Difficult viewing: The pleasures of complex screen narratives

Abstract

This article explores viewing difficulty, the condition in which a screen text poses confusing or oblique cues that impede the viewer's construction of its narrative. Significant operations of the viewing process, often overlooked because they are automatic, become fore grounded when the viewer is confronted with narrative difficulty. An analysis of the mechanisms of A Very British Coup, Twin Peaks, and The Simpsons demonstrates how complex screen narratives especially—and to some degree all screen narratives—ask viewers to enter into and take pleasure from an active and involved process of sense‐making.