When we watch a film narrative, it can be easy to get trapped into thinking of the people and places as real. I don’t mean that we really are fooled that we are watching real life up on the screen but we suspend disbelief and allow ourselves to fall into the world of the film. This is important for the narrative to work but it doesn't help us when we want to analyse the narrative

One thing that can help us to distance ourselves from the film's narrative techniques enough to analyse it is to think about the functions of all the ingredients of the narrative. By the function of anything in a text I simply mean the answers to the questions- why is it there? How does it help to move the narrative on or help us to make sense of it?

Take mise-en-scene for example. This always has a narrative function- it is never "just there". If you think about the opening of Fatal Attraction for example, the view we are given of Michael Douglas' flat is a shorthand way of telling the story- it instantly lets us know a lot about what kind of person he is and what kind of family life he has. It has a function in the narrative. You could think about the mise-en-scene of Somerset’s room in Seven or of the Wallace's house in Pulp Fiction in exactly the same way- they each have an important narrative function- quickly giving us details about the characters’ lives that could otherwise take hours of storytelling. Even the rain that we see everywhere in Seven adds to the feeling that we have about the world of the film.

The characters themselves also have functions in the narrative. While the main character of a film may be at the centre of the narrative, pretty well everyone else is simply serving a purpose to move the story on somehow. In more brutal cases the victims in Seven have the function of providing yet further signs of the evil of the killer and therefore building up our narrative expectation of the inevitable confrontation at the end of the film. Think about the policeman who appears with Somerset at the very opening of the film. He is only present in this scene but he has an important function for the rest of the movie- he serves as an opposite to Somerset in the way that he makes fun of his interest in the emotional implications of a killing- "what do you mean- did the kid see it?" His function in the narrative is to stand for all the police who do not care and in fact for the society as a whole which produces the apathy that Somerset later moans about.

If you think about all characters in this way you should always be able to think of a narrative function. Sometimes they move the plot on by their actions, sometimes their function is just to be the victims of events, sometimes they help to reinforce the ideology of the film, sometimes they are even part of the mise en scene.

One confusing aspect of all of this is that a character's function can change- think about the drug dealer in Pulp fiction. When we first see him, his function is to sell Vincent the drugs which will nearly kill Mia- the drugs he provides move the plot on. When we see him again, his function has changed to that of life-saver- without him, Mia would die. These functions have ideological implications as well- think about what kind of message there is to a film where a drug dealer is a lifesaver- this is part of the ideological confusion which many people have talked about in the movie.

In summary, you should always be on the look out for the function of any ingredient in a narrative. This helps you to understand a number of the theories about narrative from the booklet- for example, binary oppositions can easily be spotted within characters who have opposite functions. Similarly, Campbell’s hero’s journey is basically made up with characters taking different functional roles in the narrative.

Steve Baker 9 2 97