“This Whole World Is a Story”: Popularizing Narrative Instability in Contemporary Film and Television

Abstract

In this article, I examine the intersection of two trends in contemporary US popular culture: a tendency of recent films to obfuscate the process of narrative understanding (called narrative instability) and a move towards combining elements of narrative with those of play (ludic textuality). I introduce both trends in more general terms and then look at the film Inception and the TV series Westworld to exemplify these trends’ narrative dynamics. This allows me to argue that narrative instability characterizes contemporary popular culture by an embrace of incoherence and by pleasures that build on an audience willing to actively engage with the text and its narration. While this has originally been a predominant trend in films, more recently, fusions of narrative and play have allowed television’s seriality to adopt instability as well, a convergence that I investigate by looking at the synergies between Inception and Westworld .