Implanted time: The final cut and the reflexive loops of complex narratives

In this paper, I attempt to reread the 2004 film The Final Cut (Omar Naim) through its connection with the complex narrative tendency, and especially its puzzle, mind-game and modular aspects. I argue that The Final Cut's complex and reflexive mode of communication - with its roots in cyberpunk sci-fi - transforms its already discussed intense narratological self-reference. Reflexivity in The Final Cut finds expression in the plot's loops and mise-en-abyme structures, which, like the implant of the story, create interplay between narrative and database. Arguing that reflexivity is an important conceptual tool for theoretically approaching such interplay, I suggest an alternative theoretical framework to rethink reflexivity and self-reference in the context of complex narratives, through Niklas Luhmann's account of reflexivity in temporalized systems. Although this systemic framework has been in development since the 1970s, it is only recently that complex systemic views have influenced the humanities. Through this alternative framework, complexity enhances the communication between the film-system and the viewer-system, including the latter in a participatory and dynamic procedure of meaning-making. © 2011 Taylor & Francis