Throughout literature across the ages, there has been one particular archetype that although often used, has always captured my imagination while reading. That Archetype is that of the unreliable narrator, a literary technique that has been growing in popularity in modern times as we readers look voraciously for more complex, morally ambiguous characters in our stories. This is partly due I believe, to the popularity of books/shows like George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, but also because we as the younger generation are becoming increasingly disenfranchised with the plastic, one dimensional world of corporate capitalism we often find ourselves in where everyone has a mask they display to the public, be it through Facebook or Twitter, their career or their chosen subculture. In a world of Capitalist business men, Vegan Hipsters and misogynistic rap fans, we as a generation are beginning to desire more and more honesty in the worlds we loose ourselves in through fiction. This of course is kind of ironic as we aren’t talking about honestly, we are talking about the exact opposite, but an unreliable narrator can be said to have a truthful quality to it.

Whatever the case, the unreliable narrator is an interesting literary technique to study and write on because of how closely it mirrors ourselves in real life. Trade mark signs of unreliable narration are contradicting oneself, or lying about certain events or characters, stream-of-thought incessant inner monologues, gaps in memory, and contradicting our general knowledge of the world in their narration (e.g. hallucinating, whether aware or unaware they are doing so) Often times, an unreliable narrator will be seen to be battling with mental illnesses or drug addiction. Peter J. Rabinowitz, a literary theorist and professor of Comparative Literature has described unreliable narrators as being such:

“There are unreliable narrators. An unreliable narrator however, is not simply a narrator who ‘does not tell the truth’ – what fictional narrator ever tells the literal truth? Rather an unreliable narrator is one who tells lies, conceals information, misjudges with respect to the narrative audience – that is, one whose statements are untrue not by the standards of the real world or of the authorial audience but by the standards of his own narrative audience… In other words, all fictional narrators are false in that they are imitations. But some are imitations who tell the truth, some of people who lie.”

One thing I have noticed however as a writer of both prose and film/TV, it is considerably more difficult to pull off the convincing unreliable narrator on a visual medium. This is due to the very nature of film/TV being all about showing audiences exactly what is going on, it becomes hard to hide events and situations when you can’t disguise them behind a text wall of first person narration.

In a book, a character can just flat out lie to you about what’s happening, they can have events contradict one another, they can essentially pull the wool over your eyes. In film/TV if they did this, you wouldn’t be able to see the screen. Plain black and white prose has its advantage in this sense because you as the reader can never be sure that the story presented to you on the page actually happened within the story world. However, I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to look at a few examples of visual storytelling where they went for unique approaches to their source material and created what I think are ingenious ways of having an unreliable narrator?

Over the course of this post we are going to consider three examples. Two films and one TV show. The films being: Fight Club and American Psycho, whereas for TV we will look at USA Network’s Mr Robot.

Fight Club and American Psycho have the added benefit of being books initially which allows us to compare both examples together. Mr Robot is a stand alone piece of media, but none the less interesting.

Fight Club is a 1999 film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter. Based off the 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel of the same name, it tells the story of an unnamed man who upon discovering his apartment has been blown up makes friends with the mysterious Tyler Durden. This friendship begins in the creation of a “Fight Club” where men beat each other to a pulp as a way to outlet their existential angst, eventually the Fight Club takes on a more sinister tone as Tyler begins to militarize its members, sending them out to engage in nihilistic mayhem.

SPOILER ALERT

The film ends with the horrific discovery of the narrator that Tyler Durden is not in fact a real person, but is the narrator’s split personality taking over and engaging in self-destructive chaos as a way to alleviate what he perceives to be the cancer of society – consumerism.

In Palahniuk’s novel, he employs several techniques to create his unreliable narrator. In fact, we begin the b0ok knee-deep in medias res where the narrator is already aware that he and Tyler are in fact the same person, yet he chooses to omit this from the narration. Instead, we are left small hints, peppered throughout the text, the chorus line: “I know this because Tyler knows this” accompanying many of the narrators instructions on how to create bombs etc. We assume that this is due to their close relationship, but a second glance alongside other clues and the knowledge of the book’s ending, causes us to re-evaluate our understanding of those words.

