Me, Me, Me: Film Narrators and the Crisis of Identity

Celestino Deleyto

© Editions Rodopi B.V. Ansterdam 2005

This chapter considers a narrative element shared by films and novels although used differently by each: the narrator. Whereas the presence of a narrator (the 'I' who speaks) is inescapable in oral and written narratives, in films narrators are used intermittently, fragmentarily and, very often, to signal 'literariness'. For this reason, this figure constitutes an interesting area of research in studies of the relationships between film and literature. This chapter looks at two recent film adaptations of popular British novels of the 1990s, High Fidelity (1995) and Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), in order to explore issues of identity, femininity and masculinity. More specifically, it focuses on the tension between the visibility of the narrator and the generic conventions of romantic comedy. As a conclusion, the existence of a sexual imbalance between the two films is detected and this is related to wider representations of masculinity, femininity and sexuality in contemporary culture.

 

The Increasing Visibility of Film Narration

 

In Spike Jonze's Adaptation (2002), a 'story-structure' guru advises his film students never to use voice-over in their scripts because, as he explains, it is too obvious and 'cheap' a way for a film to translate a character's thoughts into cinema. Being an extremely ironic metafictional story, the film itself does not hesitate to employ not one but two voice-over narrators. In other words, in order to mock current scriptwriting manuals the filmmakers choose the interdiction against voice-over as their target. In this they are echoing not only received opinions among film writers, but also the contempt traditionally displayed by film critics against those movies that use the device, especially as a way of adapting novels to the screen. Sarah Kozloff traces this critical attitude back to the theoretical revulsion against 'talkies' when sound was first introduced in films, and relates it to utopian views of the cinema as a truly popular art which would overcome the elitist barriers of bourgeois artistic forms like the novel. As she concludes, for that majority of critics who still believe that the art of cinema lies exclusively in the images, verbal narration is nothing short of illegitimate (1988: 12).

 

However, the history of cinema has often contradicted this critical and professional bias: from the Japanese benshi (storytellers who accompanied with their narration the screening of silent films, and whose power in the film industry delayed by several years the adoption of sound in Japan) to Orson Welles's unmistakable omniscient narrators, the extended use of subjective and tormented voice-over in film noir and the sophisticated experiments of the French nouvelle vague in the 1950s and 1960s, what Avrom Fleishman has called 'storytelling situations' (1992: 14) have abounded in films. If anything, the 1990s have witnessed an increase in the number, complexity and originality of onscreen and voice-over narrators and other narrating devices, including their sustained and varied use in the films of such undisputed auteurs as Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, and their appearance in a variety of films from blockbusters and mainstream films like Titanic (1997), The Shawshank Redemption (1994) or The Bridges of Madison County (1995), to more personal or independent projects like Smoke (1995), Lone Star (1996) or The Opposite of Sex (1998). Whether the critics like it or not, the presence of narrators has become a regular feature in films and one with which spectators are increasingly familiar.

 

Although Kozloff rejects the idea that the voice-over narrator is a literary device (1988: 17), there can be little doubt that these narrators generally bring films closer to novelistic narratives and, moreover, as Kozloff herself admits, that they have constituted, since the 1940s, a common strategy to 'translate' literary texts into film, immediately having become a shorthand way for films to underline their 'literariness', to ostensibly present themselves as literary adaptations. In these cases, the filmic narrator may be one more strategy in the movies' attempts to co-opt the prestige of the originals for their own viability as industrial projects. However, the situation is slightly different when the original literary texts do not belong to the pantheon of 'great works of art', but to the rather more difficult to define realm of popular culture. Here not only does the tired critical criterion of fidelity to the original not apply in the same way to the analysis of the filmic texts - fidelity stops being an issue when the original is not greatly admired by the critic: after all, nobody has ever complained about Shakespeare's complete disregard for his originals - but, from a purely industrial perspective, the artistic status of the 'great work of art' ceases to be a consideration in the filmic and extra filmic construction of the adaptation. In this chapter, I would like to explore the pervasive presence of the narrator in two such cases, the recent adaptations of two extremely successful literary examples of 1990s middlebrow British popular culture: Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (1995) and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996). Rather than compare them to their respective originals, I will be looking at how the films High Fidelity (1999) and Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) signal their 'literariness' through their narrators, and at the ideological consequences of the rather unusual relationships they establish with their spectators in terms of the representation of (gendered) identity. I will therefore relate these narrative figures to issues of self and subjectivity and will discuss the tension between the foregrounding of these issues and the deployment of generic conventions: the films' existence in a space of romantic comedy is seriously compromised by the flaunted centrality of the narrators.

