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The general narrative form is based on the idea that any narrative begins with a state of equilibrium or order and the narrative is only completed once any force which has disrupted the balance has been neutralised and equilibrium is restored. Robert Altman's 1993 film, ‘Short Cuts’ is an exception to this rule in that it takes elements from 9 short stories and a poem by the late writer Raymond Carver and pulls them together to create a larger story which seems to have no true ending. The already unstable world that the characters live in does not get resolved and for most, it only gets worse for them.
The stories chosen to create the main body of the script were selected from Carver’s existing collections and were then adapted for the screen by the director Robert Altman and screenwriter Frank Barhydt. The film is an interweaving collage created from Carver’s separate stories and are linked by themes including sexuality, the family unit, death, alcoholism and violence. However, these links are created by the viewer as these links are what is tenuously holding the stories together. Rather than one whole narrative, the movie, like the collection of stories chosen are a set of several narratives which are loosely bound by these thematic similarities and left open-ended.
Robert Altman manages to interlink characters in the movie within their larger community which is set in Los Angeles rather than the Pacific Northwest used in Carver’s stories. Altman gives reason for doing this because “...[we] wanted to place the action in a vast suburban setting so that it would be fortuitous for the characters to meet. There were logistical considerations as well, but we wanted the linkages to be accidental.” For example, one of these accidental linkages happens when Doreen (played by Lily Tomlin) is being leered at by the group of men at the cafe taken from the story “They‘re Not Your Husband”, we later recognise these men as part of the group on the fishing trip adapted from the story “So Much Water So Close To Home”. Another example set in the cafe is when Earl (Tom Waits) leaves before Doreen turns around with a plate of food for him, only to be left bewildered that there is another man in his seat. We later recognise this man as Aubrey Bell (Danny Darst), the vacuum cleaner salesman who turns up at the Weathers’ household which is part of a joining of two stories, “Jerry and Molly and Sam” and “Collectors”. However, with a cast of twenty-two supporting actors and actresses it would have been inevitable to have some of their narratives crash into each other creating these tiny links. Carver's characters are part of an 'everyday' world, yet they exist as unique entities which reflect against the backdrop of the environment, they are placed in.
Some of the characters know one another directly as acquaintances, neighbours or relatives and there are more frequent indirect links between stories such as passing one another in the bakery, where characters from three separate stories are placed together in the same setting. An audience would pick up on these links and start to watch out for these crossovers, in order to build some type of larger narrative structure onto the film as it lacks a central defining plot because none of the characters are given particular significance.
The film boasts an impressive cast, including Chris Penn, Robert Downey Jr. and Julianne Moore amongst others, each bringing their own particular attributes to the film. In ‘Short Cuts’ Altman returns to the style and strategy of his earlier seventies movies- with their interweaving storylines, huge casts, and open-ended narratives. Although there is an immense cast, none of the actors have lead roles. The closest the audience ever get to a scene stealing performance is Paul Finnegan's (played by veteran actor Jack Lemmon) monologue where all attention is placed onto him during a close-up shot and his character talks in detail about the events which led to the breakup of his marriage to the television news reporter, Howard’s (Bruce Davison) mother. This is part of a key feature of the film, the act of storytelling. The characters are all telling short stories about their lives whilst living through the events which make up the short stories of Carver’s collection. Many of the characters and events are from Carver stories or paraphrases of Carver stories or inspired by Carver stories, to maintain fidelity to the overall feel of Carver's writing and make a smooth translation from text to film. However, Altman places importance onto the feelings of the characters, rather than what they are saying because a small part of what the characters actually do say is quite normal everyday dialogue which amounts to no significance and Altman concentrates more on how the characters develop into believable human beings than relying on dialogue.
