Image, Word and Echo: Voice-over Narration in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

Abstract

Focusing on asynchronous sound and its relation to cinematic image, this article explores the role of disembodied narration. Traditionally regarded as a faulty by-product of narrative fiction, voice-over has recently come into focus as a transgressive and quintessentially cinematic device that traverses genres, borrows from different media and challenges distinctions between image, sound and word. Taking on an adaptation perspective, the article demonstrates how the echo effect is key to both writing and filming activity, and the dead hero a distinctively noir type of posthumous narrator. The Postman Always Rings Twice (Garnett, 1946) was the first Hollywood adaptation of Cain’s novel, marketed as its most accurate rendition. Starring John Garfield, the film capitalizes on the main actor’s plaintive voice and unpolished American diction to seduce the audience into ‘the hallucination of a fully sensory world’ (Doane). In contrast to the novel’s first-person narrator who manipulates the reader into complete surrender, the voice-over in Garnett’s movie promises intimacy and finally steals it away by exposing the artifice of cinema. Drawing on Chion’s definition of cinema as a “verbocentric” phenomenon, and Pasolini’s intuition that image and word in film are a “bi-unity”, this article argues for the phantasmatic and potentially subversive quality of voice-over narration in Garnett’s drama.