 

Some film theorists and critics use the term 'film narrator' as a synonym of the camera, which, like the novelistic narrator, 'tells the story' (McFarlane 1996: 17), or as an abstract entity which is in control of all the narrating activities of the film (Chatman 1990: 132-4). I, however, will use the concept in a more restrictive sense. Film narratives do not need a narrator. As Fleishman points out, the cinema, like the theatre, is a mimetic spectacle. Therefore, in spite of the 'narrator-effect' - the impression that in the cinema someone is always telling us a story - cinematic stories are not narrated but 'shown' (Fleishman 1992: 2-4). There often is an unconscious and unnecessary tendency to assume that narrative films should work in the same way as novels do, and that the narrator being such an inescapable part of the way in which a story is narrated in a novel, films must also be equipped with equivalent figures, even if their presence is generally not so immediately obvious or necessary. The critics' need to find an anthropomorphic figure behind all the stylistic devices and meanings of a film betrays their unrelenting reliance on the concept of artistic authority and a consequent disregard for the way films work both narratively and industrially. In films there is no need to 'create' the figure of a narrator, that is, an agent that tells stories, and it seems more logical to reserve that term for those moments when such figures do appear, when an agent actually tells a story. If we are right to criticise traditional adaptation studies for their reliance on the issue of fidelity and their bowing to the artistic superiority of literature over cinema, and we agree with Naremore that such 'inferiority complex' has turned the theory of film adaptation into 'the most jejune area' of film studies (2000: 1), by the same token film narratology should not struggle to find filmic equivalents of novelistic devices paying instead closer attention to the actual ways in which films work, whether they are common or not to other media. In the case of the narrator, the dichotomy telling/showing is sufficient to explain a basic difference between novelistic and filmic narratives: in a novel we need an agent (or several agents) that tells a story; what we need in a film is one or several, internal or external, points of view, but not necessarily a telling agent. Films 'show' stories and only occasionally narrate them.

 

A film narrator, therefore, is a character or an external agent who uses words (written on the screen or, much more frequently, spoken) to tell a story or, more often, one or several fragments of a story. For Fleishman most films feature storytelling situations even when they are not as a whole narrated (1992: 22). The distinction between narrated and non-narrated films, therefore, can never be absolute. Whether we classify a film as narrated or non-narrated depends on the weight and importance that we give to the storytelling situations in it. Within narrated films, the basic difference is that between external and internal or character-narrators. Whereas the former can generally only address an external narratee, the latter have no qualms about breaking narrative levels (metalepsis) and often address their stories to the audience rather than to other characters. This is the case of the internal narrator of High Fidelity and, more ambiguously, of that of Bridget Jones’s Diary. Fleishman calls those characters who speak directly to the spectator direct internal narrators (1992: 24). Although they usually communicate their stories in voice-over, they can occasionally appear on screen, as is the case of Rob Gordon in High Fidelity, or, to mention a more famous example, Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) at the beginning of Annie Hall (1977). Other types of internal narrators include dramatised narrators (characters who address their stories to other characters), mindscreen (characters who do not tell the story to other characters but only rehearse it mentally to themselves) and written narrators (characters whose narration consists in the writing of letters or diaries) (Fleishman 1992: 24-27). The narrator of Bridget Jones’s Diary is a written narrator (she is writing a diary), although, as we shall see, of a more impure kind than that of the novel.