On the other hand, in terms of the narrative, character development is allowed only to grow so far. The audience is not introduced to the characters initially; it is the audience’s responsibility to define the links between each character and to create a backstory from what the characters say to each other. This then provides the effect of a voyeuristic realism, as we watch through a window into these people’s lives, down the lens of a camera and onto the screen. As audience, we are so far removed from these people, yet we can sympathise with each of them as their individual characters develop and grow into fully rounded people through the use of these linking devices. This idea is an opposition to the traditional Hollywood narrative where characters are all in competition for a goal; this competition with others is the norm, through an amount of small-group success, individual achievement is obtained. In ‘Short Cuts’ there are things achieved, things lost and gained, but there is no resolution to the social order. Tvestan Todorov defined narrative as “movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical.” In ‘Short Cuts’ there are many equilibriums where the balance is upset, none of them similar but instead linked by the movement of characters weaving between stories just as the characters in Carver's stories "move between the 'margins of middle-class life' and the 'brink of lumpen existence'. Each story can be applied to the principle of the attempt to rectify a state of disequilibrium, yet although some of the stories in ‘Short Cuts’ begin to show signs of resolution, none of them are tied up neatly, there is no big denouement scene. The audience is still left with questions to answer, as the film just ends with no happy or for that matter, sad conclusion. Life in Carver’s world just appears to carry on, as it does after the earthquake. For example, we never find out if Jerry (Chris Penn) gets arrested for beating a woman to death just before the earthquake, or if Doreen and Earl ever "get out of Downey".
This lack of resolution is transferred from Carver's stories to celluloid by Altman, as Carver's stories seek not so much to resolve the terms of the lives depicted, as to sense the implications of that silence and absence which surrounds the characters throughout the film. The only certain endings in both the film and stories is death. There are over four mentions of death/deaths in the film, a large amount for a film that deals with the issues of suburbanite Americans. However, death figures so much in the characters day-to-day lives as it is always under shadowing everything they do and exists as a kind of continuing reminder of personal limits. Death frames Carver's world and suggests an underlying nothingness: the existential terms of an America sans it's transcendent possibilities." Death can happen to anyone in a story at any moment; for example, when the young boy, Casey Finnegan (played by Zane Cassidy), is hit by a car driven by the waitress Doreen on the way to school. For the Finnegans this is a massive blow to their world, as they search for somebody to blame for the accident. They cannot believe a thing like this could happen to them as they appeared to be careful about their son to the verge of being overprotective. For Doreen, this signifies a massive change in her life also. She realises that she is lucky for not killing Casey (although he later dies in hospital) and decides to make changes in her life.
Looking at all nine short stories during the same timeframe in the movie, Altman attempts to join the parts together as a whole and in doing so, gives an audience a look at 9 stories condensed onto one snapshot of life in suburban Middle America. One look is enough for an audience to realise that in Carver's stories how completely a whole culture and a whole moral condition are being represented by even the most seemingly slight sketch." As Carver's stories are minimalist, by glimpsing into the lives of these people we are bombarded with an intense amount of information during these short spaces in time before we move to the next story and back and forth, trying to piece together what has been happening whilst we have been 'away'. The characters exist amidst a society which surrounds them with a constant stream of images reflecting imagined lives and the myths of an idealised American materialism. We the as audience of the film are surrounded by these images manifold as we view several streams of narrative about the imagined lives of the characters.
Both the film and the stories offer us a momentary stay in Carver's America, each of the stories are a moment frozen in time and the characters become icons of a larger condition and by implication, culture. Although there are the links between characters during the narrative of the film, by nature, through Carver's stories, they are all isolated as they "depict a common world made unique." The reason nothing in ‘Short Cuts’ is ever resolved is because we are only viewing a small part of the characters’ lives, ultimately their only resolution can be achieved through death. Until then, life must go on as we imagine it does long after the movie ends, and we close the book and carry on with our own existences. Like the characters, we may learn from the events that happen, we may decide that the film or the book has the power to affect great changes in our lives as we realise that everything in the stories could possibly happen to us. If the film carried on for another hour, it still would never be resolved as new problems and issues would arise in the lives of the characters. Would the Kane's marriage break up? Would Jerry end up killing his wife next? And what would Betty do to Stormy when she finds out it was, he who took a chainsaw to her possessions? There are endless possibilities in Altman and Carver's world, yet no endings, only beginnings of new stories.
Country: USA
Budget:
Length: 187mins
Pub/2008
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004, directed by Michel Gondry
Dreamland, 2006, directed by Jason Matzner