Summary—“Narrative II”

• One function of narrative is to limit and regulate the range of meanings that a movie's stream of sound and image may potentially generate. At the same time, Hollywood movies are chameleon-like, accommodating the variety of their audiences' reactions and seeking to reward each viewer's interpretive choices.

· Classical Hollywood attempted to stabilize the meanings, especially the erotic meanings, overtly produced by movies by regulating narrative strategies. The Production Code, which operated as an alternative to governmental censorship, stipulated ways in which narrative could be used to contain the sexually or ideologically disruptive power of the image. But because the Code was designed to find ways to render sensitive material capable of being generally exhibited, it was an enabling mechanism at the same time as it was a repressive one.

· The double entendre, developed in Hollywood movies throughout the 1930s, was one form of satisfactory solution to the problem of censoring sexuality, allowing a "sophisticated" audience to find hidden "subversive" or "repressed" meanings in scenes which were still "innocent" enough not to violate the Production Code. Such forms of regulation suggest that narration in Hollywood movies sought to promote indeterminacy as much as to maintain clarity.

· Casablanca exemplifies Hollywood’s methods of constructing narratives. It is dependent for its coherence on its own system of internal pressures, rather than on the accuracy of its external references. The narrative of Casablanca is structured in such a way that the movie, while providing plot resolution, neither confirms nor denies either of two entirely plausible interpretations.

· Narrative provides the most effective means of satisfying the inherent psychological needs established by the viewing situation itself. The cinema's attachment to structured and often formulaic narratives can partly be explained by the fact that narrative serves to guide the audience, in an organized way, through the time interval occupied by the movie event.

· Classical Hollywood movies have determinate narrative structures: convention dictates order, morality, and outcome. Despite this, "sophisticated" viewing strategies survive within Hollywood because story-telling is interwoven with implausibility, inconsistency, and coincidence. Through these devices audiences and critics can temporarily "escape" from Hollywood's deterministic moral conventions into a parallel imagined version of the movie, no less implausible than the one on the screen.

· Narrative closure allows for the exploration of pleasure and desire within the safe space of licensed public fantasy which the cinema provides. Closure is not, however, necessarily absolute. The sense that characters have lives beyond the closing credits, that the story continues even though the plot is over, is an important element in the economic patterns of movie consumption preferred by Hollywood cinema, as it renews the audience's enthusiasm to re-experience the process of narration.