A great article in last week’s New Yorker, analysing the film-making technique of Tony Gilroy, finds most of the ingredients of cyber-realism – the puzzle, the loop, multiplicity of perspective and the tie – within Duplicity, his latest film. According to D.T. Max, the author:

“This is the problem that new movies must solve. As Gilroy says, “How do you write a reversal that uses the audience’s expectations in a new way? You have to write to their accumulated knowledge.” Before Gilroy wrote “Duplicity,” audiences had been trained by the mixed-up time schemes of “Memento,” “Amores Perros,” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Moviegoers got used to an aesthetic of disorientation. They also have DVDs, so they can watch a film twice to untangle its story, and the Internet, which allows them to look up a bit of jargon or insider information. Reality is a confluence of fragments, to be apprehended bit by bit; watching a movie has begun to approximate the rhythm of a Google search. Gilroy bragged to Variety about the nonlinear structure of “Clayton”: “In theory, if I make a real world, and there are some dramatic events taking place in there, I should be able to drop the needle anywhere 28 times and make something interesting out of it.”

Read the full article here.