Night Film
Multimodal storytelling in Marisha Pessl's thriller
This is the seventeenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Night Film, Marisha Pessl’s thriller about a disgraced journalist investigating a mysterious Brian de Palma-esque filmmaker.
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
Night Film is a meandering 587-page novel about a journalist named Scott McGrath who goes down a rabbit hole investigating a mysterious horror filmmaker named Stanislas Cordova after the filmmaker’s daughter Ashley commits suicide.
Pessl’s writing style is very readable; she crafts a lot of interesting ideas about Cordova’s filmography and its unnerving (and perhaps imagined) relationship to the occult. As a filmmaker the mysterious Cordova is depicted as sort of a cross between Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, and Brian De Palma, though some of the fictional films mentioned in the book possess a shade of DFW’s James O. Incandenza.
What made Night Film noteworthy when it came out in 2013 was how it played with paratexts, in-universe articles and documents featured in the book, and an online webpage which featured additional documents, photographs, and audio clips meant to “augment” the story. In this post, I’ll take a look at these flourishes, which amount to mixed success but mostly feature an admirable presentation and ambition. My main critique with Night Film is that the main character of McGrath is not credible as a war correspondent and is tonally too goofy for this story, and that the twist ending leaves too many plot holes along the way, making Night Film a mildly-entertaining roller coaster that is probably best not ridden twice.
Night Film’s most notable feature is the inclusion of its paratexts. As some of my own fiction work features such in-universe articles, I was interested in how Pessl handled them here. With Random House behind her, Pessl secured the rights to use the masthead fonts of major outlets such as The New York Times, Time Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Vulture, etc. (Pessl 1-23, 588-592). The formatting is quite good, and coyly photoshopped photographs add to the realism of the experience. The paratexts are often used to establish exposition in a more organic way, and sometimes they are inserted in the text to reflect documents that the characters are reading (such as a dark web Cordova fan site) (Pessl 169-186).
However, I found these documents often a bit lacking because they didn’t feel totally attuned to their supposed publication; a Time photostory featured toward the beginning reads like an overwrought movie blog:
In our modern world of tweeting, TMI, and total exposure, Stanislas Cordova is the exception. He has refused to appear in public or give interviews since Rolling Stone’s 1977 cover feature. Those who have worked with him maintain a strict code of silence. Cordova’s 15-film body of work—gut-twisting journeys through evil underworlds—still enjoys cult status as some of the most terrifying films ever made… TIME takes a brief pictorial look at Cordova, the inscrutable figure who—even when staying silent and out of sight—still creates a storm. (Pessl 5)
To my opinion, this doesn’t read like a TIME photostory; it uses too many dashes to meet AP style guidelines. Some of the other documents are more inspired, such as a clipping of an Amherst alumni newsletter which even features an awful opaque university seal in the busy background of the newsletter’s design spread—the college alumni mailer being a genre where poor design is often par for the course (36).
The added ambition of these documents is that some of them feature a logo of a bird in shadow, which is meant to inform the reader that Marisha Pessl’s website has an “augmented reality” component related to that page. For instance, the image of a CD cover reflecting a piano album by Cordova’s deceased daughter is meant to motivate you to go online and listen to a faux “sample” from that album (Pessl 37, “Night Film Decoder”). This is kind of cool, and some of the multimedia elements certainly add to the experience, though I didn’t quite realize that this additional web material existed until after I had finished reading the book. These elements are not critical to the story, but they deepen the lore, and I know in recent years other storytellers have used the “website lore” function to spackle gaps in the narrative or build fan interest (such as the now-lost but rather elaborate “Peteypedia” site related to the 2019 HBO Watchmen series). That said, while innovative, it seems like these elements are probably better suited to an e-book, and perhaps Night Film was a bit ahead of the curve in attempting a multimodal experiment that doesn’t quite pan out. But narrative formats evolve and change, and I sincerely hope this heralds some new kind of novel in which the narrative is indeed more intimately tied with these audiovisual elements. I mean, if I had the opportunity to add audiovisual content to a novel via a website, I probably wouldn’t say no.
