This is a working draft of my essay on the opening sequence of Boardwalk Empire‘s “Pilot” for my course on Storytelling in Film and Media with Professor Jason Mittell. By all means, there are plenty of points I would like to expand upon in the future, but I think it’s interesting to at least begin considering the various strategies which Terrence Winter and Martin Scorsese employ to get viewers to invest in the narrative and fictional world. The response has been all over the place: some critics have called the exposition heavy-handed, others got exactly what they expected.

Obviously, spoilers ahead. Any feedback and criticism would be most welcome.

Building the Boardwalk: Narrative Strategies in the Opening Sequence of Boardwalk Empire‘s “Pilot”

The opening of “Pilot,” the first episode in Terrence Winter’s television series Boardwalk Empire, primes viewers for how to read the rest of the episode, if not the show: a highly stylized and visually lush depiction of Atlantic City, situated in a liminal moment between the end of World War I and the start of Prohibition. To invoke David Bordwell’s narrative principles, I suggest that the episode’s opening sequence disorders the fabula (see Wikipedia for definition of fabula/syuzhet), restricts the point of view, and employs self-conscious style to produce a sense of displacement and mystery during the opening sequence; viewers, being thrown into a state of initial confusion, are prompted to draw upon various schemata and cognitive processes to construct the fabula of the lively yet opaque ongoings of the boardwalk, and the characters living there.

To properly gauge the opening of Boardwalk Empire, it is helpful to discuss how the credit sequence may amplify the narrative. According to Jason Mittell, the credit sequence functions as an “additional source of memory within television episodes” (93), its repetition leading the audience to consistently return their focus to Nucky Thompson and his apparent posture of contemplation. In its first reading, this paratext also indicates an general context and aesthetic tone. Viewers can potentially identify the prototype schemata of a foppishly-dressed 1920s character and situate themselves in the general setting. Also, the high dynamic range image-like effect, an anachronistic theme song, and the reduction and expansion of fabula time (evidenced by slow- and fast-motion shots) establish the show’s stylized aesthetic; much like AMC’s Mad Men, the near-overwrought excess of style even anticipates the opulence of the fictional world itself: like the unhurried close-ups of Nucky’s rose-adorned jacket pocket, golden cigarette case, and bowler hat reiterate, the boardwalk itself is a ostentatious and colorful “reality.”

Beyond such visual and historical strokes are the credits themselves, which can frame the viewing of the story by invoking various schemata for narrative comprehension; for the media-literate viewer aware of Winter’s and Steve Buscemi’s participation in The Sopranos, or director Martin Scorsese’s long-association with the gangster genre, hypotheses are inevitably made about the conventions which will dictate the narrative, themes, and style of Boardwalk Empire; indeed, some of these expectations come to bear: Scorsese’s self-conscious camerawork (e.g. the iris-in, iris-out technique to highlight the pocketwatch in the first scene, a technique also used in The Departed),  and the massive, cinematic sets (as per Gangs of New York). Also, as the opening credits manifestly position Nucky as the show’s protagonist―being the sequence’s lone human presence―the gangster “rise-and-fall” story certainly seems to be a schema in play here. Interestingly, the decision to cast character actor Buscemi as the protagonist may indicate that the show hopes to emphasize the character role as opposed to the star image. Nonetheless, Buscemi’s past roles, including his turn as a violent mobster in The Sopranos, lend intertextual shading to his role as Nucky.

Therefore, these transtextual conventions function as shorthand to consume the narrative in a particular way. That the show airs on HBO, for example, means it is to be read in the context of complex, quality-emphatic serialized narratives as The Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood. Anne Moore, writing for Parabasis, notes that there are “nods to HBO dramas throughout: the New Orleans funeral for John Barleycorn seemed to be a direct reference to the Treme pilot, and the intros of Michael K. Williams (Omar from The Wire) and Molly Parker (Alma Garret from Deadwood) were given a kind of visual fanfare that other characters didn’t get.” Such extratextual acknowledgment flaunts the show’s own credibility as a gangster story and television series.

