Previously, deception in film has been most often addressed with reference to what was presented in the section “Deception Performed Jointly by the Intradiegetic and Cinematic Narrators”: the intradiegetic narrator (Genette (1980 [1972]) gives a deceptive account of prior events, with the cinematic narrator presenting it in a flashback (Chatman, 1978; Kozloff, 1988; Stam et al., 1992). Claims have been made that in such a situation the camera narrator seems to be able to “lie”, contrary to the well-established convention (Chatman, 1978: 237, 1990: 132; Kozloff, 1988: 115; Anderson, 2010). This case (cf. Example 3 here) is typically illustrated with the (in)famous example of Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, at the beginning of which the main male character, Johnny, is talking to Eve and recounts a false-believed story of his meeting with Charlotte. A crossfade to Jonathan in his kitchen indicates the beginning of a “lying flashback”, in which the multimodal presentation “colludes with the narrator’s false account of events” (Kozloff, 1988: 115). This scene is known to have caused an angry outcry from critics (Kozloff, 1988). Bordwell (1985: 61) concludes that the narration is “duplicitous (…) by appearing to be highly communicative – not just reporting what the liar said but showing it as if it were indeed objectively true.” In this vein, Anderson (2010: 84) observes that by “invoking the conventions for a flashback, but presenting instead a dramatization of Johnny’s lie, the film misreports diegetic events—the film lies to us.” Interestingly, Hitchcock himself considered this a mistake with the benefit of hindsight, “I did one thing in [Stage Fright] that I never should have done; I put in a flashback that was a lie” (Truffaut, 1983: 189). This kind of lie is also considered a violation of the basic principle of extradiegetic narration (Thompson 1977). However, as evidenced by Example 3, Hitchcock’s lying flashback is by no means an isolated incident, and this narrative strategy is indeed employed in contemporary cinematography. Many philosophers have tried to vindicate Hitchcock’s cinematic strategy, or at least, account for its workings in the light of narrative theory.
Casetti (1986), proposes that the “false” images (and also utterances, which he ignores) represent what the narrating character’s addressee pictures in her head while listening to the homodiegetic narration. However, it is intuitive to assume that “the deceptive images and their juxtaposition must be thought of as representations of Johnny’s account, though we begin by taking them also to be representations of what is real with the fiction itself” (Currie, 1995: 27, emphasis in original). Following the same premise, Chatman (1986: 141) goes a step further and states that, when the flashback is used, Hitchcock’s Johnny is the only narrator and “everything we see and hear originates with him (...) since every cinematic tool – editing, lighting, commentative music, etc. – contributes to his intention.” Chatman (1990: 132) maintains that a narrating character like this “is ‘responsible’ for the lying images and sounds that we see and hear”, and he invokes the role of the invariably reliable implied author, who does allow the facts to emerge ultimately. In a similar vein, Burgoyne suggests that the intradiegetic narrator in Stage Fright is responsible for the multimodal lying flashback which relies on using both images and characters’ utterances and that the cinematic narrator “controls the entire cinematic apparatus” (1990: 11). Burgoyne (1990: 7) thus claims that a personal character-narrator (on the intradiegetic level) can utilise not only words but also the multimodal tools available to the cinematic narrator in order to salvage his central premise that the cinematic narrator cannot lie but can retroactively invalidate the intradiegetic narrator’s false account. This explanation results in conflating the narrative of the intradiegetic character narrator with the narrative that only the cinematic narrator can produce.
The views endorsed by Chatman (1986, 1990) and Burgoyne (1990) are not entirely appealing. Surely, although the mendacious account originates with a character like Johnny, he cannot lie to us, the viewers, for “he is unaware not only of us but of the world we inhabit” (Anderson, 2010: 88). Additionally, as Currie (1995: 27) rightly observes, this narrating character “exists within the story, and it is no part of that story that he produced and edited cinematic images in order to convince his fictional fellows (and us?)”. It is then impossible for a character to be in charge of various cinematic techniques, which would involve his/her ontological superiority over the story in which he/she partakes (Anderson, 2010). The tools that the two narrators, intradiegetic and cinematic, have at their disposal are fundamentally different. The cinematic narrator can tell a false-believed story in a flashback showing a distorted interaction or just images while the intradiegetic narrator can produce only an oral narrative.