 

A Fickle Narrator Falls in Love

 

Bridget Jones’s Diary starts with a pre-credit sequence which opens with a medium shot of Bridget (Renée Zellweger) walking in a snow-covered London Street as we hear her voice-over as narrator.1 This is a traditional direct, voice-over internal narrator who, at least for the moment, is telling her story for the benefit of the spectator only: 'It all began on New Year's Day, on my 32nd year of being single. Once again I found myself on my own and going to my mother's annual turkey curry buffet'. This is the type of narrator that we expect to disappear when her voice gives way to the 'story proper', but in this film, as in High Fidelity, it is not so easy to get rid of the narrator. Bridget arrives at her parents' house and as soon as her mother (Gemma Jones) has completed the film's first line of dialogue, the narrator is back at it, now introducing the new character: 'My mum, a strange creature from the time when a gherkin was still the height of sophistication'. Narratively, this line confirms the omniscience of the narrator, her power to preside over the story and comment on it, and draws the spectator's attention to the artificiality of the convention - we have had no time to 'get into the story' and the narrator is already 'interrupting'. This second intervention also anticipates that this direct narrator will not be dramatised later: she is addressing only the spectator and not another character in the narrating present. We also know, therefore, that the narrating present is no more than a convention and hence unlikely to later become part of the story time. Rather, we understand the narrator to occupy a detached position outside space and time, close to that of external narrators. Finally, since the narrator is clearly very important (and very prone to interfering with the showing), this is also the first indication that the story will be subordinated to her, rather than, as is more often the case, the other way round.

 

Bridget's next narrating words force us to reassess her posi­tion once again. When her mother moves to the topic of boyfriends, the narrator comments: 'Ah, here we go'. Rather than the usual gap between the time of the narrating and the time of the narration, the constructed impression here is one of simultaneity, of the narrator reacting to the events of the story as these unfold and, therefore, of an agent who is not as much in control of events as we may have thought. After her dialogue with her mother, Bridget goes upstairs to get changed and a cut shows her in her new outfit, going into the main room, where the party is taking place. The narrating voice is immediately back, saying: 'Great. I was wearing a carpet'. The line seems an impossible combination of the two incompatible positions that Bridget-narrator has occupied so far: the past tense detaches her from the narrated events, but the initial exclamation underlines the proximity between both. The spectator is getting accustomed to the arbitrariness of the film's use of the device and enjoys its comic effect: this is an ironic narrator whose colloquial, gossiping, self-deprecating tone will lead viewers not so much through the narrative of events as through the narrative of the self, to which the story is no more than a necessary appendage. Spectators will only enjoy the comedy if they accept the constant play with and disregard for realistic conventions. The fiction proposed by the film begins to look like the story told by a technically sophisticated friend of the specta­tor, who shares with us her frustrations and anxieties about her life as a middle-class thirty-something single woman in 1990s London and employs a series of visual snippets from her rather mundane and, therefore, easily identifiable experiences as illustration of her oral narrative. At the same time, as we shall see, the emphasis on the self through the prominence and artificiality of the narrator undercuts the film's attempts to adhere to the generic conventions of romantic comedy.

 