In part these allusions may feel derivative (especially in the Godfather-like operatic murder sequence of Hans Schroeder and Big Jim Colosimo), but I would suggest these self-conscious references thematically reinforce the episode’s interest in performance and liminality. First, one can justify the temporal reordering of the noncanonical story template on “transtextual grounds” (36), as Bordwell notes: Scorsese’s Goodfellas also notably begins in media res with Henry, Jimmy, and Tommy murdering Billy Batts in the trunk of a car before recounting Henry’s past. In a similar instance, “Pilot” pauses on a freeze frame of Al Capone attacking Arnold Rothstein’s lackey in the opening sequence, which then leads into the temperance woman’s lament of “Coward! Monster! Vicious brute!” from three days earlier. Schema also dictates that Nucky is likely involved in the bootlegger robbery, judging by his monolithic presence in the credit sequence; to discover later that the robbery is planned independently by Jimmy Darmody and Capone is an unexpected twist, also to Nucky’s own surprise. In this way, viewers are invited to draw upon schema of gangster convention, at times inciting genuine pleasure in the transtextual application and subversion of these tropes in the fictional world of 1920s Atlantic City.

However, whereas Goodfellas is markedly interiorized by voiceover narration explaining Henry had always wanted to be a gangster, the motivation for the flashback after the opening of “Pilot” is not as immediately clear. By first viewing a scene that in fact occurs much later in the episode’s fabula, the audience is impelled to understand the “compositional motivation,” what Bordwell describes as how the spectator “[justifies] material in terms of its relevance to story necessity” (36). Here, the narrative strategy employed is essentially an extended external flashback, enacting the events which lead up to Darmody and Capone’s decision to rob Rothstein’s haul (though viewers at first have no idea of the politics and names involved), forcing various dramatic consequences that are likely to inform the show’s overarching narrative: Rothstein’s conflict with Nucky, Jimmy’s falling out with Nucky, and Nucky’s transformation past a “half-gangster,” as Jimmy warns he can no longer be. The viewer expects this moment of recontextualization later in the syuzhet as a payoff, since the episode’s inevitable progression of time from the beginning of flashback will necessitate a return to this point in the fabula.

The first scene’s communicativeness is ambiguous, hinted at through camera movement, acting, and emotional tone. The episode opens with an iris out on a pocketwatch, suggestive of waiting for a certain moment in time. The first line of dialogue―”Come on, let’s go!”―is also an impatient utterance. This nearly metafictional impetus to move forward in time is partly undermined by the slow-moving, spatial ambiguity of the foggy ocean, generating a sense of mystery and displacement. What exactly is transpiring within the narrative? Here the viewer’s primary mode of constructing the fabula is through inferrence: one can read that the crates are filled with Canadian whiskey; their urge to finish moving the load hints at its criminality; the tone of the thugs’ leader’s voice implies whoever owns the load is extremely powerful; the tone and actions of the masked robbers demonstrates they don’t care. This temporal manipulation, then, serves to focus importance on the extractable questions: Who owns the whiskey? Where did they get it from? Who is robbing the load? Why are they robbing the load? This “how did we get here?” mentality of historic reconstruction informs the viewing experience of “Pilot.” Again, one can note this in the credit sequence’s shots of the volatile environment―clouds gathering, waves crashing, and bottles bobbing in the ocean―and its concern with the progression of time. Intercut with shots of Nucky’s static figure, the show stitches together a shot/reverse-shot relationship between a man and his world: to Nucky, the Boardwalk becomes the physical embodiment of change, while he remains in a state of distant contemplation.

