Understanding film narrative: The trailer

Sunday | January 12, 2014

open printable version

The Wolf of Wall Street.

DB here:
At many points in The Wolf of Wall Street, we hear the voice of Jordan
Belfort chronicling his exploits in building up a rapacious investment
company. A few times he even addresses the camera.
Whats he doing? Well, hes telling us a story, obviously. Stories are
what many (not all) films present to us. But how, exactly, can we
understand the storytelling process in film? What do the filmmakers do,
and what do we do?
For my book Poetics of Cinema, I wrote a chapter called Three
Dimensions of Film Narrative. This 2007 essay tries to come to grips
with several questions. Some are pretty general. What makes a film a
narrative? How does a narrative film shape our response? What roles
do visual and auditory techniques play? What are the roles of
emotional responses and broad cultural factors? How does
characterization work in a movie?
Other questions are narrower. How revelatory is Hollywoods three-act
model of plot? How do we pick out a storys protagonist? Do literary
concepts like narrator and implied author apply to films?
Since the chapter is part of a larger book, some of these matters are
dealt with at greater length in other chapters. Some are developed in

other books, notably Narration in the Fiction Film, and elsewhere on

this site. This essay was my attempt to boil down my thinking about
filmic storytelling into one convenient, if sometimes sketchy, form.
Today Im posting a corrected, slightly revised version of that chapter
as a downloadable pdf file. Thanks to our web tsarina Meg Hamel, it
has links as well. Students, teachers, researchers, and casual or ardent
cinephiles: Make use of this as you like.
The essay is here.
This blog entry is a guide to the essay, or maybe just a trailer. As with a
trailer, my use of The Wolf of Wall Street is illustrative; Im not
offering anything like a full analysis or even a review. And like most
trailers, mine has spoilers.
The three dimensions I explore in the essay are narration, plot
structure, and story world.

Dimension 1: Pushy narration

A films narration I take to be unfolding and organization of story

information as the viewer encounters it, moment by moment. . (This is
distinct from the term voice-over narration, like Jordans in The Wolf
of Wall Street, though voice-over commentary is part of the overall
narration.) Narration is designed to shape our itinerary through the
film. Its a complex array of cues that guide us in building up the story.
In The Wolf of Wall Street, the first dose of information we get is a TV
commercial for the Stratton Oakmont investment company. We see

busy, efficient brokers bent over their desks in a vast office as a lion
paces the aisles. But then we get another view of the office, as partying
staff prepare to launch a little man in a Velcro suit toward a target. The
man is hurled, and one of the men who tosses him identifies himself as
Jordan Belfort. Were then launched into a sequence laying out
Jordans lifestyle.
One thing this portion of the narration does is to peel back the staid,
solid image of the brokering house and show the orgiastic selfindulgence behind it. What if Scorsese and his screenwriter Terrence
Winter hadnt included the commercial? Our sense of the contrast
between public image and internal debauchery wouldnt be so strong.
The quick scenes of Jordans lifestyle, driven by drugs, sex, and high
living constitute a block of concentrated exposition. The narration
could have introduced Jordans debauchery gradually through hints,
but instead were told of it bluntly and swiftly. Jordan boasts that at age
26 he made nearly fifty million dollars a year. Were coaxed to ask:
How did he get so far?
This is, we might say, a curiosity questiona question about what in
the past led up to the present. A films narration is often prodding us to
ask just this question. A piece of narration may also provoke effects
of surprise, as when the Velcro-target episode undercuts the corporate
image. Surprise is central to narrative because knowledge is distributed
unequally among characters and spectators; any character may have a
secret.
Theres also suspense, which we can consider broadly as a sharpened
anticipation of what might happen next. In The Wolf, Id argue that
theres some suspense when Jordan, zonked on Quaaludes, must save
Donnie from choking on a piece of ham. Curiosity, surprise, and
suspense arent of course the only effects of storytelling, but they
function as master-effects, in Meir Sternbergs phrase. They are
central to our comprehension of the story.

