last time i found you to write the discussion not very well. The professor said It would be good to see more direct connection to the reference you make from the reading.

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The Challenge of Narrative Storytelling Mutations Between Television and Cinema

W atching Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 in a cinema at the end of 2017, I was struck by a

strange and very contemporary sensation. I felt as if I had just been “binge watching” three episodes in a row, in my domestic lounge room, of an as-of-yet-imaginary Blade Runner TV series. This is not a judg- ment, on my part, against Villeneuve’s film for being slow or, at times, not very involv- ing. I offer it more as a telling and typical impression concerning

by Adrian Martin

(Antonioni’s L’avventura, 1960). Or the story is organized in clearly marked blocks, like in Vivre sa vie (1962) and One Plus One (aka Sympathy for the Devil, 1968) by Jean- Luc Godard.

Moreover, this sensation of a lingering narrative long ago left the strict confines (if those confines were ever strict) of art cine- ma. Robert Altman (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1971) and Alan Rudolph (The Moderns, 1988) both specialized in stories that “ambi-

cultural hierarchies no longer explain any- thing very well (if, indeed, they ever did). In sheer terms of career opportunity, the trend is perfectly clear: more and more film directors are accepting work offers from television (Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Amy Hecker- ling, Park Chan-wook, Jane Campion, Spike Lee, Gregg Araki, Jean-Marc Vallée, David Fincher), or seemingly relocating there entirely (as is the case with the talented Lodge Kerrigan, co-director with Amy Seimetz of The Girl-

friend Experience [2016– 2017] inspired by Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 movie of the same title—and vastly improving on its quality). Previously exist- ing films—and sometimes not the most obvious or successful examples—are being resuscitated in inventive ways, as with the

the fluctuating state of audiovisual narrative in our time, as it navigates between the very different (and themselves mutat- ing) formats of feature- length film and episodic, s e r i a l , o r “ l o n g - f o r m ” television.

Blade Runner 2049, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Twin Peaks: The Return, and True Detective

are among recent films and TV shows whose narratives have become more mosaic-like in

their structure, a rewarding if sometimes frustrating experience.

Why did Blade Runner 2049 affect me in this way? It surely had something to do with how the story divided itself up, more or less, into large parts or segments—as many films do—and particu- larly that it appeared to linger in each part. It w a s a s i f e a c h “ e p i s o d e ” c o n s t i t u t e d a plateau, a terrain to be patiently explored, in terms of mood, atmosphere, details of land- scape, and décor. And then, at a certain moment, after a somewhat repetitive set of variations on each plateau, there would be a hook, turn, or twist (as screenwriters like to say), and a displacement would be engi- neered, a relocation to a new place, and a new or reconfigured set of character rela- tionships. And at the end, it looked like many more such episodes could follow.

Then again, is the sensa- tion of an “episodic” narra- tive plateau a purely televi- sual phenomenon? Looked at from another angle, it’s a crucial, even integral feature of what we today call (a little crudely) “art cinema,” from M i c h e l a n g e l o A n t o n i o n i a n d V í c t o r E r i c e t o R a ú l Ruiz and Chantal Akerman. I am thinking of all those c i n e m a s t o r i e s i n w h i c h there is a sudden, discon- certing break, often at the m i d w a y m a r k : t h e p l o t cleaves in two, on the basis of a sudden appearance (the wounded solider in Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive, 1 9 7 3 ) o r d i s a p p e a r a n c e

ently” drifted along in their fascinating little worlds until some new character—such as a hired killer or some more symbolic “angel of death”—arrived to complicate things and shift the interrelationships between every- body in sight. Stanley Kubrick regularly used a stark, plateau structure (as in Full Metal Jacket, 1987) and, among his loose family of disciples and imitators, Paul Thomas Ander- son has stayed faithful to the procedure f r o m h i s i n a u g u r a l H a r d E i g h t ( 1 9 9 6 ) onward.

How can we begin to grasp, describe, and account for the interrelationship of cinema and TV today? I am as tired now of the snob- bish talk of “cinematic TV” as I was, in past decades, of “novelistic films”—these sorts of

Australian low-budget movie The Magician (2005) reborn (and reinvigorated) as the series Mr. Inbetween (2018–).