The obscuring temporal effect of in media res echoes within the thematic considerations of the narrative. I would suggest that audiences are cued by the reordered syuzhet to pay attention to the liminality of the moment between the Temperance League meeting and the bootlegger robbery, a transitory stage straddling the end of World War I and the start of Prohibition. The opening scene evokes an illegal world of secrecy, which is positioned ambiguously to the carnivalesque public world of the 1920s-era Atlantic City boardwalk. Immediately after the ship collects the whiskey in the opening, it moves further into fog, from which emerges the text “Atlantic City 1920” and a brief panoramic glimpse of a lively, lit-up boardwalk. By moving the camera from a seemingly dislocated space back to the situated time and space of the boardwalk, Scorsese suggests that what buttresses Atlantic City’s sense of community is the faraway activity of criminals. This is reflected later in the repetition of the opening sequence later in the syuzhet, now intercut with scenes of Nucky attending a comedian’s show, and FBI raiding a separate alcohol compound: the simultaneous events in the fabula are positioned as subsequent events in the syuzhet, drawing out the tension but also conveying how Nucky attempts to separate these domains from one another. However, the delineation between public and private domains is in fact blurred: The domestic space of Jimmy is repressed with Angela kept in the dark about his murderous activity; Nucky tells Margaret Schroeder candidly about his dead wife―or so it seems―during a meeting in his office; the hotel manager barges in on the naked couple of Nucky and his girlfriend Lucy, to discuss his lost funds at the hands of Rothstein’s gambling.

Finally, as the opening flashback forces emphasis on constructing history, the viewer is forced into searching out for moments in which the fabula can be expanded. The act of recounting becomes an important but suspect narrative tool. At various points, Winter and Scorsese exercise a heavy hand; Agent Nelson Van Alden―the FBI Prohibition agent assigned to track the meeting of Nucky, Rothstein, Lucky Luciano, Johnny Torrio, and Big Jim Colosino―is required to identify all the high-ranking gangsters for another rookie agent, quite obviously a proxy for the audience. Yet on the other hand, though Nucky describes his wife in some detail to Margaret, and begins his speech to the Women’s Temperance League with a description of himself as a child struggling to provide for a family ravished by alcoholism, the viewer is never privy to whether either assertion is grounded in fact. Throughout the episode, the viewer’s depth of knowledge is surprisingly limited, navigated by somewhat covert exposition and particularly the controlled moment of narrative surprise: the realization upon revisiting the opening sequence for a second in the syuzhet that Jimmy is the perpetrator of the robbery, and that Nucky is in fact unaware of what has transpired. As Nucky advises: “First rule of politics, kiddo. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” This artform of self-creation and, simultaneously, obscuration is at once a reflection of the protagonist’s own performative identity, but also the self-conscious mechanics of Boardwalk Empire‘s “Pilot” itself.

—

Works Cited

Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1985. Print.

Goodfellas. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Perf. Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro. 1990. Warner Home Video, 1997. DVD.

Mittell, Jason. “Previously On: Prime Time Serials and the Mechanics of Memory.” Just TV. 3 July 2009. Web.

Moore, Anne. “Premieres: Boardwalk Empire; or, HBO Reminds Us That It is Not, In Fact, TV.” Parabasis. 22 September 2010. Web.

Winter, Terrence. “Pilot.” Boardwalk Empire. Dir. Martin Scorsese. HBO. 19 September 2010. Television.

–adjective
1. inspiring reverence or admiration; of supreme dignity or grandeur; majestic: an august performance of a religious drama.
2. venerable; eminent: an august personage.

How’s this for august, my little baby birds: I was recently accepted to present a tweaked version of my video essay on The Wire at the Re: Humanities digital media symposium—the first undergraduate conference of its kind—this coming fall at Haverford College! Many thanks to my professor Jason Mittell, who introduced me to the event and encouraged me to apply.

I had to bang out a brief 100-word description of my project, and this is what I came up with. Forgive me for writing what sounds more like a class description than a 15-minute presentation, but really, how could I honestly do this subject justice anyway, in 15 minutes:

Watching The Wire: Storytelling in the Digital Age
With David Simon’s critically acclaimed HBO serial drama as a launching point, we will consider how storytelling media has developed in the digital age. In The Wire, complex individuals of a fictional Baltimore struggle to voice their own stories, though a dominant discourse of bureaucracy and capitalistic gain—in schools, courts, police stations, newsrooms, and even the streets—threatens to override all else. Also touching upon ABC’s Lost, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other pop culture media, we will trace how the emphasis on drawing audiences—or site hits—has increasingly become a corruptive force, and how the modern story has at times surrendered, or evolved, in the face of such demands.

