Just finished watching Naked City– film-noir from 1948 with an omniscient narrator whose existential commentary somehow keeps the murder mystery that unfolds at a safe distance. The narrator is our Beatrice and he’ll lead us out.
The process of watching this movie has coincided with some recent thinking I’ve been doing about interpretation and why it feels different depending on the type of text (book, film, TV show, etc…) I’m a notorious sleeper during movies. I fell asleep during a movie John and I watched on our second date. Granted we were watching The Straight Story –one of the slower movies I’ve seen, but it doesn’t matter; I’ve slept during thrillers too. I can be really enjoying a movie– as I was Naked City– and still fall asleep. (The great thing about Netflix, though, is that there is no guilt involved in my naps.)
I don’t fall asleep when I read, and maybe this is because my brain is more actively processing information? When I’m reading, I’m thinking more about possibility and interpretation. I guess I see most movies as pretty fixed in terms of interpretation (besides these frustratingly non-sequiter Godard movies John’s been into recently); I don’t think this can really be right given that I don’t think Rosenblatt’s work only applies to written texts, but I’m not sure what else to attribute it to.