But there’s more going on here than sim- ply industrial traffic, or the speedy recalibra- tion of certain filmmakers’ career priorities. We need to look at the current transforma- tions of both cinema and TV—in terms of storytelling, narrative forms, and formats—in a new way. The current fascination, amongst fans, critics, and scholars of TV for the episodic and the serial aspects of the TV medium—and searching in these fields for something that is specifically “televisual” (just as theorists a century ago sought the specifi- cally cinematic)—tends to overlook a few salient points. For not only has art cinema

always fragmented and looped its storylines; it is also the case that some of the greatest auteurs including Maurice Pialat (in his bril- liant seven-part series of 1971, La maison des bois), Ingmar Bergman (Fanny and Alexander, 1982), and Raúl Ruiz (Manoel on the Island of Marvels, 1984) enthusiastically embraced the episodic, week- by-week format long before the current TV “revolution” rolled in. There was life—and experimentation—in this area well before The Sopranos began in 1999—although to read many myopically U.S.- centred accounts of “innova- tive TV” now on the market,

The Netflix series GLOW (short for “Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling”) is a recent example of the positive aspects of narrative “stretching.”

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The narrative of the nearly three-hour-long Blade Runner 2049 often seemed divided into separate episodes, each of which was leisurely explored in terms of mood, atmosphere, location, and décor, before moving on to the next narrative segment.

one might be hard-pressed to realize this fact. But even something we have come to regard as an extreme of radical cinema, Jacques Riv- ette’s Out 1 (1971) in its original, almost thir- teen-hour form, was conceptualized in the form of an episodic TV series—albeit episodes of wildly uneven duration, which would still present a challenge to the reigning TV systems of 2019!

In an effort to cut across the usual territorial divisions between film and TV as media, I pose this specific question: what exactly is long-form narrative, either in TV or cinema? This ubiqui- tous term is bandied around, at present, with- out much precision. What I’ve already pointed to in the Blade Runner 2049 case—the plateau effect and the descriptive idyll—are just two of the pertinent elements to be taken into consid- eration. When it comes to the “liberation” offered to many filmmakers by TV, we particu- larly need to ask: is the long-form necessarily a blessing? Is it enough to make some weary appeal to the possibility of a “novelistic canvas” offered by multiple episodes, characters, and plot threads? Is it purely a matter of “more time” to play with, extra hours to dally in? What potential problems, of both art and craft, does the long-form raise?

I believe we need to take a dual perspective when observing and analyzing these issues as they play out in contemporary film and TV. On one hand, we need to look at the possibili- ties of storytelling in a nonnormative way—i.e., without holding narrative to any fixed, rigid, ultraconventional understanding of how it works, or what it is. Along this nonnormative line, we have to avoid repressing opportunities for experimentation—and that means, for instance, keeping ourselves wide open to the entire tradition of art and avant-garde cinema. But, by the same token, we have to also be ready to give the classical narrative tradition the respect and acclaim it deserves—particularly when audiovisual storytellers aim to belong to that tradition, and meet its demands well.

Squeezing and Stretching All narrative can be understood in terms of

action and delay—and the particular tension generated by their interrelation. Although var- ious script manual gurus sometimes naively present story structure as a relentless, linear unfolding of actions, delay is just as central to its mechanisms. This is true not only of, say, perfectly generic mystery thrillers (for if we get the solution to the mystery immediately, there’s no story), but also the so-called “slow cinema” of many contemporary art filmmak- ers. Something needs to impede the flowing progression of the story, and of the charac- ters’s goals, in order to fill out the time of the tale, and fully reveal its inner world. The wait- ing, the grinding repetitions, the seemingly pointless but absolutely necessary detours, the impasses, the unforeseen interruptions and complications—narrative (of many kinds) would be nothing without them.

I take my cue here not from theory but from an experimental filmmaker: Michael Snow, who introduced his magnum opus *Corpus Callosum (2002) to the world by describing it as an investigation into his twin, life-long obsessions with squeezing and stretching (he even appends, at the end of the film, his very first, youthful animation already playfully displaying these very same traits). Snow works on the squeezing and stretching of everything in his grasp as a filmmaker—line, shape, performance ges- ture, space, time, and so on. Intriguingly, *Corpus Callosum is a work that (whether or not this intention was foremost in Snow’s mind) seems to pay special attention to sev- eral classically “televisual” formats, such as the office sitcom. Applying Snow’s terms specifically to narrative construction, we can see that plot action may be squeezed (con- densed) or stretched (delayed). And this offers a novel way of studying and evaluating the tactics of today’s long-form stories.

