to Fade Black: The Destruction of Identity in Vertigo, The Tenant, & Mulholland Drive Eric M. Lachs ENG4133: The Accident Dr. Richard Burt
The rudimentary form of narrative storytelling lends itself towards application to an individual subject's life story due to the correspondence of a narrative's finite bounds and the subject's mortality. Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), The Tenant (dir. Roman Polanski, 1976), and Mulholland Drive (dir. David Lynch, 2001) are consistent with this idea because their narratives follow an individual human subject from an anecdotally significant beginning to their death. I will argue that the anthropomorphized narrative compels the subject's suicide through the misrecognition of personal identity. This occurrence brings about the themes of narrative significance, subject motivation, identity, recognition, and mortality. The specificities of basic narrative method include the Aristotelian triumvirate form--consisting of beginning, middle, and end--and a fundamental progression in time. These requisites belie the potentially infinite scope of narrative and set a primitive restriction to the most fundamental linguistic practice. Once the boundaries of narrative have been recognized, a formal equation and basic concepts can be established in its name. The semiotic codification of these concepts is so great, in fact, that many narrative structures and concepts translate into multiple mediums. James Brooks elaborates on this in Reading for the Plot. Narrative in fact seems to hold a special place among literary forms--as something more than a conventional "genre"--because of its potential for summary and retransmission: the fact that we can still recognize the "story" even when its medium has been considerably changed. (Brooks 4) This recognition is predicated by t...
identity