Why do I love it? I am not a huge fan of any particular element, but of the way that layers exist within the storytelling. The video clip, by the way, of the scene is a flashback from the main story timeline to a point where the Tim Roth character is telling how he told the story.
When the cop starts telling his story in the scene, it becomes nearly farcical. Awesome, in my opinion, but nearly farcical. To trace the layers within the movie, we have:
The main timeline, where we are transported back to
A scene in a coffee shop, where Tim Roth is relaying a story of
A scene in a bar, where Time Roth is telling a story of
The commode, where he "listened" to
A barking dog and a cop tell a story about a "stupid fucking citizen".
It's great.
I was reading Frankenstein (actually, I am still reading it (not as I type this (that would be difficult))) and read something similar.
The narrative convention for the Mary Shelley classic is through letters, which makes sense. Characters had limited ways to relay experiences to other characters with no telephones or chat clients.
At one point, the storytelling/letter-writing layers become almost too much to follow. I was struck that the layers looked something like this:
The main timeline, which is a letter written by a man to his sister, where he relates
A conversation with a man, Dr. Frankenstein, who is
Telling a story to the brother, and that story includes
A conversation with the doctor's best friend, who gives him
A letter from the doctor's childhood sweetheart, which relates
A story about a woman who lived in her household (and the woman's deceased parents).
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| Be careful. Please. |
If you were to tell someone about me telling you about a woman's book that contained a letter from a man who spoke to a doctor about a letter he'd received from his sweetheart that told of a woman's parents who died... why, if you did that then your head might explode.
So be careful.
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