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The Big Lebowski Is Introduced And Epilogue By Voiceover Narration By A ...
The Big Lebowski is introduced and epilogue by voiceover narration by a mysterious omnipotent character known only as ‘the stranger.' (Sam Elliot) The use of a voice over narrator is one method of telling the story from a particular perspective. A heterodiegetic narrator is a narrator who is not they themselves a character within the story. These are often used as an objective observer, perhaps a surrogate or personification of the films ‘author.' This can be seen in many other films including The Princess Bride (1987 Rob Reiner) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001 Wes Anderson ). This type of narrator usually introduces and then provides the epilogue for the film, easing the audience in and out of the story.
Homodiegetic narrators; that is narrators who themselves are characters within the film; have a very different role to play. By giving a particular character a voice with which to directly address the audience; whether or not that character is themselves the films protagonist; the character is awarded an immense subjectivity. In these circumstances the narration of the film becomes fundamentally linked to the way that we understand the character, as we as audience are let into that particular character's own personal perspective. Casino (Martin Scorsese 1995) provides the viewer with not just one but two different voices over narrators who switch back and forth through out the film. This gives two different subjective perspectives on the same events.
However the subjective narration may or may not be the perspective that we the audience are supposed to share. Before we can make that distinction we must first of all look at all the other formal elements that are presented to us through the narration of the director through the use of lighting, framing, editing, color sound and so forth. We recognize through these elements another voice that is the voice of the image-maker, this voice may be used to either give credence or undermine a given characters vocal narration.
In her writing on first person narrators Sarah Kozlof quotes Christian Metz in saying The spectator perceives images which have obviously been selected (they could have been other images) and arranged (their order could have been different.) In a sense he is leafing through an album of predetermined pictures and it is not he who is turning the pages but some ‘master of ceremonies,' some grand image maker'
The fact that the spoken narration may be at odds with the narration from the image-maker leads to unreliable narrators. In these situations we as an audience have to weigh what the narrator is saying against what the image-maker is saying in order to ascertain the meaning of the film, as Kozlov explains it.
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