From Oedipus to Orpheus. Knowledge and Guilt in mind-game films

Abstract

In this article we aim to address a cinematic trend towards narrative complexity that film studies have labelled as mind-game films (Elsaesser, 2009) or puzzle films (Buckland, 2009). Understood by film scholars as part of post-classical cinema (Thanouli, 2009), their entangled narratives are often based on the nonlinear temporality and unreliable narrators. We start from this theoretical framework on the case study to focus on the narration of mind-game films focalised on amnesiac main characters. We limit our research to those mind-game films whose main character suffers from amnesia, and has forgotten some intimate trauma. We apply film and narratology analysis in order to understand the narrative focalisation (Gaudreault and Jost, 1995) of representative films of this trend such as Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Shutter Island or Inception. We aim to understand the relation between their focalisation traits and the knowledge that hides the amnesia of their protagonists. We propose that when these protagonists recover the knowledge they had forgotten, a sense of tragedy emerges, both from the narrative disposition of the story, which allows us to trace the survival of Aristotelian concepts such as anagnorisis and hamartia, and from the content of the memory, in which we find echoes of classical myths such as those of Oedipus and Orpheus.