Subtitles on a film which question character's motivations, or provides clues to what they may be thinking in any given scene.
Example: The final scene in Usual Suspects when Kooyong is looking at the noticeboard...<spoilers follow>
Hmm.. Guatemalan coffee..Spokane quartet...orca fat...hey was he just making this stuff up?-- simonj, Jun 02 2010 Empathy_20subtitles [hippo, Jun 02 2010, last modified Jun 15 2010] Unreliable Narrator http://www.novel-wr...iable-narrator.htmlI suppose subtitles may enhance reliability. [rcarty, Jun 13 2010] What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061177/In comic Woody Allen's film debut, he took the Japanese action film "International Secret Police: Key of Keys" and re-dubbed it, changing the plot to make it revolve around a secret egg salad recipe. [LoriZ, Jun 15 2010] ok...possibly a bad example (I haven't seen it for a while)-- simonj, Jun 02 2010 Should be a balloon rather than a subtitle.-- LoriZ, Jun 03 2010 [LoriZ] You want to post "Speech Balloon Subtitles" or shall I? Because that is brilliant.-- BunsenHoneydew, Jun 03 2010 Let's you do it.-- LoriZ, Jun 05 2010 I saw the subject movie within the last few months, because I was cornered. I didn't like it because it left the viewer wondering what the movie was about if the story he was narrating was bullshit.
The caption should probably read "Whoa, if he was making the story up, what the fuck is this movie about?"-- rcarty, Jun 05 2010 [admin: let's keep this along with "empathy subtitles" - "plot" is a wider concept than just empathy, even though empathy definitely helps with the plot.]
I suspect what's throwing you for a loop, rcarty, is the use of live action footage to show events that exist only in the mind of a narrator and the listener, but didn't really take place. If you don't think imaginary events are entitled to emit photons, the movie is hard too swallow - but if you accept that the events shown are imaginary in the mind of the cop who's talking to the Kevin Spacey character, it's a tightly written, well acted thriller that's on many people's lists of favorite movies, including mine.
I'm hoping that the subtitles wouldn't adopt a viewpoint that rejects a fundamental premise of the movie - they'd be pretty useless!-- jutta, Jun 13 2010 I was thinking about my criticism afterwards, and admitted to myself that one fictional story is as good as another. I guess one suspects usual narration, so to speak. I've linked an article about the 'unreliable narrator', in lieu of another literary idea I can't exactly remember. Something still bothers me about it for some reason. Maybe it is because the ending was still a surprise (not really, I guessed who he was) and the revelation that evidently requires subtext was just a slap in the face to the audience, and wasn't important to the big twist ending.-- rcarty, Jun 13 2010 random, halfbakery