Style as narration

At the same time, narration is shaping our experience through film

style. The staid tracking shot along the desks in the commercial, with
the firms trademark lion prowling the aisles, clashes with the abrupt
editing and freeze-frame that introduces Jordan. The actors
performances, centrally the swaggering performance of DiCaprio, are
part of narration as well. The soundtracks stylistic texture contributes
a lot too, with Jordans voice-over and the music and effects creating a
rousing, exhilarating effect. The narrations use of film technique, I
think, aims to summon up a shocked but fascinated and amused
awareness of the decadent world that Jordan rules.
Throughout Wolf, Scoreses stylistic choices serve narrational purposes.
There are rapid montage sequences, commenting musical tunes,
and dialogue hooks (I wont call him/shot of Denham, called,
approaching Jordans yacht). Scorseses fondness for rendering
psychological stateshere, druggy onesis presented through classic
impressionist techniques. As the film goes on, he starts to take us
into characters minds through inner monologues and misperceptions
(the smashed Ferarri). Stylistic patterning also contributes to the films
tone of grotesque comedy, not just through the dialogue, delivery, and
music but through editing. The potentially dramatic moment of Jordan
rescuing Donnie with CPR is intercut with a Popeye cartoon: Jordans
miraculous spinach is coke.
By shaping our knowledge, the narration also throttles the films
emotional appeal up or down. For example, in one scene Jordan
punches his second wife Naomi. Scorsese presents the action in a
distant shot, in which a doorway allows us merely to glimpse the
violence.

This choice lessens the impact of Jordans aggression. It gives us

important information about the story action, but not nearly as
forcefully as the tight close-ups of sexual and drug-fueled escapades in
other scenes do. You could argue that closer and more visceral views
(of the sort we get during Raging Bulls domestic violence, as above)
would make it harder to treat Jordans bad-boy high-jinks as
entertaining.
A more detailed analysis would trace the overall development of the
films narration. Wed consider, for instance, how it restricts our
information at key points. Although the narration breaks with its
attachment to Jordan to show Denhams investigation, it doesnt reveal
Naomis scheme to divorce him. We learn of that only when he does. As
we indicate in Film Art: An Introduction, Who knows what when? is
a central question for understanding film narration.

Narration as inference-making

More generally, the essay develops in some detail a notion thats

central to understanding narration. I offer a mentalisticaccount of
narrative understanding.
I think that a storytelling movie, through its narration, impels us to
draw inferences. To follow a movie story is to turn the images and
sounds into characters, actions, events, causes, and the like. This
happens partly through fast, automatic inferences of the kind we make
constantly in perceiving the world, and partly and more evidently
through the inferences we make in building up that construct we call
the movies story.
Everything Ive been describing so far asks us to fill in, extrapolate, and
draw conclusions at the level of comprehension. We take the Stratton
Oakmont commercial as indicating trustworthiness. Were encouraged
to see the little-person-tossing scene as outrageous and boisterous but
cruel, the amusement of people charged with a reckless energy.
Jordans bragging montage sequence invites us see him as powerful,
arrogant, and materialistic.
By saying that narration pushes us to make inferences Im not
suggesting that the inferences are models of deep thinking. They are,
we say, commonsensical. In the multiplex, were not logicians.
Understanding and responding to a story are processes based largely
on folk psychology. In that respect, the chapter argues a point Ive
made elsewhere on the site.
Of course not all our inferences will be correct. It would be possible to
knock down our first impressions of Jordan with information
suggesting that beneath the sharkskin is a likable idealist. (That
happens in Jerry Maguire.) Here, other sorts of moments steer our
inferences astray. Were led to think that Jordan drives his

Lamborghini home safely, but that impression gets recalibrated the

next morning. Earlier, when Denham visits Jordan on his yacht, the
rather long, tense scene leads us to consider the possibility that the FBI
agent is susceptible to bribery. His questions and facial expressions
suggest that hes weighing Jordans offer to help him with some
investments. This interchange is conveyed in fairly tight shot/ reverse
shots.

Only when Denham asks Jordan to repeat his offer does Scorsese cut to
an angle showing that Denhams colleague has,
offscreen, quietly stepped close enough to bear witness to the bribe
Jordan might offer.

Scorsese has choked off some information about the scene in order to
yield a surprise, one that corrects the impression we were building up.
One of cinemas great pleasures is catching up with a narration that has
been designed to lead us astray. Hitchcock fans, take note.