In other news: My time at Geekosystem and Gothamist has been sweet and educational; I’ve learned a lot about writing fast and furious, but I’ve also discovered that beyond posting time-sensitive stories with snark, I have to cultivate an imagination for original projects. As the final year of college (and its accompanying creative thesis) sneaks up on me, it becomes more imperative that this should happen.

In the meantime, ogle at this:

Um, why am I not at Comic Con? It hurts to go online right now and read the collective fangasm shuddering on the other side of this continent. Currently carving reminder in brain: Purchase 2011 tickets the moment they are available.

After the publication of a scathing nine-page profile on M.I.A. by the NYT’s Lynn Hirschberg, the rapper angrily tweeted the writer’s phone number. Not exactly a class-act move, but then again, it’s somewhat understandable after reading the utter disgrace Hirschberg wrought, with lines as brutal as: “‘I kind of want to be an outsider,’ she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.” At first, I tweeted my approval of Hirschberg. As Gothamist’s Jake Dobkin once remarked of a Times profile on Lockhart Steele, magazine profiles only seemed to entail a laudatory “blowjob.” It was fresh to hear Hirschberg’s unsparing take on a musician whose radical political statements were largely style and hardly substance.

In response, M.I.A. posted on her label’s blog a recording which seemed to suggest that Hirschberg had in fact engineered the French fry situation, suggesting they order the expensive dish and mentioning that the Times would pay for the meal. As trivial the manipulation, “Trufflegate” pissed me off. Though I’d believed Hirschberg had remained truthful and seemingly stuck it to the celebrity pandering machine, the recording perhaps suggests otherwise: the writer in fact played M.I.A. into a particular narrative, predetermined before the two had even met. It also seems Ms. Hirschberg has a history of using potatoesque literary devices as a way to subtly knock her profile subjects. That she was Editor-at-Large at T Magazine, and is moving to W to become Entertainment Editor, is telling about the state of journalism today. She produced a false detail which incites conflict. Pandering is hardly desirable in good reporting, but neither is false criticism.

It’ll be interesting to see this summer if Gothamist finds itself pressed to pander, upon its purchase by Cablevision owner James Dolan. Already in the past, Dolan forced one of his properties, Newsday, to cover another of his properties, the Knicks, with kindness. As ex-Gawker editor and The Awl co-founder Choire Sicha once said: “If you work at any publication in this town, you work for a millionaire or billionaire. In some ways, that’s functional, and it works as a feudal society.” Everybody needs to please the bigwig in their writing, I guess, as a matter of financial survival. With journalism so cutthroat nowadays, it’s a sad but understandable state of affairs. This makes the playing field a dangerous one to navigate. You rail on someone, and in doing so you go down on someone else.

All this talk reminds me of a certain exchange from Almost Famous, between teenage Cameron-Crowe-surrogate protagonist Will and rock journalist Lester Bangs:

Good words to live and die by!

I should acknowledge from the start that anything I write is not to be trusted. ANY PIECE OF WORK IS A SHOW AND A LESSON. A year ago, I had that written on a post-it with blotchy marker, lest I found myself removing adverbs from my writing to appear “real” or, worse, “humble.”

Coming fresh off the series finale of Lost, I’ve found rejuvenated debate about this idea. I’ll admit, I was one of the show quitters. To be fair, I was enough of a Man of Faith to push the button until Season 5. By then, things just didn’t make much sense. I didn’t know how they could possibly ever make sense. I quit — a decision much easier made in television than in life. But after the creators had finally set an end date — acknowledging one’s death day really does put things into perspective! — I decided to return to the show (warning: spoilers ahead!). In a surprisingly moving and humanist conclusion, Christian Shephard tells Jack in the church that he must learn to let go, a metafictional gesture by Darlton which asks the audience to also let go. It’s an extremely poignant moment that touches both on the fear of death (and what a bittersweet death it is, Jack closing his eyes beside loyal Vincent), but also the fear of narrative incompletion. It’s true that a lot of us just wanted our answers, damn it.

So what exactly did Lost teach me about the act of show-and-tell, on paper and in life? For all the scientific real-world solutions many viewers expected for the numbers, the flash-sideways timeline, the smoke monster, the cork in the glowing cave, and the rest of the mystery hoopla, nearly all these threads remained by show’s end floating uncertainly in the realm of the magical. In fact, the only “real” thing about Lost was that, just as in life, things always go unexplained or unresolved. Robert Frost said it best: “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life – It goes on.”