The pending question is then who deceives and who discloses the deception to the recipient. For his part, Currie (1995) proposes that it is an implied author who reveals the extradiegetic narrator’s deception to the viewer. Nonetheless, the “implied author” seems to be an otiose concept proposed, besides real authors and narrators, by many scholars (e.g. Booth 1983 [1961]; Chatman, 1978, 1990; Currie, 1995; Stam et al., 1992; cf. Sternberg & Yacobi, 2015 and references therein). Arguing against Chatman’s (1978) implied author (necessitating an implied reader), as the creator of fiction (besides the narrator, i.e. the presenter), Bordwell (2008) rightly states that the agents in the process of fiction reception are real authors and receivers, rather than the unreal agents that Chatman proposes. However, Bordwell’s (2008: 128) metaphorical roller-coaster explanation – “I don’t have to imagine a ghostly intelligence standing between the engineer and me, shaping the thrills and the nausea I feel” – misses the basic fact about film watching: it is based on make believing about the fictional narrative, rather than experiencing non-narrated real stimuli, such as a roller-coaster ride. Also, immersed in the fictional world, the recipient does not take cognisance of the film production crew (or literary authors), the real but hidden (rather than “implied” for the recipient to infer) authors, who stand behind extradiegetic narrators telling the story. In any case, the notion of “implied author” is not endorsed here, based on Ockham’s razor, the principle of theoretical parsimony.
Here, preference is shown for this simple explanation: the cinematic narrator (representing the collective sender) legitimately deceives, specifically lies to, the recipient (while the narrating character deceives the addressee) only to disclose this later. Thus, the multimodal narrative shown in a flashback is not the product of the intradiegetic narrator at all (who can only be held accountable for a running verbal commentary),Footnote 13 but rather the cinematic narrator, the entity responsible for the whole film communication (indirectly, also the intradiegetic narrator’s verbal account), as constructed by the collective sender. Incidentally, the recognition of the fact that narrative deception is not an immoral but rather pleasure-giving strategy purposefully employed by filmmakers might have pre-empted the need to account for who the guilty party is. The film production crew behind the unreliable cinematic narrator does deceive the recipient with regard to some aspect of the fictional world, leading the latter to develop false make beliefs. However, all film deception (regardless of how it is performed) is ultimately revealed, giving the recipient a pleasurable surprise (see Dynel, 2013).
Overall, the prevalent view about the illegitimacy of multimodal lies, and hence by extension, all deception in fiction may be consequent upon the traditional well-entrenched view that heterodiegetic narration, especially when impersonal (cf. Ryan, 1981),Footnote 14 rules out unreliability. Many authors have followed Doležel’s (1998: 149) claim that the heterodiegetic narrator “cannot lie or err” given the performative nature of his heterodiegetic narration. This narrator, who has authentication authority, is responsible for the creation of the fictional world, being unable to “distort” or “falsify” it (Cohn, 2000: 311), unlike a homodiegetic personal narrator, who merely reports on the events. The reason why the narrator might be regarded as inherently reliable, or here truthful, is that “in fictional communication, the text constitutes the reader’s sole source of information about the represented state of affairs”, which involves the recipient’s “taking the fictional world to exist independently of the narrator’s declarations, while using these declarations as material for construing this world” (Ryan, 1981: 530). Consequently, “[e]verything the impersonal [extradiegetic] narrator says yields a fact for the fictional world” and his “lack of personality protects him from any kind of human fallibility” (Ryan, 1981: 534).
Nevertheless, unreliable narration, and thus deception, are actually commonplace not only in homodiegetic narration but also in heterodiegetic narration (see also Zipfel 2011). With reference to unreliable literary narration, Stühring (2011: 96) states that a reader can be deceived about fictional facts in two ways, either by being given “wrong” information via “what is said” about what is the case in fiction, or by having relevant information withheld from them “at the point where it would have to be given”. Essentially, these two cases seem to correspond to two forms of deception: lying and withholding information respectively. Similarly, claiming that narrators perform three main roles (reporting, interpreting, and evaluating), Phelan (2005) proposes that each shows a “mis-” category and an “under-” category, which reflects a contrast between being “wrong”, i.e. false-believed, and being “insufficient”, which again appear to be consonant with lying and withholding information respectively.
A weaker view seems to hold that the extradiegetic impersonal narrator, i.e. the cinematic narrator, cannot lie but can be deceptive otherwise,without making mendacious multimodal assertions. Many authors seem to have advocated this view, even if not labelling technically the forms of deception (other than lying) involved. Although philosophers of fiction rarely discuss formally the categories of deception known in philosophy (see Dynel, 2018 for an overview), some relevant observations have been made regarding unreliable narrators in literary works (cf. the paragraph above). These may be seen as pertinent to the camera narrator’s deceptive multimodal messages in films. As Burgoyne puts it, “[b]ecause the narrator produces the discourse through which the viewer reconstructs the fictional world, this discourse comprises the facts of the fictional universe, which always carry the value of authenticity. Consequently, the discourse of the impersonal narrator in film is always reliable in the most basic sense: this type of narrator cannot lie about the fictional world, although the narrator can withhold information and cause the spectator to make incorrect inferences” (1990: 7).