Stretching is something that TV does a lot at present (squeezing, less so). This ten- dency particularly affects the process of a d a p t a t i o n : i t i s a l w a y s f a s c i n a t i n g t o observe how a novel overflowing with plot action has first been squeezed into feature film format, and then restretched, perhaps beyond its original limits, for a TV series. E x a m p l e s r a n g e f r o m t h e m e d i o c r e (Agnieszka Holland’s flabby two-part rendi- tion in 2014 of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby compared with Roman Polanski’s classic 1968 film, or the bloated 2018 Australian TV series of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock compared with Peter Weir’s superb 1975 film, which had already been short- ened rather than extended in the 1998 direc- tor’s cut), to the masterly (Park Chan- wook’s 2018 styling in four episodes of John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, far supe- rior to George Roy Hill’s 1984 movie adap- tation).

Sometimes, however, stretching in a TV series can provide a way of inventively alter- ing the standard format of a movie genre, redefining its shape and typical “propor- tions”. This is the case in GLOW (2017–), short for “Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling”— an affectionate re-creation of the events behind a pop-culture TV sports sensation of the 1980s. Its chief creators/showrunners, Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, adopt the standard plot formula of a typical film about a sporting team—in which, usually, the first quarter of the story is devoted to assembling and training the group. But they have taken a bold risk by stretching that conventional “first act” of a movie into the entire “arc” of their first, ten-episode season. In this case, the risk paid off handsomely, as this “idling” in the exposition phase allowed a descriptive richness—an insight into the characters and their social milieu—that reminded me of the best films of Altman or Michael Ritchie from the 1970s.

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The Netflix series 13 Reasons Why was a problematic example of “stretching,” with what could have been a two-hour narrative extended to almost thirteen hours. (photo courtesy of Photofest)

By contrast, perhaps the most depressing example of narrative stretching in TV is offered by the 13 Reasons Why phenomenon. Adapted from Jay Asher’s wildly successful 2007 novel for the “young adult” market, it was originally slated as a feature film vehicle for actress/singer Selena Gomez, before being reconceived as a TV series (with Gomez now serving as executive producer) released in 2017. So, in a single stroke, what might have been a two-hour narrative was stretched to almost thirteen. Why is this a problem? The plot of 13 Reasons Why hinges on a box of audiocassettes left behind by teenage Hannah (Katherine Langford), who has committed suicide. The central charac- ter, Clay (Dylan Minnette), has to somehow not listen to these recordings in their entirety all in one go (as any normally curious person would), because then there would be no sus- pense, no mystery, and no unfolding story.

S o t h e m a c h i n e r y o f d e l a y i s d u l y wheeled in, in the clunkiest ways imagin- able: Clay keeps freaking out at the slightest sound of Hannah’s voice, or being inter- rupted by his parents, or… But the night- mare doesn’t end there: heading into season two (a courtroom revisitation of the events of season one), amnesia be- comes a new delaying device, with the character of Alex (Miles Heizer), who has also attempted sui- cide, having forgotten what was on the tapes! And a third season is on the way in 2019. 13 Reasons Why, like many TV series present and past, begs an inevitable but cru- cial question of narrative craft: how far can a s t o r y ’ s c e n t r a l p r e m i s e o r “ m o t o r ” b e pushed to continue in the same way, with elementary variations? In practice, it either has to reinvent itself, or drain away.

It might be countered that this point is truer of drama than comedy; after all, TV sit- uation comedies (of the Cheers or Taxi vari- ety) have often managed very well with a

“theme and endless variations” format. This raises the speculation that some familiar aspects of narrative may be handled better by TV, particularly in light of the long duration possible across a serial format. Let’s take, for instance, the popular storytelling technique of what is variously known as the network, mosaic, or prismatic narrative: a story with multiple characters and threads, perhaps arranged nonchronologically, and told (with frequent “replays,” literally mocked up as 1980s-style “VHS rewinds” in Park’s The Lit- tle Drummer Girl) from various, shifting points of view. Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fic- tion, 1994), Brian De Palma (Snake Eyes, 1998), John McNaughton (Wild Things, 1998), and many others have done this in the feature film format, with even veteran Jerzy Skolimowski getting in on the flashy act in his dazzling and underrated 11 Minutes (2015).