After the credits, which now follow, Bridget-narrator reveals the precise nature of the decision that she has made and which she had announced at the end of the pre-credit sequence: to write a diary in order to 'take control of her life' and to tell the truth about Bridget Jones. As the narrator, still in the past tense, explains this, one of the characteristic headings that open each diary entry in the novel, spelling out her weight, calories, cigarettes and 'drink units' consumed, and so on, appears superimposed on the screen in what is meant to be Bridget's handwriting (with the concession for US audiences of substituting pounds for stones, just as, a few seconds later, the narrator uses the US American term 'pants' rather than the original's British 'knickers' to refer to her underwear). As Bridget's voice-over continues, she is also seen writing those very words in her diary, which suggests that what the narrator is going to say from now on corresponds to the contents of this diary. The type of narrator has, therefore, changed without any warning: in Fleishman's terms, from a direct voice-over narrator to a written diary narrator, another conven­tion of long and prestigious tradition both in the cinema and the novel. In theory, this narrator is very different from the direct narrator in that, like a dramatised narrator, it is given a realistic justification. In reality, however, the film will never make much effort to stick to the diary convention. The cut to the next scene, for example, is again accompanied by the narrator's voice who now introduces a new character, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). As she mentions his name, we see Daniel in close-up with a roguish expression on his face coming into the office and initiating his sexist flirtation with Bridget. Other characters are then presented, following the same convention previously employed to introduce Bridget's mother: the character performing an action and the narrator commenting on it, a stratagem which is well beyond the capabilities of any diary writer. In the course of the film, the diary convention is abandoned or resumed at the narrator's will. For example, at the end of this same scene, when Bridget explains to Daniel that she was talking to F. R. Leavis on the telephone and he ironically asks her whether this is the same F. R. Leavis who died in 1978, the superimposed word on the screen, a long-drawn 'fuuuuuuuuuck!', again in Bridget's handwriting, is another immedi­ate reaction which suggests not so much the resuming of diary writing as another modality of internal narrator: mindscreen, an amusing way to present Bridget's reaction to the discovery of her faux pas. Therefore, what we have seen so far is a narrator both extremely powerful in terms of her mastery over the tale she is recounting and voluble and inconsistent in narrative terms, changing freely from one mode of internal narration to another as the occasion requires (the only one she does not use in the course of the film is the dramatised narrator, the most realistic type). This volubility, of course, reinforces her mastery since she is not bound by any narrative or realistic rules that may curtail her freedom to communicate her feelings, experiences and, above all, anxieties to the audience.

 

The intermittent nature of filmic narrators and the relative autonomy of the image with respect to them work against their control of the textual point of view over the narrated events. In most internally narrated films, the occasional presence of the narrator does not prevent the text from showing the action from the point of view of other characters or from an external point of view, or even from showing a part of the story to which the narrator cannot possibly have access. Film spectators are well accustomed to the convention and do not generally notice the inconsistency. My foregoing description of Bridget Jones's Diary's narrator suggests that the film may be an exception in this respect because of the much closer control that it allows the narrating voice over the image track. However, I have been referring here mostly to the first ten minutes or so of the film and, although Bridget-narrator continues to appear frequently, as the narrative develops her interventions become less constant and her control of the story slackens somewhat, allowing the spectator to settle into a more conventional filmic narrative. Her point of view continues to predominate both through narration and internal focalisation, but the careful spectator will notice breaches of this self-imposed norm quite early on in the film.2

 

An early scene shows Bridget's clumsy but rather funny presentation of a new book at a launch party under the close scrutiny of an onscreen audience which includes real-life authors Salman Rushdie and Lord Archer. For the first time in the film, the visual emphasis here is on Bridget not as subject but as object of the look, her speech working as a comic act which both amuses and embarrasses fictional and real spectators alike. The struggle for control of the narrative point of view between Bridget as narrator and the other characters, particularly Daniel and Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), as focalisers, is momentarily resolved when, after the speech, Bridget stands alone by the bar and we see her briefly from Mark's point of view, while he talks to other people. He is about to go towards her and rescue her from her dejection when Daniel beats him to it and suggests having dinner together. As they leave the party room, we stay with Mark for a second or two, sharing his perspective on them, an intense look which conveys his romantic interest in her, his hatred of Daniel, his disappointment that she prefers the other man and his worry that she will be betrayed. This is a look that Bridget has had no access to and perhaps the first important narrative element that reveals something not controlled by the narrator.

 