Dimension 2: Plot as pattern

You can also think about the narrative as having a more abstract,
geometrical structure: thats given to us as the plot. Narration creates
on-line, moment-by-moment pickup; as viewers we go with the flow.
The plot is more architectural, a sort of static anatomy of the film as a
whole. We can think of it in a couple of ways.
As a map of a particular film, the plot consists of the overall
arrangement of incidents. It lays out the story actions in time. It can
proceed chronologically, as plots do most of the time, or it can
rearrange incidents out of linear order. The Wolf of Wall Street follows
the Stratton Oakmont commercial with the Velcro-target scene, and
then presents Jordan at the height of his powers. But after the quick
exposition of his lifestyle, the plot flashes back to his first day on Wall
Street in 1987.
Now the film presents a mostly chronological layout. Jordan gets his
brokers license, loses his job, picks up a low-end one, and then rises to
the spot running his company. This trajectory is sometimes interrupted
by quick flashbacks filling in background on a character or a situation;
we even get flashbacks within flashbacks. The overall time scheme is
hazy, since were never shown exactly what point in time is now.
Theres the suggestion that the initial flashback is rounded off when
Jordans cohorts meet to plan the Velcro-tossing stunt, but that
opening scene isnt replayed, so we cant be sure exactly when the
opening flashback ends. The flashback must be finished at some
indeterminate time late in the film, when Jordans fortunes decline and
Naomi is alienated from him. But the narration whisks us along
without establishing the firm framing devices of traditional flashback
plotting.

From this perspective, every film establishes its own plot structure,
based on the overall geometry of its scenes and sequences. Thered be
a lot to say about this in The Wolf, such as the introduction of Denham
(and the brief alternating scenes of his investigation) and the various
lines of action that fill out the plot: Jordans addictions, his plan for an
IPO, his two marriages, the SEC inquiry, his Swiss money-laundering
schemes, and the like. The craft of screenwriting consists in large part
of developing and braiding lines of action in this way. Several entries
on this site, as well as many chapters ofNarration in the Fiction
Film and Poetics of Cinema, analyze how such plot patterns work in
tandem with the narrations unfolding.

Caught in the act(s)

Another way to think about plot structure is to consider how the

particular film obeys broader principles of construction. Tragedy,
comedy, melodrama, mystery stories, and other genres have distinct,
widely-known conventions of plot geometry. There are as well
traditions of plotting that cross genres.
In modern commercial cinema, the most famous structural convention
is the three-act pattern. Kristin has proposed that Hollywood feature
filmmaking is better thought of as adhering to a multiple-part principle
based on characters goals. The film might have two, three, four, or
more parts, depending on its running time and the ways it shows
character goals created, reformulated, blocked, delayed, and fulfilled
(or not). Weve tested Kristins proposal in books (Storytelling in the
New Hollywood, The Way Hollywood Tells it) and on this site
(here and here and here and here).

The essay considers the matter more theoretically, but just to illustrate,
Ill hazard a layout of The Wolf of Wall Streets plot structure. Its
nothing but spoilers, so Ive flagged it all in olive green if you want to
skip it.
Since Wolf runs about 173 minutes without credits, I think it can be
usefully laid out in five large-scale parts. These are framed by a brief
prologue (the commercial and the Velcro-target scene) and an epilogue
summing up Jordans court sentence, his stay in a country-club prison,
and his new career as the Worlds Greatest Sales Trainer.
The Setup shifts from Jordans life at the pinnacle to his beginnings in
the business and his rise as an entrepreneur. In the course of this
portion he meets Donnie and the two assemble their team of eccentric,
grotesque staff. After establishing Stratton Oakmont, Jordan
demonstrates his sales technique and the script his salespeople will
follow. This section consumes the first thirty-five minutes of the film.
What Kristin calls the Complicating Action, which resets the
protagonists goals, centers on Jordans plan for an IPO and his affair
with Naomi. Around the hour mark, Jordan is divorced and free to
pursue the IPO, but now Denham of the FBI is following the company
and the SEC is getting curious.
The Development section, which typically expands and delays the
fulfillment of the goals set earlier, shows Jordan marrying Naomi, the
firms frenzied launch of the IPO, and Jordans botched effort to bribe
Denham. By about 96 minutes into the film, the two antagonists,
Jordan and Denham, have faced off in a preliminary conflict. What
remains is to see how Jordan will evade capture.
Im inclined to see the fourth part as a second Complicating Action,
because Jordan recalibrates his goal. Stratton Oakmont is making so
much money he needs to find an offshore place for it. He decides on
Switzerland, and the bulk of this section of Wolf focuses on whether
hell be successful. But the SEC is breathing down his neck, and he
momentarily considers quitting his firm. During a pep talk to his staff,
his resolve weakens (hes sold by his own rhetoric), and he decides to
fight the regulatory battle. This is a turning point: now both the SEC
and the FBI are on his tail with renewed vigor.