TV, however, can achieve something with this tricky format that no film can do, espe- cially when there is an enforced pause between episodes, as a series is gradually “rolled out” over a period of time rather than released all at once for binge-viewing con- sumers. From La maison des bois to the steely German mystery/thriller/sci-fi series Dark (2017–), there is no thrill quite as awesome as the sudden plunge, at the start of an episode, into an entirely different, unforeseen point in story-time (earlier or later) or story-space, implicitly demanding that we “catch up” however we can. The remarkable series The OA (2016–), created by Zal Batmanglij and lead actor Brit Marling, kicked off its second season in 2019 with a disconcerting backward step from the cliffhanger that ended season one—exactly “7 hours 46 minutes earlier,” as an informative intertitle states—and then provides instant immersion into the daily rounds of a character, Karim (Kingsley Ben- Adir), we have never met before!

Or consider a more “local,” punctual device that has become de rigueur in any m u l t i s t r a n d a u d i o v i s u a l n a r r a t i v e : t h e moment in which, usually to the accompa- niment of a song, we witness the dexterous comparison of the story’s diverse characters, each in their own piece of the plot, as they mull over their lives or approach some moral–ethical crucible. In a feature film, you can really do this type of orgasmic montage o n l y o n c e , t o i n s u r e m a x i m u m p a t h o s impact, as P. T. Anderson did in Magnolia (1999); but in a series like the political thriller The Americans (2013–2018), it can happen repeatedly, over many episodes, w i t h o u t l o s i n g i t s e f f e c t i v e n e s s . D a v i d Simon and George Pelecanos’s The Deuce (2017–) ended its second season with an especially fine instance of this technique, set to all five minutes and twenty-five seconds of The Pretenders’ “Mystery Achievement.”

This is not to say that TV always pulls off its jazzy mosaic effects with equal success. The third, “comeback” season in 2019 of True Detective (after a disastrous, vaguely Twin Peaks-ish second season in 2015) has many qualities of mood, performance, and characterization. But its elaborate “scaffold- ing” structure (plots moving forward simul- taneously in three separate periods, 1980, 1990, and the present) sets itself an almost insoluble craft problem: no character in the latter two time-zones can simply utter what- ever facts they have come to know about the central abduction and murder mystery dur- ing the intervening years. That’s an awfully big “lacuna” to maintain over eight episodes.

Similarly, Patrick Somerville’s miniseries Maniac (2018) lost me as a viewer at the close of episode 3, after already piling up too many prismatic, one-step-forward/two- steps-back games: first, the story told from the viewpoint of Owen (Jonah Hill) and then again, differently, of Annie (Emma Stone); a character-defining flashback from Annie, and then another (this one self- invented) from Owen…and so on. Those three episodes certainly constituted an ini- tial narrative “plateau,” before launching off into an entirely other, simulated fantasy- land situation—but, to my taste, the idling went on too long, and revealed little except its own grinding mechanism.

Supersize Me? Those verdicts on True Detective and

Maniac are my personal opinions on two particular series but, in a more general way, we should inquire: what is the state of criti- cism in relation to these types of ongoing metamorphoses in storytelling across film a n d T V ? N o t s u r p r i s i n g l y , o n e s t r o n g response has been to react against the poten- tially “infinite” long form, and to advocate a return to (or at least a re-evaluation of) “classical” narrative structure as honed within the feature film format. At stake here, especially, is the status of narrative closure— a story’s definite end point. In an interview

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with Peter Gizzi, 1 the American critic- turned-filmmaker Kent Jones (Diane, 2018) has stressed that a good movie is one in which, at every moment of its running time, all the elements are being shaped toward, and structured in the light of, its foreseen conclusion: only at the end of a rich movie will we, as spectators, be able to “read back” and see why everything happened as it did, and why all the particular stylistic choices had been made by the director. It’s what lit- erary theorists have long called the “sense of an ending”—the aura of an inexorable, unfolding destiny, justifying all the points of the journey along the way.

