On the Type Characteristics of "The Massacre on the Nile" from the Narrative Approach
In terms of genre, "The Tragedy of the Nile" is a detective film or a mystery film. This article will focus on analyzing why "The Massacre on the Nile" (replaced by "Nile" below) is classified under the genre of detective films from the perspective of narrative techniques.
The official beginning of the story is when everyone takes a cruise ship, the steel hull and the bottomless Nile River form a closed space. When the cruise ship began to sail, the film explained to the audience the conflicts between the passengers and the daughter of Lynette through a large number of dialogues. And when everyone disembarked to visit the ruins, they designed a plot where someone tried to push down the boulder to murder the Lynettes. Here, the film throws out the first puzzle: "Who pushed down the boulder". But this puzzle was answered when everyone arrived, and the audience was no longer a bystander in these shots, but entered the film as another detective on the same line as Poirot. . The film does not give a clear answer as to who pushed down the boulder. But the audience can deduce that the lawyer pushed down the boulder through the order in which everyone entered the camera. At this time, the three elements of trick, reasoning, and truth appeared in the film for the first time, which are also the three most important elements that constitute a detective film.
When everyone returned to the ship, Jackie, the unstable factor, was introduced into the confined space. She serves as the trigger for the film's second mystery: "Who Killed Lynette". At this point, the most important mystery in the film begins to unfold, and Detective Poirot and the off-screen detectives work together to deduce the mystery. As both "detectives", the audience seems to have an omniscient and almighty God's perspective when reasoning, but with the wrong guidance given by the film, it is often difficult for the audience to know the truth before Poirot, and to reason in Poirot At the same time, because of the audience's trust in his character, it is difficult to jump out of the conclusions he gives, even if they are wrong ones. This is also the fun of detective films. The audience gets more information than the detective in the film, but in the end, they still can't solve the puzzle in front of the detective. In Ni, the misdirection of the audience is not subtle objects or character dialogues, but time. Due to the linear narrative, the audience tends to fall into the cognition that Lynette was killed in the middle of the night, thus temporally denying the possibility of a crime for Jackie and Simon.
In the process of looking for the gun, Poirot concluded that everyone on the boat had time to pick up the gun that had fallen under the chair, and the film also gave Poirot's imagined picture. At this time, the audience was misled again. Due to Poirot's conclusion, the audience had the wrong idea that everyone has time to commit crimes and tools to commit crimes. In fact, the person who owned or learned that the gun fell under the chair can only be the person Jackie was in contact with when he fired the shot. The other passengers knew that the location of the gun was only Poirot's personal imagination, and it was not enough to be included in the reasoning. Process. "If you want to add sin, there is no need for words", this is also a major loophole in Poirot's reasoning, and the conclusions drawn by imagination are often unreliable. But also because of this, the audience has more suspects, which also makes the reasoning more fun and difficult.
Criminals, law enforcement, innocent victims, bystanders. The audience can easily classify the characters in the film according to these four types of characters. Speculation about the identity of the characters is also the fun of detective films. Since the law enforcement officer, that is, the detective, is a fixed role, the fun of this kind of guessing is carried out among the three types of groups of criminals, innocent victims, and bystanders. The perpetrator guessed by the audience is likely to die under the gun of the real murderer not long after, and bystanders are also likely to be killed and silenced because of witnessing the crime of the perpetrator, and they will become innocent victims in the role classification. The death of the writer and the maid is a manifestation of this. Both of them died because they witnessed the murder process of the murderer. Through death, their suspicions were cleared, and the scope of the murderer's candidates was further narrowed.
The misdirection of the film ends when the female writer is shot. At this time, all the guesses and evidences have completely appeared in front of the audience and Poirot. The audience joins Poirot in the final and most comprehensive reasoning, from which the conclusion is drawn. This part tends to occupy very little space in detective films. Because due to the existence of reasoning, the conclusion becomes a kind of existence to verify the audience's conjecture. Whether the audience's reasoning is correct or not will be answered at the moment Poirot draws the conclusion. At this time, the audience no longer simply wants to know the real murderer of the case, but also has a feeling of hope that their inference will be affirmed.
Throughout the whole film, all the stories are developed in strict accordance with: tricks, reasoning, and truth. These three parts are carried out. When each part occurs, other parts are mixed in and nested layer by layer, forming a suspenseful story. Film. The misinformation and answers in it also provide the audience with corresponding fun, so that a film that is almost composed of dialogue is not boring at all.
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