The Unreliable Narrator

This past week, we read "Memento Mori" by Nathan Nolan. The main character is a guy with amnesia. He obviously can't remember much, so he isn't exactly someone you would trust to provide you with accurate details of past events.

We also read Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. The focus of the play, Willy, wasn't the narrator for this one. But he would have been a very unreliable narrator if he was.

After I finished reading "Memento Mori" I scrolled back up to the top of the document, and I noticed that the intro-background thingy at the beginning said that this story had been presented to a pair of brothers. The other brother had turned it into a movie.

One quick Google search later, I realized that the brother was Christopher Nolan. Christopher Nolan directed a movie called The Dark Knight which you might have heard of. It's only one of the superhero greatest movies have ever been created. It also features one of the greatest supervillain portrayals you will ever see. Heath Ledger's Joker also happened to be someone that would be pretty unreliable if you asked him to recount any past events. The movie Joker, which came out in 2019, follows the Heath Ledger's Joker in terms of narrator reliability.

These unreliable narrators are an incredibly intriguing method of presenting a story. You obviously don't have as clear of a picture as to what's actually going on, and it makes it a bit more interesting trying to figure out what's true and what's not.

Unreliable narration can also be used to develop characters in a unique but effective way. The unreliable narration of Joaquin Phoenix's portrayal of the Joker in Joker allowed the audience to sympathize with him with a character that most people knew was going to become a supervillain. Heath Ledger's Joker utilized unreliable narration to become even more terrifying. He first paints a backstory of how he got his scars that makes him appear like an extreme example of a victim of circumstance when he kills Gambol. This seems quite believable, but then the Joker switches up his story of how he got his scars when he threatens to kill Rachel. And chances are the Joker would have come up with a third story had he not been rudely interrupted by one of Batman's gadgets in his suit. His intentionally unreliable nature of narration makes him more psychotic and terrifying as a villain, and it sets up an outstanding battle between Batman and the Joker throughout the movie.

Unreliable narrators can make a movie that much more interesting. Obviously, it has to be done well, but there's a reason why Memento (the movie by Christopher Nolan based on the same idea as "Memento Mori"), Death of a Salesman, The Dark Knight, and Joker are held in such high regard.