Implanted time: The Final Cut and the reflexive loops of complex narratives

Abstract

In this paper, I attempt to reread the 2004 film The Final Cut (Omar Naim) through its connection with the complex narrative tendency, and especially its ‘puzzle’, ‘mind-game’ and ‘modular’ aspects. I argue that The Final Cut's complex and reflexive mode of communication – with its roots in cyberpunk sci-fi – transforms its already discussed intense narratological self-reference. Reflexivity in The Final Cut finds expression in the plot's loops and mise-en-abyme structures, which, like the implant of the story, create interplay between narrative and database. Arguing that reflexivity is an important conceptual tool for theoretically approaching such interplay, I suggest an alternative theoretical framework to rethink reflexivity and self-reference in the context of complex narratives, through Niklas Luhmann's account of reflexivity in temporalized systems. Although this systemic framework has been in development since the 1970s, it is only recently that complex systemic views have influenced the humanities. Through this alternative framework, complexity enhances the communication between the film-system and the viewer-system, including the latter in a participatory and dynamic procedure of meaning-making.

Keywords:

• complex narratives
• cyberpunk
• reflexivity
• Luhmann
• systems theory

Acknowledgements

This paper is part of my doctorate research funded by the State Scholarships Foundation of Greece. For the final version of this paper I am grateful to my colleagues from the ‘Imagined Futures’ research group at the University of Amsterdam, who provided me with their invaluable comments.

Notes

1. The shooting of The Final Cut was done in Vancouver, Canada.

2. ‘Hakman’ literally means ‘cutter’ in German.

3. For the meaning of modularity in the new media context see Manovich 2001, 30.

4. The faded sepia colors of the scene, as well as its placement at the beginning of the film before the credits, give some indications that it might be temporally situated in the past. It thus temporally anchors the film to the past and prepares the viewer for a return to it.

5. For a more general ethical critique of complex narratives see also Cubitt 2004 and Cubitt and Cameron 2009.

6. The moment when Alan runs away from the ‘scene of the crime’ and we watch him passing in front of the wall where his name is written with big capital letters, could be seen from a Lacanian perspective as the ‘symbolic birth’ of the character.

7. Lars von Trier first associated ‘mind-games’ with the ‘lookeys’ (a sort of hidden clues) contained in his film The Boss of it All (2006), as Elsaesser notes in ‘The Mind-Game Film’ (2009b).

8. For the same reason Charles Ramirez Berg excludes from his taxonomy of alternative plots science fiction films such as The Matrix, because he finds that their nonlinear temporality is genre-dependent, and fundamentally remains a linear quest for truth (or ‘for deciphering the mystery’) by a single protagonist, without allowing for alternative interpretations (2006, 11–12).

9. This digital recording eliminates, according to Stewart, the time-lapse characteristic of filmic temporality (linked to the virtualization of the present, according to Deleuze), leading to the alienation of experience and self-consciousness.