For Jones—and he has a powerful cine- ma history to back him up on this—cinema is all about “concision, compression, and stylistic choices made as responses to the moment in relation to the motivating force that started it in the first place by one indi- vidual,” i.e., the writer/director or auteur, that person who has the best and deepest apprehension of the whole work and its total form. In Jones’s opinion, current serial TV h a s w i e l d e d “ a h o r r i b l e i n f l u e n c e o n movies.” Films are becoming looser, less organized. Their makers are drawn to emu- late the type of televisual storytelling that is “overextended” because it is “constantly elbowing in and out of tangents and thus creating the impression of vast amounts of territory.” (The Breaking Bad spin-off, Better Call Saul [2015–], represents the intriguing case of a narrative concept that both gener- ously expands elements of the original, but is also inevitably constrained, by its struc- ture, to eventually “lock onto” the start and end of Breaking Bad’s story, forming a coherent “saga.”)

Jones is pointing to the way that digres- sions—and the plateaus they help conjure— can become more alluring to filmmakers than the straight lines of classical narration, Howard Hawks, Ida Lupino, or John Car- penter style. A recent example of this influ- ence of TV on cinema can be found in the sequel to an earlier Denis Villeneuve film, the drug-thriller Sicario (2015). In Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018), directed by Ste- fano Sollima (a veteran of Italian TV crime series including Gomorrah [2014–]), large, separate pieces of the overall plot “float” until they finally intersect, very much as in a TV series. The effect is odd and not entirely satisfying—although, naturally, space is thereby elbowed for a further sequel, report- edly in development!

In a similar vein to Jones, the Italian scholar/critics Luca Bandirali and Enrico Terrone2 have argued that, in an age of “supersize” (their word for long-form) sto- ries, when narrative closure is suspended, the less clearly defined middle section or “second act” of any story can be indefinitely expanded. This possibility, they propose, offers an alluring freedom, the freedom of the potentially “never-ending story”—but that freedom is also a trap or a problem, in

direct violation of what they hold to be the most basic principles of the Aristotelian the- ory of drama. (When in doubt, call on Aris- totle!) Once more, the appeal to classicism by these critics calls for the “sense of an end- ing” as the most crucial part of any narra- tive.

Let’s try to look at this in another way. In the real industry of TV production, such acts of suspension and expansion are, of course, not just a question of aesthetic theo- ry. If the decision from network executives is to continue or renew a series—or, con- versely, if it is to be abruptly discontinued, mid-narrative, because of low or disappoint- ing ratings—then the ending (if one has even been imagined or sketched out yet) must be either postponed, or lost forever. This latter fate is, to take only one especially sad example, what befell the brilliant series created by Laura Dern and Mike White, Enlightened (2011–2013, with episodes directed by Todd Haynes and Jonathan Demme), the third and final season of which never materialized. The same thing hap- pened with Soderbergh’s absorbing The Knick (2014–2015), and Alan Ball’s adven- turous Here and Now (2018), which lasted only a single season.

What sort of critical system or method might be able to best deal with this present- day, fluctuating situation of the long-form narrative? David Auerbach,3 one of the out- standing modern commentators on TV, has suggested a useful model. Like Jones, Auer- bach happily asserts that what is referred to as a “mythology” or “cosmology” in TV nar- rative—a coherent universe in which a story (however fantastic) unfolds—is usually tele- ological, i.e., shaped with a view toward its concluding, final point. This is how, for instance, the Lord of the Rings cycle is built in literature and cinema. Not all audiovisual narratives, however, behave in this way. Some “mythological universes” have more surreal premises—they “change the rules” as

t h e y p r o c e e d , o r p e r h a p s c o m p l e t e l y “reboot” the basic premises. This is the case, for example, with George Miller’s Mad Max film series, since the fictional world it cre- ates is never the same from movie to movie!

