Today is John Hodiak’s day here on TCM and one of the movies showing later tonight is The Arnelo Affair, which I just happened to write up for TCM recently. One of the first things I mention in the article is the framing of the film’s timeline. It takes a familiar convention in noir, the flashback, and pushes it just a bit further. Rather than hold out on any plot reveals until the end, it tells us upfront that Tony Arnelo (John Hodiak) killed his girlfriend and planted Anne Parkson’s (Frances Gifford) compact at the scene to blame her. We know who killed who and who’s being set up right from the start. The suspense comes from wondering how straight-laced Anne ever got involved with this shady gangster in the first place. It works even as the movie itself is a bit lackluster but the question is how necessary is it? Do flashbacks provide a deeper understanding of the characters or are they just techniques to get the story moving?
It’s not difficult in any given year to find a handful of movies either using flashback or reverse order storytelling (mainly in the form of prequels but often literally, as in Betrayal and Memento). Even movies that aren’t ostensibly employing flashback but use narration are often thought of as defacto flashback storytelling. That is, Apocalypse Now is told in a linear progression from start to finish on the screen before us but Martin Sheen’s Willard narrates it, indicating in the basic sense that he has already lived through it and is relating the story back to us. Sometimes the narration is setup explicitly for the viewer, as in Double Indemnity, where we are specifically shown Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) speaking into a dictaphone so that we understand without confusion where the voice-over is coming from. And here again, the narration signals that the events have already occurred. So, does that make any of it better? Let’s look at a few examples (though there are probably thousands to choose from).
We might as well start with Double Indemnity since I just mentioned it in the paragraph above. Does knowing Walter has been shot and is telling the story from memory make it more meaningful? What if the movie had simply started with the story at the beginning? No dictaphone, no narration, no flashback. It seems to me it wouldn’t have made any difference whatsoever to the story but would greatly affect the tone. The story stays the same but hearing Neff’s narrated admiration of Keyes’ (Edward G. Robinson) doggedness and his exasperation of same as we see it happen adds an extra layer of tension. When Keyes asks Neff why the dead husband of Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) didn’t file a claim on his broken leg and Neff narrates that he knew, then, that it was over, there’s a difference in the journey the viewer now takes. Before, the viewer wondered if Neff would fool Keyes, now the viewer, knowing Neff has essentially conceded defeat, wonders if Neff will get away before being arrested. It’s a small difference but it changes the way the viewer attends to the story and, thus, changes the story in its own way.
But what of others like Wuthering Heights, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Killers, Out of the Past, Mildred Pierce, Rashomon… okay, wait. Rashomon’s a whole different animal. Sometimes a movie employs multiple flashbacks to illuminate a story from different angles to help the viewer get a fuller picture of what’s really going on and Rashomon does this, too. But Rashomon uses multiple unreliable narrators, all telling the story from their own point of view which helps the viewer get to the truth. Citizen Kane, though not ostensibly framed the same way as Rashomon, does go about things in much the same way. The narrators are multiple and since they’re all telling it from their point of view, we have no idea how honest any of it is. The hope is that somewhere in the middle of all that opinion and faulty memory is the truth. But maybe it’s not. In Rashomon, we can be fairly confident that by the end we know the truth, assuming we trust the woodcutter’s final story, but in Citizen Kane it’s a bit trickier. An internationally famous, wealthy, and powerful man has died. Did he even say “Rosebud?” Did the nurse make the whole thing up, having heard him mumble it in the weeks proceeding? It certainly doesn’t seem like she was even in the room when he said it anyway. Do his friends, employees, and ex-wife have any reason to be absolutely honest? They’re being interviewed by a reporter about a man that everyone is going to be reading about. Wouldn’t that incline them towards embellishing their stories? How about the butler? Does his story of Kane wrecking the bedroom and then saying “Rosebud” ring true, or does he just want his name in the papers as well? Finally, that newsreel we get at the beginning – does it tell a more accurate rendition of events than the people? Are Mankiewicz and Welles saying you might as well go with the news story because once you start digging into a man’s life all you get is what people want to give you and that’s usually coincident with what makes them look better? Either way, I think the story suffers a great blow if it’s told from start to finish as a simple biopic. The flashback device and the Rosebud MacGuffin make the story as much about Kane’s friends and associates as it is about him.
The fact is, any movie can be told in flashback. It’s just a matter of picking a dramatic point near the climax and highlighting in the beginning. Imagine The Bridge on the River Kwai done this way. Start the movie showing Colonels Nicholson (Alec Guinness) and Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) discovering the detonation wires to the bridge, struggling to cut them, witnessing the death of the young officer before seeing Shears (William Holden) swimming across the river and being gunned down. The camera then focuses on Nicholson who asks, “What have I done?” and then cut to the start of the story. But who would narrate it? Well, it could be Major Warden (Jack Hawkins) who’s witnessing all of this. The rest of the story, we can assume, was related to him by Shears, leaving some camp stuff where neither is present up in the air but not much. Or Nicholson and Shears could narrate as well (multiple narrators, like Kane) but, in the end, what would such an exercise prove? Not able to see it (it would be easy enough to edit a copy like this but the narration would be absent) I can only conclude from my own experience that a thriller with a climactic ending works best if there is no narrative or flashback intervention whatsoever. That is, take me on a linear trip from start to finish and don’t ruin the bridge destruction by shoehorning in a flashback.
In the end, I don’t know if I’m able to convince myself that anything I’ve written in the preceding paragraphs actually holds true. In other words, even when it works well, like Double Indemnity, I’ve never fully believed flashbacks were a particularly good, preferable, generally efficient, or illuminating way to tell a story. That’s not to say I don’t like them but I think more often than not, they’re merely gimmicky ways of getting around to the climax and can provide an easy out if the climax isn’t that great to begin with. The Arnelo Affair, which I liked, don’t get me wrong, would suffer without the flashback only because the story itself isn’t really that strong. The flashback isn’t necessary to the story and provides no greater depth, it only adds a little suspense (“How did she get mixed up with him?”) because without it, there isn’t much else. Obviously, in some cases, the flashbacks are the story (Rashomon, Citizen Kane, La jetee) and that’s a whole different thing. Most of the time though, I think coming into the story from the start and leaving it at the end is always the preferred method of cinematic storytelling.