This section, a bit longer than the others, runs about forty minutes. I
attribute that mostly to a wedged-in scene thats almost pure delay:
Jordans and Donnies wild night on Quaaludes, which ends with
Jordan crawling toward his car, smashing it up, and saving Donnie
from choking. Nearly all of this has no effect on the plots forward
movement; Donnie survives and Jordan isnt charged for the road
mishaps. The only plot causality here is the fact that a wacked-out
Donnie makes an incriminating call on Jordans home phone, which is
tapped. This bit of action could have been handled much more briefly,
but the Quaalude gluttony is so inherently funny, and forms such a
plausible topper to the lude motif throughout the film, that its
expanded to a remarkable twelve minutes. This sort of delay is usually
seen in Development sections, but because Jordan resets his goals in
this section Im considering it a Complicating Action.
The Climax (25 minutes) arrives when Jordan, hiding in Italy with
Donnie and their wives, learns that Aunt Emma, his front for the Swiss
money-laundering, has died. He must race back to Zurich to shift the
money to a new account, and in the process the yacht is wrecked in a
storm. Hes arrested and agrees to rat on his friends. Naomi divorces
him. He tries to protect Donnie but fails and is sent to jail. In
the epilogue hes shown bouncing back, playing to an audience of
suckers who share his dream of getting very rich.
Winters screenplay, with its parallelled and intertwined lines of goaldriven action and its reiteration of one large-scale component, a second
Complicating Action, shows how the classical pattern can be expanded
to fill out a longer-than-average running time.

Dimension 3: The story and its world

Theres a tendency to think of the story action as existing virtually

before it becomes a plot and is presented through narration. Its as if
the story was already there, waiting to be turned into a film. To some
extent, this can happen with documentary narratives and adaptations
of novels, plays, and comic books. Nonetheless, as viewers we access a
movies world only through narration and plot structures. In fact,
access isnt quite right. As Ive indicated, I think that weconstruct the
story inferentially, on the basis of the cues given by those other
dimensions.
If every viewer has to build up the story herself, shouldnt we have
widely different senses of what happens? To some extent we do. People
might fill in certain gaps differently, or draw divergent conclusions
about what made something happen. Certain films, not typically
Hollywood ones, do encourage more open explorations of the story
situations. Here plot construction and narration may follow other
conventions, such as those Ive tried to chart in Narration in the
Fiction Filmand elsewhere.
Mostly, though, even in independent films, theres a great deal of
convergence among viewers inference-making. Sooner or later, we
arrive at a common understanding of most of what happened and why.
As we leave the shared realms of perception and comprehension, of
course, viewers construals can diverge a lot. Once we get to abstract
interpretationssuch as whether The Wolf of Wall Street celebrates or
condemns the anything-for-a-buck culturewe should expect a lot of
variations. (I try to explain why this happens elsewhere in the book, in
the essay Poetics of Cinema.)
Three Dimensions of Film Narrative considers the story and its world
broadly, in terms of cues for causation and characterization. It focuses
particularly on characters and how we understand them. Again I argue
for an inferential model. This means that, as in real life, were
practicing mind-readingtrying to figure out characters traits and
temperaments on the basis of their behavior, trying to grasp their
motives and goals. We build them up as persons on the basis of cues,
and we ascribe to them many of the qualities we expect persons in the
real world to exhibit. Again, folk psychology provides the ground: the
film is likely to streamline and simplify the complexities of real-world
personhood.

