From the outset, Sandra, the female protagonist, is in a trance-like talk with a literature student who comes for an interview. It is a bizarre talk. Sandra is drinking. The camera often closes up abruptly. The dynamic between the two is stilted, operatic and probably a bit flirty in hindsight. Music pushes in, inappropriately loud. It’s an uplifted one, saucy, dance-like. The camera keeps unstable. All of these add up to the stagy effect of the weird conversation, which eventually leads to the interviewer bringing up the topic of the blurry boundary between fiction and reality. Up until this point, everything looks fictional. Ironically, it is the only part that is later eligible as court evidence: the interviewer recoded the conversation—without ambiguous sounds such as the one in the fight recording—and thus it is mechanically perceived as reality.
This first scene sets the motifs which will be dealt with later by dint of a fall and all its complications. The interview is finished haphazardly due to the music, and Daniel takes over as the focalizer. At the same time, the camera switches to a calm manner, as if leading us to the mundanity of real life. But the sudden death of Samuel again makes it all unrealistic. How can he die so suddenly? It must have been planned! The Gone Girl mindset sneaks into the audiences’ suspicion, and the police’s. Fiction and reality from this point begin to intertwine to the next level.
The first layer is the forming of a story. When two parties present their narratives to the court, only one is considered real, and the other fake or fictional. But speech in and of itself is a form of fiction. The word “fiction” comes from Latin, meaning “form, contrive,” and speech in its nature is an organization of ideas. Therefore both parties may contrive a story for their benefit by using the fragments of what happened. In this film, it is further complicated by the fact that Samuel is dead, so he can only speak through what he leaves behind: recordings, talks with others before his death, behaviors seen by witnesses, etc. However, if it makes any difference, his narrative becomes more convinceable, because he cannot lie anymore. This might be due to the common belief that only lies make a story fictional, without realizing organization is the biggest contribution to a story’s fictionese. To procure the truth, we should not only look at what is included but also what is left out. In Samuel’s case, he leaves out a capacious blank.
The second layer can be categorized in the first one, but can also be looked at on its own merits, which is the reported speech of another person. There lies a debate in linguistics on the terminology of “reported speech.” Some believe it is a misnomer, because the word report connotates “fact,” which further connotates its trueness. However, retelling another one’s speech is never a documentary representation—the speaker is entitled to alter the material to their own purposes. So some linguists propose to term it “constructed dialogue.” This is vividly represented in the film when Daniel tells what Samuel said to him when they drove together. The voice is from Daniel in the court, while the focalizer is him in the car, watching Samuel talking. There is a weird combination of Samuel’s facial motion with Daniel’s voice. It looks like they match each other perfectly, as if Daniel is play-acting his father. But at the same time, we mustn’t forget that it is because both the visual image and voice are Daniel’s production.
What adds to the mixture of reality and fiction is that both Sandra and Samuel are novelists. Sandra is considered a biofictionist, and Samuel also tries to integrate his life into his work, which is why he records his domestic arguments. This evokes a thought experiment: imagine when Sandra writes another book on this matter, as she always does after an incident of her life, everything—including what is considered reality, such as the court proceedings—becomes fiction. What makes the thought experiment more interesting is taking into consideration that this film itself is fiction. It forces us to take a step back, stop looking at the film, and take a sip from the glass on our table. But who can confirm that we are not fictional characters created by some eccentric creator for their entertainment?
What is real? At the end of the film, Sandra goes through everything. She doesn’t feel happy, because she isn’t rewarded anything after all this gratuitous toil. Life goes on. People die, just some earlier than others. We constantly make what is happening into memories and fiction, until at one point, everything becomes fiction and we die. Probably at the end of the day, only fiction stands strong.
