My group watched the movie Memento which is an Independent Film directed by Christopher Nolan (also famous for Batman, Inception, Dark Knight Rises, Etc.) The viewer watches the movie chronologically backwards, as well as only seeing the memories, and the short blurbs of the main character Leonard's encounters to find out who raped and killed his wife. Another threshold Leonard encounters is his short term memory loss, which occurs every fifteen minuets.
The monomyth was extremely difficult to fill out, due to the movie being extremely confusing, and hard to grasp certain events specifically to put into categories. My group and I struggled so much so, we started from the bottom to the top of the monomyth chart and began to fill that out, which ended up being easier. Likewise to many other films, we were not capable to fill out every part out on the chart, which leads me to the question of independent films. Many other movies were common genres such as action, romance, comedy, etc. All of which seem to follow the monomyth chart pretty easily, and almost perfectly. Independent films on the other hand, have no guidelines usually to where the movie should end up, and how it gets there. Christopher Nolan completely wrecks the monomyth chart in my opinion, and still creates a psychological thriller through a new definition of heroism.
Compared to other films in the chart, Memento has almost the least possible definitions of sections of the chart. An interesting comparison of Nolan's films, The Dark Knight is a fiction/action film which has a hero, but his view on heroism is very unordinary. Likewise in Memento, the 'hero' is hard to even tell, due to Leonard on search to avenge his wife's murder, but may or may not killed the right guy. The hero is portrayed differently in Nolan's films, which leaves the viewer to decide whether or not the main character is a hero.Memento was a difficult film to divide into the monomyth sections, but writing backwards just as the movie is, helped a lot. Independent films can carry the monomyth theme just as any other movie, but that wouldn't make them 'independent' in my opinion.
I think a big reason independent films don't follow the typical monomyth storyline as closely is the fact that they need to be unique to make a mark. A film from a well-established studio will be more conservative in its plot because they know people will come watch it anyways due to a large advertising budget and reputation. An independent film needs to be more unique to get attention and draw more people into the theater.
ReplyDeleteIndependent films also usually have limited releases and are released initially at film festivals, making it hard for many of them to receive much attention from the critics unless they are outstanding. The monomyths' purpose is for us to find one guiding arc that represents almost all of our stories about heroes while most independent movies shy away from that generalization and tend to be quirky and different. I agree with Josh in saying that it is a big reason in why it was harder to apply the monomyth to that.
ReplyDeleteAlso there was an Indian movie where the guy lost his memory every 15 minutes, but I'm not sure which one came first.