Auerbach nonjudgmentally recognizes the range of storytelling options that TV offers. There are, in his schema, three main possibilities or models: he calls them Steady- State, Expansionary, and Big Crunch. First: a Steady-State TV series is flexible and aim- less, episodic and modular. The only fixed elements are the characters (always the same, never changing), and perhaps a regu- lar setting, such as the bar in Cheers. Soap operas and situation comedies work this way; so do police shows and hospital dra- mas. In contrast to the traditional believabil- ity or verisimilitude scale of drama, Steady- State comedies are frequently weightless, u n r e a l — a n d t h i s i s a k e y p a r t o f t h e i r appeal. That format has certainly influenced cinema: the lighter comedies of Woody Allen, for instance, owe a great deal to it. The ultimate ending of a long, Steady-State TV series can be abrupt, even completely silly or nonsensical, because an end point means little in itself. The bizarre Australian soap opera Chances, for instance, ended in 1992 with a completely unmotivated global apocalypse! And we should never underesti- mate the potentially subversive value of what American poet and activist Franklin Rosemont4 once dubbed such “popular accomplices” of surrealism.

Next in Auerbach’s schema, the Expan- sionary model, represented by series such as Lost (2004–2010) and The X-Files (which, provisionally at least, seems to have halted its expansion with Gillian Anderson’s defin- itive departure from the cast at the end of its eleventh season in March 2018). Here, ele- ments are continually added to the initial premise, problems are varied and repeated, some change occurs, but there is “no end in sight”—as long as the series remains popu-

In the feature film Sicario: Day of the Soldado, separate strands of the narrative “float” until they finally intersect, very much as in a TV series. (photo courtesy of Photofest)

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Raúl Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon, with a running time of four and a half hours, was exhibited theatrically as a feature film but was broadcast on TV as separate episodes in some countries.

lar and the network keeps giving the go- ahead for it to continue. The high-tech- action series Blindspot (2015–) began from an idea—every time a tattoo on the body of the central character is decoded, a new adventure with a tight deadline is trig- gered—that is clearly designed to stretch as far into the future as it possibly can. And, if not, there will always be a sudden revelation, switch-around, or turning of the tables, where one character assumed to be good will be uncovered as evil, or another charac- ter presumed dead is discovered to be really alive, and so on. Classical narrative it ain’t, but, once again, it does share a certain surre- alistic merriment with many illustrious B- movie forms of yesteryear, such as Edgar G. Ulmer’s recently restored Detour (1945).

Lastly, the Big Crunch model tries to play a midway game between the Steady-State and Expansionary formats. From the very beginning, it seems to promise a big ending (a “crunch”), and it keeps planting clues that point paths toward this conclusion. Breaking Bad grappled with this problem, as it stretched itself out over five seasons in six years (which is much longer than the single year that the plot itself actually covers!). It all hinged on a coming catastrophe: when would Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and his many crimes be uncovered, and what would be the result of that exposé? The Deuce, in contrast, sustains its intrigues more loosely, so that it can “float” more eas- ily: situations develop (women increasingly assert themselves as active “agents” in the pornography industry), criminal involve- ments intensify, and the “times they are a- changin’” (as in a Martin Scorsese or P. T. Anderson film) as the decades transition from the 1970s to the 1980s—but as yet there is, as we wait for the third and final season to begin, no looming crunch.

Tempics Fugit In my opinion, the critique of TV needs,

ultimately, to look beyond the rolling argu- ments (however valuable they can be) over whether the medium is sufficiently classical (or not) in its storytelling. There is an ele- phant in the room here, and it relates to that other great cinematic tradition—the avant- garde. Apart from the welcome glimmers of pop surrealism, are we yet seeing truly wide- spread, experimental TV anywhere in the world? Showrunners experiment, certainly, but always within the limits of an ultimately teleological narrative framework. Natasha Lyonne’s lively Russian Doll (2019) resur- rects the Groundhog Day (1993) idea of a sin- gle span of time lived over and over every day—in this case, terminated each time by a gruesome or banal death, just as in the hor- ror film cycle of Christopher Landon’s Happy Death Day (2017), Happy Death Day

2U (2019), and its “not very likely but not impossible” future third installment (accord- ing to its producer Jason Blum).

Let’s look back, briefly, on what was, not long ago, touted as the great revolutionary event of mainstream TV: David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). While taking noth- ing away from Lynch’s extraordinary artistic achievement in that ever-surprising third series of Twin Peaks, unveiled twenty-six years after the show’s prior cancellation, we can note what has fast become its legacy within the contemporary TV industry: a “packaging” (and thus, to some extent, a taming) of every kind of narrative “weird- ness” within an all-encompassing fantasia of “multiverses” and alternative or parallel time lines. The second season of The OA, too, has plunged into this New Age-y realm of “rebooted realities”—which one character describes, in perfectly Aristotelian terms, as “the science of destiny.”