What Lost represents is the battle for meaning. For some viewers, all the pieces needed to have a point. That’s certainly how I felt throughout much of the second and third season, as the show dived more into the mysterious details of the island’s mythology. Who the hell built that four-toed statue? That there wouldn’t be concrete pay offs was a scary decision for the show make. The divisive reaction to the finale reflected this; for some, the lack of answers was the hugest crime perpetrated in television history. But perhaps it was the best lesson, for those willing to listen. It was brutally honest, in its fidelity to the truthfulness of our own life experience.

I think this was Lost‘s primary “point” of sorts. We naturally seek meaning in continuous experience by containing it in isolated narratives. Beginning, middle, and end. Motifs and themes as well. For Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse to produce so many mysterious beginnings without ultimate answers, many feel it was merely a ploy to lure audiences. And maybe it was. What arrogance on their part, to assume they could wrap it up neatly in a way that would provide satisfaction! But it seemed to feed into the entire conversation about storytelling Lost had generated; at heart, we wouldn’t tell stories without an audience. That is, we needed to share our experiences together.

Ex-newspaperman and television showrunner David Simon has written about the idea of storytelling as arrogance, both in The Wire and in publications: “Here. Look at me, I’ve got a story to tell. Pay attention to me.” This is clearly the problematic which motorizes my own arc toward writerly self-loathing.

See, first my writing atrociously emerges from a swamp of self-indulgence, and then I have the gall to think that someone will entertain these little stories — which, by the way, always boils down to two things: the luxury of existential reflection, and girls. But they are attempts at ordering the meandering nature of my life. Likewise, the flash-sideways are the ostensible “stories” of the Lost universe, constructed by the characters themselves as a reimagining of their own persons. We tell stories to establish our own role in the greater fabric. This connection from the storyteller to others around him is the bridge from a hole of self-indulgent experience to that classic campfire experience, in which we can construct a world even listeners can engage in.

Darlton listened, as well as they could, to their viewers, and wrote for them. There is, of course, the dangerous extreme of such a strategy. The majority of the web is one such example. It’s been democratized, but the success of a blog nonetheless hinges on hits. SEO keywords and web analytics have permeated and corrupted the online writing culture. We give the audiences exactly what they want, but not enough of what they need. That’s why I think Lost worked in the end.

We must remember that no matter how many turns of phrase a writer pares down in a semblance of “keeping it real” and human, a piece of writing will always inherently be manipulative. That is the craft of expression. Lost‘s decision to remain fantastical ironically rendered it a immensely humanistic work. We were persuaded to persevere with the narrative, urged onward by J.J. Abrams’ beloved device of mystery, and in doing so, we lived and engaged with the island’s inhabitants — some as confused as us by the inscrutable world. In this sense, even the mythology of the island was true to life, in that it operated as a analogue for trivial uncertainties and higher mysteries that exist also in the real world. Lost exhibited verisimilitude where it most counted: in the fallible, sentimental relationships between human beings.

Taking a break from my short-form reportage at 21st Century Boy until mid-June, I’ve created this new blog in an attempt at more personal and verisimilar writing. This blog will focus more on my own life and writing, to emphasize the connections most important to me and the experiences I comprehend best (most of the time). Remember, all writers are manipulators; Ben Linuses one second, Henry Gales the next, depending on the situation.

But that having been said, what Lost has suggested to me is that there’s often a moral underpinning which drives these artistic manipulations. We want people to pay attention to our stories because there is often that didactic imperative. “Listen,” we seem to be saying, “this is the point.” If there is intelligent goodwill there, I think that redeems whatever is lost in translation. Moreover, there is nothing that bars a reader from interpreting narratives in a way separate from the author’s own. As the poststructuralists contended, even your own text can elude you.

As a final thought — what better self-contained narrative is there but one’s own life? As mortals, we don’t have the luxury of experiencing continuous existence. It’s only natural, then, to grasp at some satisfying kind of resolution. It, too, is another story we have to write.

Fin.