Watching Myself Watch Herself

There is one scene in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie in which our protagonist, Amélie, is sitting on her red bed watching her green television set play what appears to be a documentary. We assume it’s a documentary because we are shown a black-and-white montage sequence with a voiceover. These elements are just a few of the many audio-visual cues that we, as life-long watchers of movies, news, and television, expect to indicate reality. The cognitive dissonance occurs when the voiceover begins lecturing about the life of Amélie Poulin who recently died after a life of service for the good of humanity. She appears, in black-and-white -what Turner called the “guarantor of ‘truth’”(28) and not long after there is a cut back to our color Amélie who is crying with guilt at her own disappointing tale. We, the viewers of this viewing, are led to wonder if we are seeing “the news” through the filter of the mind of Amélie whom we can assume to be projecting herself onto the heroic and tragic story of a woman who spent her life helping strangers while she allowed her loved ones to suffer.

            It is not that we are surprised to find her watching TV, nor to find a young woman crying at what she is witnessing on screen but the style of faux-documentary that catches one off guard. Especially considering the president which Jeunet has already build for us – sampling from our own sense of reality (with color footage of figure skaters and the death of Lady Diana) and our collective recognition of a past reality (black-and-white stock footage of bull fights and crying athletes) – Amélie’s appearance in black-and-white at the faster speed of film (that usually indicates old footage) appears first to us as yet another trip back into our own reality – the style of film that is “accepted as real” (Buscombe qtd in Turner 27). As much of a fantasy as this appears to us – just as impossible as her paintings talking to her lamp – it is an unreal visual manifestation of a reality we can all relate to.

Walter Benjamin, in his essay “Art in the Age on Mechanical Reproduction,” through his examination of the growing role of the viewer, declared that one of the most important thing about the mass reproducibility of film was it’s ability to reproduce the masses – allowing people through “camera and sound recording, the masses are brought face to face with themselves”(684). Yet, Benjamin implies, this role from the viewer is not as much one of narcissism as it is one of criticism, and so we find Jeunet’s Amélie – sitting as critic of her own “more real” reality.

And there I sit – absorbed in 122 minutes of an unreality that I will use in the creation of my own reality.  That I have used to create my own reality. From the fact that I notice more when a room has complimentary colors to the fact that when I saw the film Juels et Jim I started jumping around my living room yelling “This is that part from Amélie! Where they kiss and the bug flys in her mouth!” One of the things that I find most valuable about film though is that not only can it change the way you see the world but you can also use it to share an experience of with someone you relate to. Amélie  is actually my favorite movie, and the reason why is more because of the fact that it, more than any other movie I’ve ever seen comes the closes to approximating the way I see the world.  It’s blend of color, light, magic, sampling, and nostalgia is a very good approximation of the products of my own imagination and hopes – essentially it is the world I occupy at my happiest. And become of film’s ability to be so encompassing – the camera forcing you to share it’s outlook on life, I feel like I can, by recommending this movie to a person – transport them into my own outlook on life – at its best.