Another hint of unreliable narration, one which we receive in both the novel and film is the narrator’s Insomnia. Remember when I mentioned earlier that unreliable narrators often are battling with mental illness or drug addiction? Well in a way Palahniuk’s narrator is battling both. We see him pleading with his doctor to give him something for the pain, revealing to us both his reliance on medication, but also his insomniac tendencies that act in a way as the inciting incident for the rest of the story.

It’s around this point that the film employs an interesting technique seeing as it can’t hide clues in text like the novel does with its choruses etc, we start to see flickering images, flashes of something (slow it down and of course, it’s Tyler) before the narrator has even traveled down his little rabbit hole into the plot of the story.

A side effect of his insomnia, these hallucinations call into question the integrity of the world being presented to us, along side the narrator’s confession that when you have insomnia “everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy.“

A final note on the Fight Club film lending to unreliable narration – in the film we see a metafictional version of the story play out. Not only do we have voice over narration, but at times the characters will break the fourth wall, look directly at the audience and explain something. This technique seems to be designed as a way to tell us as the audience that what we are watching is more akin to a “dramatic reconstruction” of events rather than an in the moment telling of what happened.

American Psycho, released in 2000 and directed by Mary Harron is based off the infamous book of the same name by Brett Easton Ellis. It is a satirical black comedy detailing the day to day life of Wall Street Yuppie – Patrick Bateman as he struggles to hide from the world around him his psychopathic tendencies.

SPOILER ALERT

At the end of the film, it is revealed to Patrick through a series of confusing conversations that all the people he has viciously killed in the course of the film may or may not have been simply figments of his imagination. We are left with a rather ambiguous conclusion and the morally grey question of if he imagined it, is it the same as if he had really done it?

In the American Psycho novel, the whole narrative functions around a comedy of errors. What I mean by that, is Ellis’ focus on the absurd day to day events of his character Bateman. In fact, in the book, this is probably the most dead give away of Bateman’s unreliability. The events Bateman records are so fantastic and strange at times, that as a reader, we are left thinking it couldn’t possibly happen, could it?

The trick Ellis employs in these near comedic events is that although they feel surreal and untrue, they also in a way feel exactly like the kind of bullshit people in the late 80’s capitalist boom would do. We have for example, absurd fine dining dishes constantly being recorded by Patrick – “Lobster with caviar and peach ravioli, Blackened lobster with strawberry sauce. Quail sashimi with grilled brioche and baby soft-shell crabs with grape jelly.”

On top of that, obscenely violent murders or altercations taking place in full view of the public and no one does a thing. Patrick himself constantly confesses in both the film and the book “I like to dissect girls, did you know I’m utterly insane?” yet no body listens to him, they are all so conceited that they just laugh it off and change the subject to something about themselves.

There is also the running gag of nobody on wall street remembering who anybody else is. I feel in the film, this gag was very poorly handled, as it is such a crucial gag in my opinion for the ambiguity of the film’s ending to make sense. The joke is this: from the very get-go of Ellis’ narrative, all the way through the book, other yuppies are constantly mistaking Patrick for each other. In turn, Patrick and his friends are always mistaking others for co-workers as well. On top of this, girl friends are doing the same thing. This joke falls into the ongoing satire of self-absorbed capitalist america, but also creates the ambiguity as to whether Patrick has killed anybody at all in the plot’s conclusion.

If so and so says he saw one of Patrick’s victims after Patrick supposedly killed him, then who is telling the truth? We can never know because Patrick may have mistaken a victim for someone else, or Patrick invented his victim, or so and so saw someone who he mistook for Patrick’s victim, unwittingly giving Patrick and alibi.

In the film, this is a very minor aspect to the plot, which doesn’t allow for nearly as much ambiguity as the novel does, however it still works towards an unreliable narrator for film.