The moment is thematically and generically relevant because it introduces a desire different from Bridget's and consolidates the film's adherence to the conventions of romantic comedy. One of the central tenets of this genre is the articulation of at least two subjects/objects of desire. There is very little romantic hope for a film in which only one point of view and, therefore, only one desire predominates. Because of its subject matter - the fulfilment of reciprocal desire in various social and historical circumstances - romantic comedy is, by definition, a more egalitarian genre than most.3 It follows that the initial format of Bridget Jones’s Diary, with the total predominance, one would say even tyranny, of Bridget's point of view through her role as narrator (and secondarily as focaliser), is not particularly conducive to the proper consummation of love. It seems logical to speculate, therefore, that the hold of the narrator over the story must loosen before the film can settle into the conventions of romantic comedy, and this is what happens to a certain extent, even though Bridget-narrator continues to direct our attention. It could be argued that, in a sense, the film chronicles the struggle between the narrator and the genre for predominance. It could also be said that the whole point of the great visibility of Bridget as narrator, particularly at the beginning of the narrative, is closely linked to her inability to establish romantic attachments with men: she talks to spectators because she has nobody else to talk to, because only they will listen. For this reason, the film's reliance on an extremely narcissistic narrator becomes part of a neo-conservative ideology which, starting in the USA in the late 1970s, has presented women as frustrated, lonely and unhappy victims of their own ambitions of equality (Faludi 1992). The empowered narrator of Bridget Jones's Diary can be interpreted, paradoxically, as a symptom of a cultural female powerlessness. The Hollywoodisation of the novel, particularly through the use of USA star Renée Zellweger to play British Bridget, works towards an universalisation of the trend - 'modern women have the same problems everywhere' - and brings important ideological consequences to what was probably, at least on a conscious level on the part of the filmmakers and the producers, only a commercial decision. Conversely, while Daniel's obvious sexist objectification of Bridget was never very promising as a way out of Bridget' historically-specific predicament, Mark's gradually intensified gaze, and its summoning of the conventions of romantic comedy, goes a long way towards counteracting the solipsism of the film's narrative structure. It is significant that the gradual strengthening of both the role of Mark Darcy and the conventions of romantic comedy with respect to the novel runs pararrel to the relative loss of power of the film's narrator, a loss which never happens in the novel, among other things because Mark remains a relatively secondary character and is certainly never given a voice or a point of view. At the end, each spectator will decide which of the two pulls attracts her/him more, but in Bridget Jones’s Diary a powerful filmic narrator and the fulfilment of erotic desire prove to be incompatible.

 

Romantic Comedy to the Rescue of the Male Narrator

 

The film adaptation off High Fidelity also stresses the potential for romantic comedy of the original. The story of a break-up between a man and a woman and their final reconciliation is as old as Shakespeare and was, for example, the common subject of a cycle of screwball comedies that Stanley Cavell called 'comedies of remarriage' (1981), even though Rob (John Cusack) and Laura (Iben Hjejle) are not married at the beginning and remain unmarried at the end. However, the hypothetical tension between narrator and genre is resolved here in a different way from Bridget Jones’s Diary. Sharon Maguire's film, while remaining a 'woman's film' in its overall effect, appears as a conglomerate of disparate narrative blocks in the inconsistency and fragmentariness of its narrator, in its use of a popular USA star to portray a British character, and in the gradual opening up and proliferation of its points of view to accommodate romantic comedy tropes. High Fidelity, on the other hand, features a much more disciplined and coherent narrative structure through an internal narrator who is even more pervasive and controlling than Bridget. Unlike her, Rob starts as a direct narrator, sometimes voice-over but mostly on-screen, and remains the same throughout the film. If the filmmakers' decision to transplant the story from London to Chicago is artistically braver and more successful than the casting of Zellweger as Bridget (although the professional press was surprisingly almost unanimous in its praise of the actress's performance), the intensification of the role of the narrator to retain the novel's distinctiveness and appeal is both more inventive and satisfying than in the other film.4

 

