Herman's Polychronic Narration: An Analysis of Selected Christopher Nolan Films

Abstract

As the title suggests, this dissertation applies David Herman's theory of polychronic narration to selected Christopher Nolan films. Christopher Nolan is a modern-day auteur who pushes the boundaries of narrative, specifically in terms of the deformation of time. Due to Nolan's radical manipulation of time, thus creating a temporally fractured story world, traditional temporal theories such as Genette's are not sufficient in analysing Nolan's unique use of time, especially when combined with filmic techniques. Therefore, this study is based on the assumption that a theory such as Herman's theory of polychronic narration is needed to examine and understand time's deformation in Nolan's films. Four films of varying temporal complexity --Dunkirk, Interstellar, Memento, and Tenet --were selected for analysis to confirm this study's hypothesis. Dunkirk and Memento's temporal deformation exhibited forms of polychronic narration that precisely fit Herman's theory. While analysing Dunkirk, for example, it was possible to represent an inexactly coded, multiply-ordered polychronic narrative on a (re)constructed timeline, thus allowing for a better understanding of indeterminacy in the film. Unfortunately, the applicability of Herman's theory began to falter once Interstellar and Tenet were put under the spotlight. True, the application of Herman's theory of polychronic narration enabled one to examine indeterminate events within these films; however, unlike with Memento and Dunkirk, these indeterminate events were not as easily explained by Herman's theory. With regards to Interstellar, Herman's method of documenting indeterminate events clearly does not take into consideration such radically inexact events as found in Interstellar. Therefore, adjustments needed to be made in order to represent these instances on a (re)constructed timeline. Once these adjustments were made, the theory of polychronic narration could be fully applied to Interstellar. The same cannot be said, however, for Tenet. In Tenet, it was seen that Christopher Nolan pushed temporal deformation as far as he could. This resulted in the theory of polychronic narration being able to only partially analyse and explain indeterminacy within the film. Herman's theory did not possess all the necessary tools to fully apply polychronic narration to Tenet, nor could a (re)constructed timeline using Herman's theory be developed. This study concluded that Herman's theory of polychronic narration can be, in many cases, applied to Christopher Nolan's films and that it is the most optimal theory to examine and explain inexact events - likewise, traditional theories like Genette's need only be slightly 'updated' to understand Nolan's more simplistic films. However, despite Herman's theory being best suited to analyse time's deformation in Nolan's films, it was still apparent that it lacks the ability to fully examine Nolan's more extreme temporally-deformed films. Therefore, this dissertation, as a result of shedding further light on the role of time-formation in Nolan's films, adds some further developments to Herman's theory in order to accommodate the more extreme instances.