We should remind ourselves, though, of how utterly befuddling (in the best possible way!) it was to watch Twin Peaks: The Return from week to week in 2017. Plot events flared up and went nowhere (my personal favorite: Charlyne Yi in episode 15, crawling along the floor of the Roadhouse Club and screaming her lungs out); events took place in uncertainly located spaces and times (poor, troubled Audrey [Sherilyn Fenn] zon- ing in and out of reality); inexplicable sights and sounds regularly appeared (such as mir- ror or window reflections differing from the real bodies in front of them). And then there was the immortal eighth episode, yanking us without warning into an “origin story” of cosmic and cataclysmic proportions. All very unsettling and adventurous, as well as superbly “Lynchian”—but also, to a large extent, all “sewn up” by the end, like a typi- cal puzzle or “mind-game” narrative film.

Destiny, cosmology, and a plot that is finally explicable (even if, as in Lynch’s case, it takes some time and argument to figure where and how every detail falls into place):

Russian Doll, starring Natasha Lyonne, borrows the Groundhog Day narrative to dramatize the same span of time relived every day, but in this case terminated by a gruesome or banal death.

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all these terms fit together and resonate. But there is also an entirely different type of nar- rative, and it is one that cinema—the cinema of Alain Resnais, Angela Schanelec, Tsai Ming-liang, and many others—has long investigated. The best account of this radical form of narrative has been offered by the Australian/Russian theorist, Julia Vassilieva.5

In a superb essay on the full, six-part TV series version of Raúl Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lis- bon (2011), she draws upon the work of lit- erary scholar Gary Saul Morson to suggest that the majority of TV culture (both in pro- duction and in critique) is today still impris- oned by those basic, Aristotelian principles of narrative structure (i.e., poetics), while ignoring everything in the viewing experi- ence of its process that can be construed dif- ferently, as “eventness” or tempics.

The distinction at play here might sound abstruse, but is actually quite straightforward. The classical structure of a narrative is its closed, logical, holistic form—even if it is arranged in a nonchronological, nonlinear way (the prismatic “Tarantino effect” men- tioned above). This standard form of narra- tive, according to Morson, is finally all about “fatalism, determinism, closed time”—mag- nificently embodied by, for example, Break- ing Bad. A tempic story, on the other hand, is all about moment-to-moment possibility: what might happen, could happen, what did not happen, at any given juncture in time and/or space. We might call it “conditional” or speculative narrative. In place of an ulti- mate, locked-in destiny, we are confronted with what Vassilieva calls the realm of the “unstable, unpredictable, unfinished, and unresolved”—which is, for her, a species of freedom, allowing room to move for both fic- tive characters and real spectators, not to mention audiovisual creators. Recall how Rainer Werner Fassbinder concluded his TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), in a ges- ture of sovereign liberty, with a feature- length “epilogue” episode billed as “My Dream of the Dream of Franz Biberkopf by Alfred Döblin.”

Ruiz himself said it well in his press kit statement6—the central attraction for him of Camilo Castelo Branco’s melodramatic 1854 novel Mysteries of Lisbon as source material was that its various plot events and threads “spill over, they exceed the limits established by related events by awakening other latent fictions that were sleeping in the shadow of the romantic fact.” Or, to use a still intellec- tually fashionable term, the narrative is as much the record of what is virtual (possible, imaginable, able to be generated) as of what is “actual,” real, or believable in it—a “narra- tive cloud,” as Vassilieva describes it in terms suitable for our digital era. The various and increasingly popular narrative conceits of time-on-a-loop and multiverses give us a tantalizing, flirtatious glimpse of that cloud, but then brutally limit the potential range of its freedom—this is true even of Twin Peaks: The Return. And the many multistrand net-

As expected, Twin Peaks: The Return offered narrative “weirdness” and parallel time lines.

work plots that have ruled the roost for some time now, whatever their undoubted quali- ties, fall short of the open path of narrative as (as Vassilieva puts it) “a motor, a machine for generating multiple stories and multiple temporalities.”