Whereas Bridget Jones’s Diary attempts to ensure the widest audience appeal through highlighting both the romantic comedy dimension and the narrator's role, Stephen Frears's less compromising approach keeps High Fidelity on a lower profile while focusing much more intensely on the contemporary male's plight in the field of heterosexual desire. I am suggesting, therefore, that the effect of romantic comedy in this film appears to be seriously impaired for the same reason as it is gradually promoted in Bridget Jones. In High Fidelity the relationship between Rob and Laura is seen exclusively from his perspective. Laura's point of view is either filtered through the narrator or sometimes even imagined by him, as are those of the other characters. Although the specific nature of film language makes it theoretically impossible to suppress the focalisation of characters on the screen and filmic conventions ensure that an external focaliser is always at work even in the most subjective of narratives, there are no moments in this film equivalent to the crucial shift in point of view at the book launch party in Maguire's. In a more decisive way than Bridget, Rob matures in the course of the film, a maturation constantly hindered by his 'infantile' male friends and bolstered by Laura's patience, understanding and compassion, but, unlike in the majority of romantic comedies, this is presented exclusively from his perspective. The opening segment of High Fidelity firmly establishes the narrator's relationship with the story and with the spectator. The first image is a detail shot of the vinyl record playing in the soundtrack. From here the camera pans tight following the headphone cable until it finds the back of Rob's head on which it concentrates for a few seconds. This shot already points towards the central conceit of the film: the music can only be heard by Rob and, through his ears, by the spectator, but not by other characters (in this case, Laura, who is also in the house). We, therefore, have privileged access to Rob's subjectivity and will learn very little else apart from his opinions and thoughts. After the cut, a close-up reverse shot shows Rob looking straight at the camera and starting his relentless conversation with the spectator. The similarity with the beginning of a film like Annie Hall is remarkable but there are also important differences: while the Alvy Singer of Annie Hall initially looks like the director himself, perhaps giving an imaginary interview, and therefore introducing the possibility of a dramatised situation and of a diegetic interlocutor (like the interviewer in Allen's later Husbands and Wives (1992)), here we are aware from the beginning that Rob is not John Cusack but a fictional character and that he is not talking to anybody but the real spectators. This first address is interrupted by Laura, who is about to leave him, and who, in order to attract his attention, unplugs the headphones. Without any marker of a change of narrative level or return to the fictional world, Rob has a brief conversation with his girlfriend before she goes. He then turns back to the camera to introduce his childish but very amusing distinctive practice of making top-five lists about everything: 'My desert island, all time, top five most memorable break-ups in chronological order are as follows...'. After listing the names of his previous girlfriends, he vindictively shouts at Laura from the window to remind her that their break-up has not even made it into the top five, although the spectator knows that this is not strictly true.

 

Then he resumes his dialogue with the camera and starts telling viewers about those break-ups through a combination of voice-over, flashbacks and constant returns to direct address to the camera. These five stories (in the end Laura's is included in the top five) constitute the first narrative segment of the film, but the role and central conceit of the narrator, established through them, never changes.

 

The formula admits numerous variations: a 'hypothetical flashback', when he imagines the dialogue in which Laura tells their common friend Liz (Joan Cusack) the reasons why she left him; a mindscreen conversation with Bruce Springsteen with some useful advice about how to behave with Laura; three fantasised ways in which he would react 'like a man' when his rival Ray (Tim Robbins) comes to pay him a visit at the record shop, followed by his real mumbling, powerless reaction; or direct addresses to camera even from inside some of the flashbacks. These and other strategies work because of their subservience to the convention of the direct on-screen narrator. This technique doubtless enhances the film's artificiality and, in the words of the Russian Formalists, 'lays bare the device'. Paradoxically, its more specific effect is not so much one of breaking the illusion but, rather, a simultaneously almost literal and logically impossible incorporation of the spectator in the same diegetic level as the fictional characters. In other words, an intense engagement with the story on our part, as if we ourselves were also fictional charac­ters - or as if Rob were not completely fictional. The repetitiveness and consistency of the address suggests that there is a character in the position of the camera, a character that spectators never get to see, an imaginary confidant of Rob's, who is no other than the spectator her/himself: an infinitely patient friend who sits and listens to his ravings. In the first scene, as has been mentioned, Rob moves naturally from addressing the camera/spectator to addressing Laura, as if both were part of the same world: the girlfriend who abandons him and the infinitely patient friend who sits and listens to his ravings. In later scenes, this makes for spotlessly invisible transitions and amusing ambiguities: when standing by the counter in a club, Rob and his two friends, Barry (Jack Black) and Dick (Todd Louiso), consider what it would be like to live with a musician as they watch Marie (Lisa Bonet) perform, and Rob speaks to the camera in close-up - we cannot be sure whether he is talking to his friends or to us - again as if the spectator were one more member of the group of friends and belonged to their same world. At other times, Rob looks at the camera and spectators expect his narration to return, but he is simply meditating and has nothing to communicate for the moment. On these occasions, the illusion of reality is not really broken because, if viewers accept the pact that the film has offered, Rob does not really leave the diegesis to address them. He does not think of us as radically different from the other characters, except that, unlike them, we never talk back (although we would certainly like to). This ensures that the filmmakers can include as many of Rob's thoughts as they like without the film becoming tedious, but it also binds them to Rob's perspective and means that the other characters become ciphers without much real autonomy .5 Much more than Bridget Jones’s Diary, High Fidelity succeeds or fails on the strength of the believability and the pleasure provided by its protagonist-narrator.

