ABSTRACT
The consensus on Vantage Point seems to be that it is a two-star movie. Reviewers at the time that the film was released, plus subsequently for TV listings magazines and elsewhere, generally consider Vantage Point to be a failed film undeserving of a five-, four-, or even three-star accolade according to the demotic calibration of cinematic quality. Making an observation on this apparent consensus, however, might seem a strange way to open an essay where the task in hand is to consider this puzzle film’s narrative and the way that it exemplifies complex storytelling. Nevertheless, there is good reason in what follows for making a note about the film’s reputation. First, the demotic rating—though widespread, appearing in the assessments of professional reviewers for publications as well as the legions of bloggers— is rather unjust. Arguably, the narrative is expertly constructed and innovative. Second, the film contributes to more than one corpus or cycle of contemporary narratives with common purposes—not just the puzzle or complex film but also the overlapping category of films devoted to replaying or negotiating the trauma of 9/11. Third, one key component of the film’s narrative betrays its ultimately conservative political project, although it is not mentioned in reviews of the film. Fourth, the issue of the complexity of the narration is at the heart of the discourses that have thus far established the film’s reputation, offering up a potentially dominant way of apprehending the narrative. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the approach in the current essay necessitates consideration of the film’s reputation in assessing the nature of the narrative’s complexity. A cognitivist approach to the complexity of a narrative in a film tends to stress how a film is “incomplete” until the spectator implements “schemata” to render the film as a coherent mental representation (Buckland 2009a, 7). A semiotic approach, while allied to a cognitive perspective in focusing on how a spectator is likely to read a narrative, is concerned with the semiotic resources that are brought to bear on reading. As such, it considers a narrative, complex or otherwise, to consist of a multi-ply tissue of readings (Lotman 1974, 1982) implying certain audiences, certain probable readings, as well as the possibility of aporia in readings, but without imagining that there is always a ‘text itself’ which awaits liberation from the webs of relations in which it is suspended.