In most TV production, even now, this realm of the virtual or the tempic is only ever approached at the extreme limit of wacky, pastiche-laden, delirously “meta” comedies such as Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna’s sublime Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019). What J. Hoberman7 once iden- tified and praised as the “vulgar modernism” of Frank Tashlin films, Mad magazine, and Ernie Kovacs’s TV specials has become, at best, the vulgar postmodernism of such zany comedy. In this televisual format, departures from verisimilitude—such as an entire episode revealed only at the end to be the dream of a character—may be finally “explained,” but the explanation itself is per- functory, a mere alibi for play, just another self-referential joke. It’s something to cele- brate, but it is still not the full-on TV revolu- tion of which some of us dream.

Allow me to conclude on what may at first seem to be an oblique reference. Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind, dis- cussed so well by James Naremore in the Winter 2018 issue of Cineaste, is a very pecu- liarly placed object within the context of our contemporary media sphere. It is most cer- tainly a film—and, of course, was conceived, shot, and partly edited by Welles as such— but the only manner in which it could have ultimately made its way to a public in 2018 is as, in a certain sense, a “TV event,” a digital reconstruction underwritten, presented, and distributed by Netflix. The result of this reconstructive experiment is fascinating and I, like many cinephiles, am eternally grateful that it now exists. But, without demeaning the insightful labor of all those who heroically

contributed to finishing The Other Side of the Wind after Welles’s death, I wonder if its fin- ished form cleaves a little too much toward a certain, tidy containment, and away from a more “tempic” possibility.

The crux of this matter is the relation between the “framing” story of Jake Han- naford (John Huston) and the “framed” or embedded story, the film-within-the-film featuring Oja Kodar. Out of the potentially many possible versions of Welles’s footage, the reconstructors have erred on the side of dovetailing the latter inside the former in order to create a clear hierarchy of levels—a very “classical” decision taken for what is not (in my opinion) an entirely classical project.

Could we imagine a version in which the two “films” that comprise The Other Side of the Wind stood more as equals, or fought each other for supremacy more openly? After all, as Cyril Béghin8 has perceptively suggested in Cahiers du cinéma, the profound, underly- ing “theme” of Welles’s raw material may be exactly the idea that was allegorized in his earlier The Immortal Story (1968): living, car- nal flesh (as so vividly embodied and stylized in the Kodar scenes) will always rise up to trump, overwhelm, and even destroy the neat “narration” that seeks to control and contain it. Here—to appropriate and revive some long-lost buzzwords of 1970s film the- ory—the tendency of television to profes- sionally “homogenize,” to smooth out and make conventional sense of its product, wins out over the subversive possibilities of a rich- er and more eventful “heterogeneity.” And that is not only an argument internal to Welles’s career; it can also serve as one, pro- visional allegory of the relations between TV and cinema in our time. •

This article has been expanded, updated, and exten- sively rewritten from a piece that originally appeared in the inaugural issue of the Korean film magazine Filo (March 2018), and was then translated into Spanish for Caimán cuadernos de cine (No. 70, April 2018).

End Notes: 1 Peter Gizzi, “Movies and their Making: New York Film Festival’s Kent Jones,” Bomb (September 28, 2017), https://bombmagazine.org/articles/movies-and- their-making-new-york-film-festivals-kent-jones. 2 Luca Bandirali and Enrico Terrone, “Supersize Stories: Narrative Strategies in Contemporary TV Series,” Cinergie (No. 11, June 2017), https://cinergie.unibo.it/article/view/7396. 3 David Auerbach, “The Cosmology of Serialized Television,” The American Reader (June 2013), http://theamericanreader.com/the-cosmology- of-serialized-television. 4 Franklin Rosemont (ed.), Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices (City Lights Books, 1980). 5 Julia Vassilieva, “Beyond Poetics: Raúl Ruiz’s Rethinking of Narrative,” Critical Arts (Vol. 31, No. 5, 2017), pp. 186-201. 6 Raúl Ruiz, “Preface on Mysteries of Lisbon,” Mysteries of Lisbon press kit (Music Box Films, 2011), MysteriesofLisbonPressNotes_070611 (1).pdf 7 J. Hoberman, Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media (Temple University Press, 1991). 8 Cyril Béghin, “The Other Side of the Wind: L’hypothèse d’un film,” Cahiers du cinéma, (No. 751, January 2019), pp. 84–87.

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