Lastly, we arrive at Mr Robot, a relatively new show, season 1 aired mid 2015, with season 2 about to start this month. Created by Sam Esmail, Mr Robot, in a way combines the best elements of both Fight Club and American Psycho as well as pulling from cyber goth films such as The Matrix, to create a very unique story about a computer hacker named Elliot and his ongoing relationship with the hacker group fSociety as they take down the insidious E Corp, an apple/google/windows-esque corporation that pretty much rules the world. As the series progresses, we the viewers begin to become aware of Elliot’s growing mental illness, and his integrity as a trustworthy narrator is quickly called into question.

From the meta (self-aware) lines we know we are in for a wild ride with Elliot who narrates:

“Hello friend. Hello friend? That’s lame. Maybe I should give you a name. But that’s a slippery slope, you’re only in my head, we have to remember that. Shit, this actually happened, I’m talking to an imaginary person. What I’m about to tell you is top secret. A conspiracy bigger than all of us. There’s a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world. I’m talking about the guys no one knows about, the ones that are invisible. The top 1% of the top 1%, the guys that play God without permission. And now I think they’re following me.”

One of the most interesting techniques used by the series writer to me in conveying an unreliable narrator is the use of the term “Evil Corp.” It’s subtle, and if you miss the change over, it can be kind of confusing. For me, the first time watching the series, I was a little lost as to what the name of the corporation Elliot is battling against was called. Was it E Corp or Evil Corp?

Well, initially, Elliot tells us they are called E Corp, a company that masquerades as saviors of the world, providing products to consumers on an almost world dominating scale. Elliot however knows the truth, his father died as a direct result of E Corp’s negligence and lack of care towards mankind. Elliot calls them Evil Corp, and from the second he tells us his nickname for the company through voice over narration, every other character in his world begins to refer to it by his nickname as well.

It’s confusing because if you don’t realize Elliot as being an unreliable narrator, it seems as if the world is willfully ignorant to the name of the company they are buying from, and this of course is partly the point.

It is obviously a satirical comment on how we as a society will gladly ignore (as Elliot points out) that Steve Jobs for example made his millions from child labor, just so we can have the next apple product.

But deeper than this, the change over in name acts as a visual/audio adaptation of the unreliable narrator literary device of lying to the readers. You see, by having characters start using the nickname known only to us and Elliot, the writers have created a contradiction in the story world. We feel as if the world around Elliot is being fabricated in someway and because only us and Elliot know his nickname for E corp, the conclusion we must arrive at is that Elliot’s narration is tampering with actual events in someway.

In the course of the season we also see the use of present tense in Elliot’s narration, the voice over panics at the same time as we see Elliot panic on screen, adding further to the understanding of Elliot’s mental illness – he is literally talking to somebody in his head as the events take place.

We also see his narration at times talking over top of characters dialogue as in episode 2, where a drug dealer is trying to introduce himself and Elliot’s narration kicks in over top explaining how he already knows who the dealer is because he hacked him.

This technique implies that Elliot is not above shouting over top of true events and significant information. This is not a fair telling of the story, this is Elliot’s version of the events and we will hear what he wants us to hear.

There’s also the use of missing time in the show. A scene will start and neither us nor apparently Elliot will really know how he ended up there. Another example of this being at the end of episode 2 where he arrives at the wharf to speak with Mr Robot, out of context to everything else that has been going on.

Due to its long form story telling, Mr Robot uses multiple devices outside of the ones I’ve mentioned to build Elliot as unreliable, from his paranoia and hallucinations to his sudden breaks into anger, it all builds towards his version of events not being trustworthy.

So that’s it, a quick overview of three great pieces of visual storytelling in which one of my favorite archetypes is used. As we as a society become more and more disillusioned with what is going on around us, the drive for these types of stories is only going to increase, because like I pointed out at the beginning of this post, what’s more honest than dishonesty?