As viewers we dont understand a character in isolation. Characters

interact, and the narration and plot structure prompt us to compare
them, rank them, sort them in different ways. In The Wolf, Jordan is
handsome, brazen, and suave; Donnie, a classic weak friend, is
awkward and homely, but he has a primal energy that matches
Jordans slick lan.
Jordans father and most of his elders are more prudent and cautious
than his crew, who are uninhibited. The guys are a bevy of misfits,
distinguished from one another by looks and one or two tricks of
demeanor.

Jordans first wife is a brunette hair stylist who voices doubts about his
schemes; his second wife is a gorgeous blonde party girl who happily
plunges into his lifestyle. In each case, the narration and the plot
structure give us the necessary cues, usually redundantly. Jordans
voice-over commentary reinforces the character information we get
from the actors appearance and performance.
The essay also considers how films present character change.
Sometimes characters come to learn more; they may not vary their
distinguishing traits but they realize they have made a mistake. More
deeply, characters may decide to get in touch with a suppressed side of
themselves. Thats what happens, I think, in Jerry Maguire; he
becomes the man his wife thinks he could be.
But very often characters dont change. Jordan, in The Wolf of Wall
Street, has an opportunity to confess, return the money he fleeced from
his clients, and take his punishment. Instead, he insists that everything
hes done has been for his friendsthe staff of the firmand they
deserve to succeed as he has. (Even though he is deceiving them too; he
buys shares in his own IPO and orders the salespeople to push that
stock.) What shocks many viewers about the film, I suspect, is that
Jordan doesnt become a better person in the course of his adventures.

His punishment is light, he learns nothing, and by the end of the film
hes as amoral as he was when he started the company. (Sell me this
pen.) As sometimes happens, the interest of the plot comes from
watching a gifted, resourceful scoundrel adapt his techniques to
changing situations.

But wait, theres more

Okay, you may be asking impatiently. But why? Why offer these
categories, carve things up, make supersubtle distinctions, concoct new
terminology? Why not just do film criticism?
Well, partly because I want to articulate more than my response to a
particular movie. I want to understand the more general ways in which
films work and work upon us. I think we can usefully look for
explanations of movies functions and effects, and these are things that
ordinary film criticism doesnt typically offer. For example, noticing
how a films elements function with respect to narration, plot, style,
and story world can do more than sensitize us to this or that movie.
This sort of analysis can make us aware of broad norms of
moviemaking and how particular films relate to those norms, currently
and historically.
At the same time, the line of thinking Im proposing casts light on the
skills we deploy, mostly unawares, in experiencing films. No matter
how simple-minded the movie, I think that we do things in following it;
we exercise our narrative competence. On the other side, sorting things
out this way can explain the range of choice and control open to the
filmmaker. I think that the poetics of cinema I propose can help
filmmakers become aware of the tools they are usingand perhaps

encourage them to try other ones. My categories are derived from

filmmaking craft, and perhaps they can in turn illuminate the practical
tasks facing filmmakers.
A couple of final points. In the chapter I draw examples from a variety
of films, many American (Cellular, Boyz N the Hood, Youve Got Mail,
etc.). Despite my consideration of Ashes of Time, Claire Dolan,
Memento, and other films, some readers will ask why I dont consider
more non-Hollywood examples. The choice was strategic: Hollywood
films throw the areas Im charting into sharp relief. They provide clearcut (not necessarily simple) examples of my points. And historically,
the dominance of Hollywood film in the worlds theatrical market have
given them a lot of influence. Much of what we think of as nonHollywood is based on attempts to revise or reject those norms.
At the same time, Im counting on readers cutting me some slack
because Ive written a lot about alternatives to Hollywood. My books on
Eisenstein, Ozu, Dreyer, and Hong Kong cinema try to analyze diverse
storytelling options. Elsewhere inPoetics of Cinema I discuss various
narrative traditions, including varieties of network narratives and
forking-path plots.Narration in the Fiction Film explores still other
storytelling modes. And on this site Ive had a lot to say about nonHollywood constructive principles (for example, here and here).
The last section of the essay considers what is probably inside-baseball
for many readers. Yet the underlying question is important. How
adequately can film narrative can be understood on a model of literary
narrative? Some theorists think that the basic principles of narrative
are to be found in verbal storytelling, and narratives in other media
must find equivalents for them. My own view is that narrative as a
phenomenon gets mapped onto different media in varying ways. There
may not be a single model that will be valid for plays, novels, dance,
comic strips, radio drama, film, digital fiction, and so on.
For example, if Jordan Belfort were a character in a novel, certain
weird things wouldnt be happening onscreen. A first-person narrator
in the novel can tell us only things that she or he knows about. But
inside Jordans tale we get all kinds of scenes that he didnt witness.
True, he knew that FBI agent Denham was on his trail, but he couldnt
know the color of Denhams office, or what Denham said to his
colleagues. Nor could Jordan know exactly how the quarrel between his