The central problem with Night Film rests in its characters and incoherent plotting. The narrator Scott McGrath is described as a former war correspondent, a National Geographic-type who has written books such as “MasterCard Nation, Hunting Captain Hook: Pirating on the Open Seas, Crud: Dirty Secrets of the Oil Industry, [and] Cocaine Carnivals” (Pessl 26-27). While offering interesting parodies of books such as Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History, the novel is meant to make you believe that McGrath, who has apparently reported on Siberian prisons, is a sad-sack emotional wreck (with a daughter that melts his heart) who also lives an immature lifestyle in the vein of Jimmy McNulty’s mattress on the carpet from The Wire (Pessl 27). To be so productive as a tough-as-nails international reporter, you’d expect McGrath to be a little more put together. Of course, he’s been broken down by a libel scandal which derailed his career, after he accused Cordova of abusing children with faulty evidence, but still, his credibility as a journalist is hard to swallow. Making matters worse is that McGrath’s voice as narrator evokes the overwrought noir voice from The Naked Gun movies, one probably best read (if this were ever adapted to film) by Chris Pratt:
I thought things were looking up when I’d ended up in bed with an attractive bartender named Maisie—until it occurred to me she could feasibly be my distant cousin. Just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, you realize you’re standing on another trapdoor (Pessl 26-27)
The clichés come a mile a minute, and he charts bad Raymond Chandlerisms over the course of nearly every page. Chandler’s writing worked because there was still an element of emotional restraint in his work; moreover his analogies were extremely specific, avoiding low-hanging fruit such as “rock bottom” and “trapdoor.”
Awkward characterization aside, essentially what the novel boils down to is McGrath weighing the evidence whether Cordova sold his daughter to the devil (in the guise of a creepy priest), or if all the supernatural stuff is a figment of McGrath’s imagination. And yet, we have a scene where McGrath consults Cleo, a modern-day ‘witch’ at a witchcraft shop, and discovers he has been cursed, with some pretty serious evidence:
The shadow—resolutely black on the table—did not naturally follow the object. Instead, it froze as if snagged on something invisible, quivering with tension, the shadow’s tongue elongating, pulling far out behind the figurine before swiftly snapping back into place and moving normally. Amazed, I blinked, leaning in, certain my eyes were playing tricks on me, but within seconds it happened again. (Pessl 413)
This is a lot, and despite this turn of events, the witchcraft plotline is dropped pretty quickly and the mystery of the Cordova daughter’s suicide (spoiler alert) eventually turns on a more conventional explanation—that Cordova did not sell his daughter to the devil, but that Ashley was dying of cancer. That is, until the last few pages of the book, when the narrative takes another left turn and, despite most of the plotlines terminating (not necessarily resolved, just dismissed), McGrath travels to Chile on a hunch, where he finally discovers Cordova in an island cabin:
Somehow, I sensed as soon as he told me, he’d find a way to be gone, faster than the wind across a field. I’d wake up somewhere far away, wondering if I’d imagined it, if he’d been here at all, inside this quiet house poised at the edge of the world. ¶ The one thing I did know, as I stepped toward him, was that he was going to sit down and tell me his truth. ¶ And I would listen. (Pessl 587)
Sentimental prose aside, this ending leaves far more questions than answers, and, like the stereotypical M. Night Shyamalan film ending, the twist is mostly effective in the moment, because the plot of Night Film is so convoluted that it barely supports any specific ending, much less this one. So, does the supernatural occurrence at the witchcraft store support this surprise reveal of Cordova’s whereabouts? That his daughter was really sold to the devil? I don’t know, and frankly, don’t really care.
Because the thing is, the novel’s supernatural angle makes it lose credibility. I couldn’t help but think while reading this book that a much, much scarier and darker book would have seen a more serious version of McGrath face off against a Cordova who did, in fact (as McGrath suspected at the beginning of the story) abuse children (in a fictionalization of the Jeffrey Epstein case). That would have been difficult to read, but also intense in the way that a dark Denis Villeneuve film like Incendies or Prisoners feels like a David Fincher movie with added substance, a David Fincher story that truly hurts. This book is lighthearted and sentimental, and its darkness is lighthearted, and therefore shallow, too. That’s what sinks Night Film for me, despite its innovation in terms of what a multimedia mystery novel might look like in the future.
Works Cited
Pessl, Marisha. Night Film (Random House: New York, 2013).
“Night Film Decoder,” Marisha Pessl, https://marishapessl.com/night-film-app/.
“Peteypedia,” HBO, 2019. https://www.hbo.com/peteypedia.