SubStance

SubStance 31.1 (2002) 115-118

"That Fabric of Times"
A Response to David Bordwell's "Film Futures"

Kay Young

David Bordwell's essay, "Film Futures," reveals Bordwell's remarkable capacity to recognize the underlying patterns and structures on which films depend to make their narrative worlds. Like an Aristotle of film, he sees these patterns, names them, and hypothesizes about why they exist. In this piece, Bordwell is interested perhaps most broadly in what can be "held in mind," or how we make sense of a narrative, and in particular in how we hold in our minds how a film forks or proliferates multiple alternative futures. Bordwell delineates over the course of the essay seven conventions on which forking-path films rely. His subsequent structural analysis of how those conventions shape the particular films that portray them demonstrates Bordwell's "holding in mind" how these films make sense to him. In his final remarks, he comes to postulate that the more future alternatives a film presents (i.e., the more radical its potential portrayal of the future), the more it must rely on "cohesion devices," "repetition," and "schemas for causality and time and space" (22), (i.e., reminders, presumably, of what about each alternative has remained the same, even as the futures shift). Bordwell's closing claim highlights the thread that I think weaves its way throughout his argument: forking-path films are narratives that reflect the limits of what we can hold in mind or how we cognitively manage.

One of the central problems of the piece is the uncovering of the "clues to the way forking-path narratives actually work and work upon us" (4). Bordwell uses "folk psychology" as the primary means to uncover and make sense of those clues because of his understanding of narratives to be essentially built upon "the ordinary processes we use to make sense of the world" (4). Folk psychology, in the essay's allusions to it, seems to carry with it an understanding of cognition that is fairly monolithic and quick to shut down alternatives. Bordwell's description of our film watching/comprehending tendencies--to reason from a single cause, rely on first impressions, predict a particular rescue outcome because we desire it--suggests a cognitive portrait of the film viewer that makes us by nature quite shaky in our encounters with ambiguity, resistant to understanding [End Page 115] things over time and form multiple, perhaps conflicting, perspectives, and desirous of solving problems by arriving at a happy ending. I want to try to turn Bordwell's central claim inside out in order to ask: Does this portrait of our limited cognitive tendencies also suggest a more expansive vision of how we are able to "manage" the highly abstract idea of "the future," by inviting us to defend our (unacknowledged) capacities to hold difference/ambiguity over time? And, can films as well reflect that expansiveness, specifically with regard to "how far" we are able to make sense of the future as numbers or forms of alternatives, or as simultaneity?

Bordwell asserts that we can't cognitively imagine twenty or sixty, let alone an infinite number of alternative chains of events. And this makes me wonder about how much or how differently we can imagine. Is the problem the limits of our memories (that we can't hold all the alternative pieces in our minds), or is it that we can't generate a large number of permutations and combinations? I feel ready to acknowledge the limits of what we can remember, but like Borges's Ts'ui Pen, I want to believe it possible that we can imagine something like an infinite number of alternatives: "In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually-impossible-to-disentangle Ts'ui Pen, the character chooses-simultaneously-all of them" (98). Borges's careful and multiple use of the hyphen and the words they hold prompt our eyes and minds to try to consider the co-presence of...