 

Both Bridget Jones’s Diary and High Fidelity offer, through the evocation and flaunting of their own 'literariness', almost literally what for Anthony Giddens is the main characteristic of modernity: narratives of the self. Through a constant reflexivity or self-analysis, the modern individual seeks to control her/his own life and his sense of her/his own individuality (Giddens 1991). For Michel Foucault, on the other hand, sex is one of the privileged spaces for the exploration and construction of people's sense of identity in modern societies. According to the French thinker, we have come to expect sexual encounters to give us the truest idea of who we are (Foucault 1981). Romantic comedy, as one of the most popular cultural formations for the representation of sex and love in our society, seems an ideal place to link our modern sense of individual identity to our desire for the other, and therefore to bring together the theories of these two authors. Yet, my analysis of Bridget Jones's Diary has argued that Bridget's glorification of her own suffering and constant disappointments in love appears to be a necessary condition of her consolidation as a narrator, and consequently the happy resolution of her relationship with Mark significantly weakens the power of the narrator. Bridget's visibility as internal narrator and therefore as subject of the narrative in this contemporary 'chick-flick' is tied to her insecurity and helplessness in love, much like the female subjectivity constructed by the 'woman's film' was, according to Mary Ann Doane (1987), tied to the characters' experiences of suffering, fear and masochism.

 

A different process seems to be at work in High Fidelity, one that appears to be related to the continuing inequality in the represen­tation of the sexes in our culture. In this film, the crisis of masculinity through the experience of love, which constitutes the starting point of the narrator's omnipresence in the narrative (the top five all time break-ups), becomes the source of change for Rob -  an epiphany of sorts takes place while he is waiting for the inexistent bus after the funeral of Laura's father, just before they have sex in her car - who uses it 'wisely' to 'mature' without diminishing his control over the story as narrator. This may remind the film spectator of one of the most representative cultural icons of contemporary masculinity: the Woody Allen schlemiel hero, who often thrives in an atmosphere of beleaguered manhood and who, coincidentally or not, regularly doubles as film narrator. From a feminist standpoint, Kathleen Rowe criticises Woody Allen's comedies as examples of the way in which 'new men' use their melodramatisation - present themselves as victims - as a way to shore up their authority over women (1995, 196-200). Before Hornby's popular books of the 1990s, Allen had been using the format of romantic comedy since the early 1970s in order to explore the historical predicament of men (and sometimes women) in the face of important changes in cultural definitions of masculinity and femininity and the relationships between the sexes brought about by the sexual revolution and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Babington and Evans 1989: 152-78). In films like Love and Death (1977), Annie Hall, Manhattan (1979), Hannah and her Sisters (1986), Another Woman (1988) and others, Allen uses narrators in various ways to convey the experiences of these melodramatised men and women in similar if less ostensible ways to the two films that I have analysed here. A film like Hannah and her Sisters, for example, articulates a subtle struggle for control of the narrative between various men and women in which the character played by Allen himself makes his final romantic triumph coincide with a visible dominance over the other characters as narrator, in a way which may be seen as a precedent of High Fidelity. Allen has occasionally used younger actors to replace him as romantic lead, especially in the 1990s. Of these, probably the most successful was precisely John Cusack who, having already appeared in Shadows and Fog (1991), returns to play the protagonist of Bullets over Broadway (1994), a promising young playwright in the 1920s who, also acting as narrator, undergoes a similar personal development to that experienced by Rob in Frears's film. Like High Fidelity, this film uses the conventions of romantic comedy, and even the structure of the comedy of remarriage, as well as the device of the internal narrator, in order to convey what is essentially a male personal narrative of the self triggered by a crisis of masculinity disguised here as a crisis of creativity. John Cusack's presence in both films links the filmic Rob Gordon to Woody Allen as part of a wider cultural conversation about the contradictory position occupied by men in contemporary society. As in many of Allen's films, High Fidelity succeeds in appropriating the 'egalitarian' conventions of romantic comedy in order to reinforce the literal narrative of the self and manages to chronicle the romantic triumph of his protagonist without diminishing his position as narrator.6 Frears's film consolidates Cusack as one of Allen's inheritors in the 1990s, as a contradictory yet far-from-helpless 'new man', and the film's outstanding use of a male character narrator emphasises, through its highlighting of issues of power, authority, subjectivity and desire, this line of cultural development.

