Hah hah, wow! I wish I'd read this before I made my post about Twilight, because in that post I come very close to this question but never actually come out and give a verdict on "reliable" or "unreliable" because it wasn't how I was approaching the topic.
[Besides, perhaps a word like "unreliable" gives Meyer too much credit - I don't think she even took into account things like critical distance.]
Anyways.
Salieri. I don't know if this is me falling into the seductive perspectival trap of the film medium, but I think it is more difficult to determine an unreliable narrator in a movie than in a novel. The hints and suggestions that are possible in a novel are less obvious or sometimes completely impossible on the screen. Therefore (and I realize my logic is weak here) I think that unless the viewer is clued into the narrator's bias in a fairly straightforward way, my inclination would be to trust the camera's perspective. Maybe this is laziness on my part, my willingness to trust concrete visuals in a movie where I would have doubted the words that made up the same scene in a book? Or my lack of familiarity with the movie?
Yet I always (lol, for the maybe two and a half times I've see this movie) felt that crazy!Salieri framed the story but was not of it. I think the very fact that he is narrating events that he couldn't possibly have seen or even perhaps have known about is a signal to the viewer that his narration *isn't* unreliable, because it's no longer his. I think the fact that Salieri frames the novel is intended to give the movie greater thematic and emotional impact, and I think it totally works, but I don't think this framing technique is *insisted upon*. I think that the mechanics of the movie dictate that Salieri gives up his narration to an omniscient narrator in between sanatorium scenes.
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regna
Is Salieri an unreliable narrator?
Date: 2008-10-26 08:32 pm (UTC)[Besides, perhaps a word like "unreliable" gives Meyer too much credit - I don't think she even took into account things like critical distance.]
Anyways.
Salieri. I don't know if this is me falling into the seductive perspectival trap of the film medium, but I think it is more difficult to determine an unreliable narrator in a movie than in a novel. The hints and suggestions that are possible in a novel are less obvious or sometimes completely impossible on the screen. Therefore (and I realize my logic is weak here) I think that unless the viewer is clued into the narrator's bias in a fairly straightforward way, my inclination would be to trust the camera's perspective. Maybe this is laziness on my part, my willingness to trust concrete visuals in a movie where I would have doubted the words that made up the same scene in a book? Or my lack of familiarity with the movie?
Yet I always (lol, for the maybe two and a half times I've see this movie) felt that crazy!Salieri framed the story but was not of it. I think the very fact that he is narrating events that he couldn't possibly have seen or even perhaps have known about is a signal to the viewer that his narration *isn't* unreliable, because it's no longer his. I think the fact that Salieri frames the novel is intended to give the movie greater thematic and emotional impact, and I think it totally works, but I don't think this framing technique is *insisted upon*. I think that the mechanics of the movie dictate that Salieri gives up his narration to an omniscient narrator in between sanatorium scenes.