Gaspar Noe’s backwards revenge epic, Irreversible, plays and distorts with the notion of time and past time to create post-irony. The aforementioned technique wrangles the audience’s complete attention.
Noe starts the film by showing two men conversing about the events of the night. Their conversation leads the audience backwards in time by using a 720 degree camera trick to show another pair of men, one in a stretcher (Vincent Cassel) and another in handcuffs, leaving a BDSM gay club known as the Rectum. The scenes in the movie continue to happen in reverse showing the story unfold backwards from a chase, a rape, and a party. The movie ends where it chronologically begins, at the dawn of the day when Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci wake up together and talk about their plans for the night.
Noe uses story structure to show post-irony (or pre-irony in this case) during the course of the night. For example, Monice Bellucci’s character’s receives a brutal ten minute raping. In the next scene, which is previous chronologically, the viewer discovers that she ends up alone in the subway station because she leaves Vincet Cassell’s character at a party because he’s too messed up for her taste. Also, more twisted irony reveals itself when the first scene of the movie chronologically (the last in the order) shows that Monica Bellucci’s character is pregnant, thus making her rape more excruciating in retrospect. Noe presents another ironic incident by using the reverse timeline when he shows the death of Bellucci’s rapist. Bellucci’s character’s ex-boyfriend bashes her rapist’s face into wet mushy pieces with a fire extinguisher in club Rectum towards the end of the night, which is the beginning of the film. When the rape scene occurs, the audience discovers that the man that was killed for the rape earlier in the movie is actually the wrong man and Cassel’s rampage of revenge is in vain.
1 comment:
Mike,
A good post in that you made a critical statement (reverse chronology serves to develop the narrative toward ironic conclusions). Your explication of scenes that support this is nicely done. However, your thesis statement needs further elaboration. It is standard practice when invoking a term like "post-irony" to unpack it for the reader. Good practice for yourself, as well, in that you need to define your terminology in order to use it effectively toward building your argument. A term like post-irony could suggest lots of things. Don't make the reader guess what, exactly, you mean by it.
Keep up the good work.
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