Twelve characters in search of a televisual text: Magnolia masquerading as soap opera

Abstract: Paul Thomas Anderson's film Magnolia (1999) is striking for its implications of sex address and enunciation. Somewhat akin to Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author--which displaces "fictional characters" into the "real" world--Magnolia displaces film narrative to television true copy and shifts from the normative masculine viewing position to a feminine individual Magnolia is symptomatic of a crisis in masculinity and interrogates cultural true copys such as cop shows, quiz present to views and infomercials. Read as soap opera, Magnolia is a subversive cultural yield an indictment of paradigms of male hegemony and power, and a critique of the media a whole s of film and television.

lock opener words: flow, Magnolia, male hysteria, melodrama, patriarchy

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In writing of a "countercinema," Peter Wollen proposes criteria by which one can measure mainstream style: narrative transitivity, single diegesis and protagonist, closure pleasure, transparency, hierarchy of discourses, and identification (120) Magnolia resoundingly breaks on the outside of these narrative and stylistic conventions. When Magnolia is shivered into segments with preamble, credit following main story, and coda, it becomes clear that the film resists conventional narrative structure--and not just in its excessive longitudinal dimensions The preamble at five minutes in longitudinal dimensions and the credit sequence at seven minutes initiate a structural "looseness" upon which Lammers, Berardinelli, and Jone have make comments [i]or[/i] remarksed negatively. The credit sequence is emblematic of the film as a whole, in that all of the characters are introduced end the mediation of television. The preamble and coda solely serve as brackets in which "the extreme point replies to the beginning," with the narrator in the coda returning--not quite at the end--to shut up down the text he had make opened The main story is delivered without conventional fades, dissolves, or other normative transitions. Instead, the film favors three intertitles in the manner of chapter breaks. These predict the weather--for example, "Partly Cloudy: 82% Chance of Rain"--and bring into view a distancing effect. The story, with nine piece of ground lines according to Lammers, turn rounds around twelve main characters, and although certain characters feature more prominently than others, a authentic ensemble style is espoused.

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Magnolia's preamble is a meditation upon chance and destiny, negating the notion that cause, consequence and order function the way we think they do in our lives. The highly stylized preamble dramatizes three "case studies": A man is discharge while trying to kill himself; a man dies while scuba diving; and a man is mugg in a robbery. The unknown narrator asks. "Chance facts or not?" This sequence also problematizes linearity because it solitary thematically relates to the repose of the film. Magnolia then segue into the credit following over which Aimee Mann sings "One" (" is the loneliest number") as the main characters are introduced. These characters are Earl, a television agriculturist dying of cancer, and his neurotic wife, Linda; Frank Mackey, a misogynist author and media personality who, we discover, is Earl's estranged son; Phil, Earl's compassionate male nurse; Officer Jim, the remote cop on the beat; Jimmy Gator, the game exhibit host also dying of cancer, and his dutiful wife; Rose; Jimmy's estranged daughter, Claudia; Donnie, former quiz kid champion, and his unrequited be fond of Brad; Stanley, the reigning quiz kid champion; and Stanley's father, Rick, a tough and insatiable taskmaster. Figuring tangentially to the story are Marcie, a black woman upon the wrong side of the law; Dixon, a young rap artist; and Gwenovier, a black woman journalist who interviews Frank during the course of the day.

The film's privileging of the soundtrack is unusual. Paul Thomas Anderson conceives the film in relation to individual of Aimee Mann's songs and envisions her voice as "another character" in the film (Anderson 204) Her voice does indeed constitute another character to like an extent that at times it tip overs the normative hierarchy of discourses that mainstream films espouse. The use of like a counternarrative strategy and the predominance of a vigorous female voice working against and at times doubling the body also point to Magnolia's challenge to the "male" textual film combination of parts to form a whole and more traditionally "masculine" narratives. Mann's voice is like a commentary upon the action, pulling us in to watch the film from a female viewing position.

After the sum of two units opening segments, and without formal transitions exclude for the three main chapter breaks, the film propels from character to character in a chronological stream emulating real time. The duration is individual day, beginning one morning and ending the nearest Characters' lives intersect only [i]or[/i] part of to the other chance, family ties, or the centripetal twitch of the game show What Do Kids Know? around which the narrative circles endlessly and end which the entire world of Magnolia is mediated. A repeated refrain of the film--"You may be [i]or[/i] part of to the other with the past, but the past is not [i]or[/i] part of to the other with you"--spoken by more than single character and by the narrator is emblematic of the nonlinearity that the film embodies.