Withholding information is indeed frequently addressed as a strategy of the cinematic narrator’s deception. For instance, according to Fink (1982: 24), there is a “silently accepted convention” that on-screen presentations “may omit something but never distort the truth”Footnote 15 and so they can never be “false”. Kozloff (1988: 115) also allows for the fact that film images can involve a partial presentation of what is true in fiction. Referring to a voice-over flashback in a screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Evil under the Sun, Kozloff (1988: 115) reports that the “two murderers, naturally, lie” as they are recounting their alibi to Poirot, while the flashbacks shown on screen are “not false” but are “just partial”.Footnote 16 Regardless of whether the narrating characters are telling lies and/or performing other forms of verbal deception in practice, technically, the “partial” shots do deceptively withhold information (Dynel, 2018, 2019) through elliptical editing, as well as camera distance and angle, which allow some crucial information to remain covert from the recipient’s perspective.
For his part, Koch (2011: 70) addresses “mimetically deceptive” unreliable narration of films, such as A Beautiful Mind, that “play out a delusive strategy by way of the presentation of distorted fictitious sense-data that are not marked accordingly.” Thus, the key narratorial characteristic of such films is “not misrepresenting the fictitious world but presenting someone who misperceives it,” or more adequately presenting this character’s distorted view of the fictional world (Koch, 2011: 70). This explanation is relevant to some of Elsaesser’s (2009) “mind game films” and to some of Klecker’s (2013) “mind-tricking narratives”. In these cases, the cinematic narrator offers multimodal representations of the focalising characters’ (Anderson, 2010) genuine lived mental experience that actually diverts from the fictional reality, about which the recipient is retroactively informed. What the cinematic narrator initially presents as the diegesis later turns out to have been, in total or in part, something untruthful relative to the fictional world, being the focalising character’s figment of imagination, hallucination, delusion, dream, etc. Thus, the recipient needs to backtrack on the meanings generated based on the previous scene(s) or even the entire film and reframe them as being the character’s figment of imagination, hallucination, delusion or dream, which does not correspond to the fictional world and its truth. This broad category of film deception originates from the primary source of the representation: it is not the omniscient and infallible cinematic narrator’s perspective but the focalising character’s perspective affected by his/her mental state that modifies the fictional reality or is completely divorced from it, which the cinematic narrator merely reports. The challenge of the production crews collective sender in such films is “to avoid shots that amount to forthright false statements or, in other words, to provide a twist that allows, resorting to poetic licensing, for a consistent ex post facto reconstruction of the complete discourse” (Koch, 2011: 74). However, it may be contended that multimodal lies are not ruled out, with the cinematic narrator presenting interactions or events that are the focalising character’s mental creations from start to finish but not the truth of the fictional world, as is typically the case with dreams shown on screen, unannounced; or a character’s personified figment of imagination representing the character and interacting with others in the fictional world. Such untruthful (relative to the fictional world) assertoric messages are not considered lies given the retroactive reframing.
This kind of focalising/filtering through characters, who may be adjudged tacit, deceptively covert intradiegetic (unintentionally) unreliable narrators,Footnote 17 is usually restricted to the representations of the diegetic world determined by the characters’ experienced mental states, whether involuntary (dreams or hallucinations) or voluntary (imaginings). However, focalisation may also be done through a character’s mendacious narrative, which has been depicted as a markedly different form of the cinematic narrator’s deception. As Anderson puts it, by “focalizing through a character who, intentionally or otherwise, mischaracterizes diegetic reality, the cinematic narrator can present a false version of the story” (2010: 89, emphasis added). Comparing The Sixth Sense and Stage Fright, both of which focalise through unreliable characters, Anderson (2010: 87), states that the former “misleads us—underreports events—while the latter lies to us—misreports events.” Anderson (2010) maintains that in presenting the story through the skewed perspective of a character who misinterprets his/her experiences, as in The Sixth Sense, the multimodal narrator does not lie but deceives the viewer also through ambiguity. Similarly, Klecker claims that some mind-tricking films are based on “withholding information” but do not “actually lie in the sense of deliberately conveying information that is untrue. They leave strategically placed gaps that offer two possible interpretations—one during the first viewing and another (the final one) in retrospect, upon the disclosure of the surprise gap” (2013: 136, emphasis added).
It needs to be underscored that covert ambiguity and deceptively withholding information are two different forms of deception. Indeed, “underreporting”, or rather withholding information through not revealing a basic fact about the protagonist in The Sixth Sense (i.e. that he is dead) invites covert ambiguity that underlies the whole film in a garden-path manner (see Dynel, 2009). Essentially, the first part of a (here, multimodal) text must entail covert ambiguity, with only one meaning being effortlessly accessible to the hearer/recipient, and the second part of the text (the climax) must surprisingly invalidate the recipient’s previous inference and prompt him/her to backtrack and reprocess the previous part of the text to appreciate an alternative, hitherto unobserved, meaning congruent with the meaning revealed in the climax. However, specific scenes may involve other deceptive strategies (e.g covert irrelevance, when the late man is talking to his wife, who is only doing self-talk).
