Complex Film Narratives: Diegetic Fictionalization in Christopher Nolan’s Fantastical Puzzle Film Cycle

From around the mid-1990s, mainstream Hollywood cinema has embraced more experimental approaches to its long-established and solidified “classical narrative” forms and rules. Filmmakers frequently design their narrative experiences in ways that take advantage of viewers’ increasing familiarity with and use of the technical goods. Film scholars hold different opinions over whether contemporary complex films fully deconstrue the rules of classical film narration or mostly just offer playful variations of well-established strategies. Complexity–—a sense of temporary or lasting cognitive puzzlement regarding comprehension and meaning-making—can be prompted through a range of manipulations across many parameters of cinematic narratives. Complexity is trending in contemporary narrative cinema, where it should be understood more as a cognitive effect than a narrative feature.