Melinda and Melinda
Brainteaser movies have been enjoying a certain vogue in the past few years. The taste for them can be traced back to at least 1994 and the jigsaw-puzzle narrative of Pulp Fiction. But the trend got started in earnest in 2000, with the release of Memento, which tells a complicated story backward, and it gained further momentum two years later when the same gimmick was combined with sex and violence in Irreversible. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Kill Bill have more substantial characters than either of those films, yet part of their appeal lies in the challenge of putting scrambled narrative pieces together.
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There are people who say they don’t like to read or write but spend plenty of time doing both on the Internet. Similarly, there are people who say they don’t like to think while watching movies yet don’t mind using their brains when it comes to “puzzle” movies. But there are different kinds of thinking. Figuring out the story in these films takes so much concentration that other issues–what the stories mean, whether they’re worth telling, whether the characters are just disposable genre machinery–become secondary. Ultimately the filmmakers are treating the characters as objects and encouraging viewers to see them the same way. Among current releases, The Jacket seems intended to appeal to the same taste.
Allen often uses musical signals to let us know whether what we’re watching is supposed to be funny–lively jazz to signal comedy, and classical music, often modernist, to signal tragedy. His intent is obvious enough when he uses snatches of numbers by Erroll Garner (“The Best Things in Life Are Free,” “Somebody Stole My Gal,” “Will You Still Be Mine?”) or Bela Bartok (String Quartet no. 4), though it’s awfully facile to stick Garner in a box labeled lighthearted and Bartok in one labeled gloomy. Typecasting becomes caricature when Allen moves on to sound bites from Duke Ellington (“Take the ‘A’ Train,” “In a Mellow Tone,” “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart”), Igor Stravinsky (Concerto in D for String Orchestra), and Bach (Partita no. 3, the second prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier). The musical pieces get shortchanged, and so do we listeners. It doesn’t help that Allen sometimes gives us additional portions of the same works, because he’s still using them as if he were turning a faucet on and off.