This pattern based on withholding information and covert ambiguity underlies many films pivoted on multimodal deception that holds until the climax, not always involving character focalisation (cf. Examples 1 and 2). Whether or not filtering through one character, the tacit unreliable narrator, is deployed, the climax reveals the preceding ambiguity and prioritises an alternative, truthful reading on the entire film (e.g. a character is schizophrenic and has no friend, or a character wants to impress the crowd rather than committing suicide, etc.). What is important is that the specific scenes and phases throughout the film may deploy other forms of multimodal deception and cannot be reduced to the broadly understood covert ambiguity, as corroborated in the analyses in “Types of Multimodal Deception in Film”. Different forms of deception addressed in language philosophy may be deployed jointly across modalities by the cinematic narrator, multimodal lies included (e.g. when a character is shown conversing with a person that later turns out to have been his hallucination rather than a real person inhabiting the fictional world, as in Fincher’s Fight Club), to serve an overarching deceptive purpose that stems from the covert focalisation, which typically prevents the cinematic narrator from being held accountable for lying.
A remaining query is whether the flashback in Stage Fright does involve cinema narrator’s lying when focalising through Johnny and his mendacious account, and whether this practice can be considered legitimate at all (see also Example 3). Indeed, this multimodal flashback is one of the scenes that “show us things that never occurred as if they had occurred; they can manifestly lie to the viewer about the diegetic world” (Anderson, 2010: 84). In this case, the cinematic narrator presents the diegetic world as filtered not through a confused or mentally incapacitated character (together with the lived experience, this seems to work as extenuating circumstances for the deceptive cinematic narrator, thus typically not considered to be lying) but, instead, through a character who is purposefully mendacious in his interaction with another character, offering a multimodal representation of his lies, and hence telling multimodal lies, which can be vindicated – it is argued here – by the embedded narration. The cinematic narrator’s lying flashback gives the mendacious perspective of the character who acts as an intradiegetic narrator of the subordinate story. It is not the case that the intradiegetic narrator uses the cinematic narrator (Burgoyne, 1990) but vice versa, it is the cinematic narrator that uses the intradiegetic narrator and lends the latter support by rendering his narrative through a multimodal narrative in a flashback only to disclose the intradiegetic narrator’s deception at the end of the film.Footnote 18 This strategy seems to be considered controversial inasmuch as the ultimate reframing of the account as only a focalised fabricated version of events does not cancel or suspend the lies relative to the fictional world, which the other forms of reframing (e.g. as dreams or hallucinations) do, possibly even denying the status of assertions to the previous untruthful messages.Footnote 19 Nonetheless, even if, intuitively, more controversial than the other forms of focalisation involving the character’s genuine lived mental experience that make for untruthful multimodal statements (apart from using other forms of deception), the focalisation through a mendacious speaker who produces a false-believed narrative of “non-lived” experience can be regarded as being equally legitimate in cinematic narration.
All focalising situations may involve what later turns out to have been a sequence of untruthful multimodal messages and even assertions, and hence potential lies about the fictional world and its truth, retroactively reframed as belonging in a dream, illusion, delusion or, as is the case with Hitchcock’s famous scene, as part of an intradiegetic narrator’s mendacious account dramatised multimodally for the recipient’s sake. Unlike in the case of deceptive focalisations through character minds’ fabrications, the recipient is aware of the focalisation through a narrating character who performs verbal lies; it is the narrating character’s mendacity that is covert, and so the retroactive reframing does not concern the very aspect of focalisation. In this case, the cinematic narrator reports the character’s lies (and other deceptive utterances) to the recipient as if oblivious to the intradiegetic narrator’s (un)truthfulness. In practice, through the cinematic narrator’s focalising and later reframing of the multimodal lies, the collective sender aims to give the recipient a cognitive surprise, like through any other form of film deception targeted at the recipient (i.e. not revealed to the recipient at the moment of production).
It is hoped that this discussion disperses the doubt that critics instilled into Alfred Hitchcock: “Strangely enough, in movies, people never object if a man is shown telling a lie. And it’s also acceptable, when a character tells a story about the past, for the flashback to show it as if it were taking place in the present. So why is it that we can’t tell a lie through a flashback?” (Hitchcock in Truffaut, 1983: 189). As has been argued here, multimodal lies can be told through the cinematic narrator when (and only when) some form of character focalisation is used, whether the character is purposefully deceptive and his/her verbal lies are cinematically narrated as a multimodal lying flashback (the controversial case of non-lived experience) or has a warped view of the fictional world, is dreaming or purposefully imagining things (the widely accepted forms of the cinematic narrator’s mendacity involving a tacit intradiegetic narrator and the representation of their lived experience). These are fine specimens of multimodal film deception targeted at the recipient.