“When I asked for details about Deep Throat’s feeling that our lives were in danger, Woodward and Bernstein insisted that we move outdoors. Fear began to seep in as we talked more on my lawn. I thought I knew about hardball, but I had never yet felt that we were dealing with hitmen. I suspected our telephones were probably tapped, that our taxes were surely getting a world class audit, but I had never felt physically threatened. Now they were saying that our lives were in fact in danger.”
Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post during the time of the Watergate Scandal, from his autobiography A Good Life (1995, p.359)
If the world of The Melete Effect is a world that is somewhat like our own (and only the history is different) then in part it is the setting that helps to further distinguish Melete’s world from our world. The setting here is taken to mean the individual location of each scene within the narrative. The various settings of The Melete Effect are required to do a lot of the perceptual work to aid the audience in identifying situations and placing them in an appropriate genre. Any tonal shift between different settings must be managed carefully to ensure that the audience knows where they are within the story at any given time. If the settings shift too radically it can result in the audience becoming disorientated and losing their ability to comprehend the story. This can be a deliberate choice by the writer, but at some point the narrative should right itself in order for the audience to retain a sense of narrative equilibrium, otherwise genre expectations can fail completely.
In the table below I have taken the fictional locations of The Melete Effect and identified both genre and fictional inspiration. I have also identified a relevant scene from The Melete Effect and specified the setting and real-world inspiration.
Table 4.3: Comparing Genre in The Melete Effect Fictional
Location
Genre Fictional Inspiration
Scene from The Melete Effect Setting Real-World Inspiration
Franklin D.A.
Political Thriller
All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976)
Check your sources The offices of the Columbia Times
The offices of the Washington Post
A Hot Time in the Ol’
Sandgate Tonight The Sandgate Complex The Watergate Complex The Worm Turns The suburbs of Franklin D.A The suburbs of Maryland
Conspiracy Thriller
All the President’s
Men Deepwater by Deepwater Meeting by a River The Potomac River The Parallax View
(Alan J. Pakula, 1974)
Mac finds the Fifth Man Mister X.’s house
Film Noir
The Dark Page (Samuel Fuller, 1944)
An Empty House Mac’s house
Santo Cristos Political Thriller
Missing (Costa-
Gavras, 1982) The Path to Estadia Futbol Estadia Futbol
Estadio Nacional de Chile where the Pinochet regime kept political prisoners. State of Siege (État
de siège)(Costa- Gavras, 1972)
An Interrogation Interrogation Room
Interrogations conducted by Central and South American dictatorships
Salvador (Oliver Stone, 1986)
Enter the Lair of El Perro
Salvaje Jungle
The jungles of Salvador and Nicaragua.
It is interesting to note that almost all of the genre work that has influenced The Melete Effect is drawn from the period in which the story is set. The exception being Samuel Fuller’s The Dark Page (2007, originally published 1944), a novel written during the same period as film noir and set in a newspaper. Fuller’s dark and cynical descriptions evoke a world eventually clouded in darkness, and it is this loss of innocence that influenced The Melete Effect. By contrast Oliver Stone’s Salvador (1986), which focuses on photojournalist Robert Boyle’s experiences in El Salvador in 1980, was an indirect genre inspiration. Here the look and feel of Stone’s film, coupled with the trope of a character in over their head, contributed directly to the Santo Cristos storyline.
Yet it is the work of directors Alan J. Pakula and Costa-Gavras who have influenced The Melete Effect and it setting most directly. Alan J. Pakula’s films All the President’s Men (1976) and The Parallax View (1974) both have a cynical view of American society, and All the President’s Men particularly shows that truth can sometimes only be achieved by dealing with the mundane. Most interestingly both films depict journalists who uncover truths that are explosive, for the protagonist of the Parallax View, Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) this truth results in his death, and for Woodward and Bernstein (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman respectively) it means a constant vigilance to ensure that the truth will finally be revealed. Both films revel in their paranoia, and this is the overwhelming state that the audience is left with. These facets are reflected in the settings and narrative structure of The Melete Effect.
Costa-Gavras work is unique in that his films strive to present events in a balanced and neutral tone. Although horrific things happen to the protagonists of State of Siege (État de siège in French) (1972) and Missing (1982), Costa-Gavras seems to frame his work in such a way that he the director is not commenting on the action. This is of course a difficult assertion, because of course a director will frame and edit his story in a particular way, but Costa-Gavras offsets his stories by revealing the actions of all parties involved. No one is truly the protagonist or antagonist, rather everyone has a part to play. It is this spirit that has influenced The Melete Effect the most, because it recognises that depending on the setting, some characters have greater influence than others, and this brings us to the final narrative part.