Network films and complex causality

Abstract

This essay addresses the issue of causality in multi-character films that have been characterized as complex or network narratives. In these films, causality, in the classical sense of a logical connection between the depicted events, appears loose, as film scholars like Charles Ramírez Berg and David Bordwell have previously observed. Using the film Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2008) as an exemplary case, and adopting a framework of analysis derived from complex systems theory and dynamic network analysis, I suggest that in network films causality is subordinated to the systemic organizing principle of emergence, and is a product of a dynamic loop that connects the anthropomorphic micro-level of characters with the macro-level of formal dynamics through the mid-level of agents' complex interaction