Identifying the Criteria of Monstrous in Film: Analysis of Narrative Techniques

Abstract

The article presents an in-depth study of various narrative techniques used in Joker (dir. Todd Phillips, 2019) which allow the audience to discern the real and imaginary events of the film. Since the film widely employs the unreliable narrator trope, the identification of the events occurring or being radically transformed in the protagonist’s imagination is possible through analysing the narrative techniques used, which can be divided into two groups: the so-called “story” techniques based on a specific sequence of actions and / or words, and audio-visual, which include camera-angle, the position and movement of the camera, the score, etc.
A close look at the “story” techniques makes it possible to specify the hallucinations based on the following model: “A situation ambiguous from the standpoint of public opinion/morality: the protagonist gives a negative assessment of his possible actions in this situation but the key counterpart convinces him that the actions, taken or proposed, are the right thing to do”. Other imaginary events are identified by means of actual cinematic techniques, such as camera closing-up on a TV screen with the subsequent transition of the action into the screen space, the use of a musical leitmotif, etc.
Distinguishing between the imaginary and real events allows us to rather accurately determine the stages of accurately determine the stages of transformation of an ordinary mentally conditioned person Arthur Fleck into the Joker, a monster in terms of cultural monsterology, as well as the film’s embodiment of the evil clown archetype as an agent of chaos that also defines the “borders of the possible” for a conditioned person in modern society. The article thus concludes the efficiency of such an analysis of narrative techniques for a more precise reading of the film’s imagery and understanding of its implied meanings.