 

Conclusion: Beyond Comparison

 

The literary narrators of these two films illustrate the cultural dimensions not only of the process of adaptation from novel to film but, more generally, of the complex relationships between film and literature. In a recent interview about Dogville (2003), Danish director Lars von Trier explains that through the radical stylistic approach used in his film he was trying to challenge what he considers reactionary attempts to cordon and limit film, theatre and literature. In Dogville, which is not an adaptation but based on an original script written by von Trier himself, and which employs an omniscient external narrator, he creates a fusion of the three arts. For von Trier, questions as to what is or is not filmic are irrelevant because in art everything is possible (Bjòrkman 2004: 25). I have tried to prove that the figure of the narrator, indispensable in novels, but often employed in complex ways by both films and plays, is a good example of the potentialities of this artistic fusion and that, beyond predictable comparisons between the different ways in which this or that figure are used in the different arts, what is more relevant and more worthy of attention is its participation in cultural struggles for the construction of historically-specific identities and ideological discourses.7 


Notes

 

1 I am using the DVD version of the film (Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2001) for my analysis. In her review, Leslie Felperin (2001: 36) refers to a different beginning, which seems to correspond to what in the DVD is the first of the 'deleted scenes'. In it, after a brief exchange between Bridget and a neighbour, we see a long shot of St. Pancras station followed by the medium shot of the protagonist referred to before. The lines of the voice-over narration do not correspond to those of the final cut, and are followed by a sequence inside the station with the train announcer improbably discussing Bridget's thighs on the loudspeakers, which has also disappeared from the DVD version.

 

2 Fleishman briefly discusses the relationship between narration and focalisation in rather unsatisfying terms (1992: 157-8). For a more thorough discussion of the usefulness of the term for the analysis of film narratives, see Deleyto (1996).

 

3 For good accounts of romantic comedy in film, see Neale and Krutnik (1990), Neale (1992) and Thomas (2000).

 

4 Predictably, Bridget Jones's Diary was much more popular at the box office than High Fidelity, although both were produced by the extremely successful British-based 'independent' company Working Title. Made on a budget of $20 million, High Fidelity grossed $27 million in the USA, £4.5 million in Britain and not quite €1 million in Spain. Bridget Jones's Diary, for its part, was made on a slightly higher budget of $26 million but grossed $71 million in the USA, an impressive £41 million in Britain and more than €13 million in Spain (Internet Movie Database).

 

5 Whereas this is true of the film as a whole, the actors' performance can go some way towards counteracting this tendency, and both Todd Louiso and, especially, Jack Black manage to give their characters a life of their own, and turn them into autonomous pleasures. It was probably his performance in this film that opened the way for Jack Black to become the star of later films like the Farrelly brothers' Shallow Hal (2001) and Richard Linklater's School of Rock (2003).

 

6 I am not suggesting here a cultural sexual determinism of the type entertained by traditional feminist film criticism: Bridget's loss of part of her control as narrator when the conventions of romantic comedy are activated is related to the fact that she is a woman and Rob's parallel preservation of his position in similar circumstances can be explained as part of the cultural representations of contemporary masculinity, but it is not impossible for female narrators to preserve a high degree of visibility after their encounter with the conventions of romantic comedy, as is proved, for example, by other contemporary films like Clueless (1995) or The Opposite of Sex. Therefore, rather than patriarchal inevitability, I prefer to refer to cultural tendencies.

 

7 Research towards this chapter has been funded by the DGICYT project no. BFF2001-2564.