partner Donnie Azoff and his ally Brad Bodnik went down, even
though we see the entire scene embedded in his telling.

Of course we can say that these scenes are just movie conventions. We
accept that in film, first-person voice-over often includes scenes that
the speaker didnt witness, or maybe didnt even know about. But that
convention points to the limits of importing models of storytelling from
literature to the study of cinema. A novel cant wedge those things in
without raising the question of how the narrator knows this. We just
dont ask such a question about Jordan.
By a path too winding to summarize here, these and other observations
lead me to a counterintuitive conclusion: Narrative, at least in film,
isnt best understood as an act of communication from an author-like
entity to a reader-like one. Why do I say that? How can film not be
communication? Answer, too brief: What most people call
communication I call converging inferences.
And to end my trailer, I suggest that we think of narrative in all media,
most especially film, as inherently promiscuous. It will pull in anything
that gets the immediate job done. That includes grabbing one element
of ordinary conversationa guy telling a storywithout keeping the
other bits of the communicative chain, such as feedback from a listener.
Jordan is talking to us, but he doesnt know were here, and we cant
interrupt him.
One more time: You can get the essay here. Thanks for reading!

In a way this post is a sequel to the previous entry; background on Meir

Sternbergs account of curiosity, suspense, and surprise can be found
there. For more on the subject, see our category Narrative
strategies and the essay Common Sense + Film Theory = CommonSense Film Theory?

Many of the everyday terms we apply to stories are ambiguous or vague,

so sometimes we need to define our terms or invent new ones. Take
narration. In ordinary talk, can mean voice-over commentary, such
as Jordan Belforts in The Wolf of Wall Street. But if we restrict our
usage to just this form of sound, we dont have a good term for the
general flow of narrative presentation in the film, let alone films that
dont have voice-overs. So its useful to reserve narration for that
general process and use voice-over in some form to describe the
soundtracks role in that.
The same problem comes up with the term point of view, which has
many different meanings. It might refer to first-person reportage, or
what a character thinks and feels, or what she believes. (Obama is a
good president from her point of view.) If we want to be precise in
talking about these qualities of storytelling, we need to explain the
terms were using.
And sometimes its just easier to introduce new terms. In the essay, Ill
sometimes call the plot the syuzhet and the story thefabula. Why the
fancy terminology? Wont plot and story do? Well, yes, up to a
point. In this entry I did use those terms, and our textbook Film Art:
An Introduction has done that ever since its first edition of 1979. Still,
when were working within a research community, it helps to have
terms, even unusual ones, which say exactly what we mean. The
original readership for the Three Dimensions chapter knows that
plot and story have different meanings in our culture, and so I tried
to use terms that were less ambiguous. Not incidentally, I wanted as
well to signal my debt to the Russian Formalist literary critics, perhaps
our first modern narratologists.
Other chapters of Poetics of Cinema are posted online here.
P.S. 14 January 2014: Thanks to Steve Hilby for correcting me: I
originally mis-identified Jordans car as a Ferrari.
P.S.S. 14 January 2014: My old friend Brian Rose signals his
Academy interview with the filmmakers, in which Scorsese and
Schoonmaker declare a lack of interest in plot. Pfui, says I.

Last Modified: Monday | April 21, 2014 @ 16:37