Owl Creek Bridge device

[IdleRich]

Kind of inspired by the doppelganger thread, one story device in which I'm interested is that first invented (I believe) in the story An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. For those who don't know, the gist of the story is; a soldier is about to be hung from the titular bridge but the rope snaps and he escapes, swimming away and then eventually making it home to his family - when suddenly he receives a massive blow to his neck and dies - his body hanging from the bridge where it has been all along, the events of the story being some kind of vision concocted by his mind.
Since then there have been loads of examples and variations on this theme, off the top of my head I can think of Carnival of Souls, The Third Policeman (kinda), The Filth (if I'm reading it correctly), Alice ou Le Dernier Fugue (I've never seen it but that's my understanding), er....
Anything else? Also particularly interested in variations on the same theme.

 

[polystyle]

Owl Creek was startling when seen back in early school ...
That snap o' the neck brought you right back to focus !

 

[empty mirror]

this is kind of a spoiler thread, innit?

i do like the story. i remember chuckling at his devil's dictionary or whatever.

this is so lame but i there is a wiki article about it:

Works inspired by the story or employing a similar plot device

• Flann O Brien's Novel The Third Policeman recounts a somewhat similar plot and twist, involving an escape from a hanging death and a journey home.
• Sir William Golding's novel Pincher Martin uses a similar artifice as Bierce's story, and Golding admits the similarity in an afterword to the novel.
• Another literary work that can be thought of as an adumbration of the Owl Creek Bridge theme is the short story "The Secret Miracle" by Jorge Luis Borges.
• David Lynch's movie Lost Highway.[2]
• Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ
• Terry Gilliam's Brazil
• M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense
• He Was a Quiet Man, a 2007 film starring Christian Slater uses this plot format. One striking similarity is the "hints" that appear to the viewer that the imagined sequence of events are just that, imagined.
• Richard Linklater's Waking Life
• Jacob's Ladder (film)
• The Life Before Her Eyes
• Richard Kelly, the director of 'Donnie Darko' has said it was an inspiration for his film.
• At the end of "My Occurrence", an episode of the TV series Scrubs, it becomes apparent that the lead character has imagined many of the events of the episode as he does not want to believe that a friend has cancer.
• In rapper DMX's song ATF on It's Dark and Hell Is Hot, ATF agents are at the door, ready to raid his apartment. Following the tale of an elaborate escape and shootout, it is revealed that the last thing he hears is the ATF at the door.
• It also inspired The Doobie Brothers song "I Cheat The Hangman".
• The 1965 horror film Dr. Terror's House of Horrors employs a similar premise: Five men traveling on a train are met by a mysterious doctor, who proceeds to tell their fortunes. For each of them, he predicts a different fate, but each fate is horrific. He informs them that they only way they can avoid these terrible fates is by dying first. When the train finally stops, it turns out that the men are in some kind of limbo, having already perished in a train wreck.
• The 2007 German film Yella employs the same plot device as An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. On her way to secure a better job and future in West Germany, East German Yella hesitantly agrees to a car ride from her estranged ex-husband. When she rejects taking him back, he drives both of them off a bridge and into a river. Yella emerges on the riverbank unscathed from the accident. Yet as she makes her way to the West, and following a series of premonitions that allow her to move from success to scandal to tragedy in the corporate business world, the final sequence reveals she did not survive the crash.
• In the manga of Battle Royale, Hirono Shimizu's final thoughts, as she drowns in a well, are very reminiscent of this story---she imagines herself miraculously escaping from the well and meeting Shuya Nanahara, Noriko Nakagawa and Shogo Kawada, as the explosive collar falls off her neck on one page---on the next page, she is shown drowning, with her last words from the previous page repeating endlessly in her mind.
• The comic book Punisher: Born features the same plot device.
• The episode No Reason of House (TV series) is similar to "Occurrence" in plot.
• The Heroes episode Cold Snap uses the same plot device.
• The films Stay, The Escapist and The Descent use a similar plot device.
• The VR.5 episode Simon's Choice uses the same plot device. The hanging is updated to the use of an electric chair.
• The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Inner Light has Captain Picard living an entire lifetime while unconscious for 25 minutes.

 

[Sick Boy]

Also Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho

 

[IdleRich]

I was thinking about Lost Highway - could be one although it's not totally clear to me.
Also the Borges one, that's the kind of variation I was thinking about.
The Descent is a surprisingly good film wouldn't have thought of that but you're right.
Should have thought of Jacob's Ladder though, that film terrified me.
Wow, that film Yella sounds almost exactly like Carnival of Souls.

"Also Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho"

Is that what happens? I can't quite remember.

I suppose you're right though, if you haven't seen the film or read the book this is a spoiler thread.

 

[empty mirror]

man Descent was great i thought
i wanted to start that one up again as soon as it ended
very visceral and pheremonal


it has been a while since i've seen lost highway (not since it was in theaters)
but mulholland drive uses this device, but somewhere in the middle, i think, rather than at the end, if i remember rightly

 

[Tentative Andy]

It forms one possible interpretation of Alan Warner - These Demented Lands.
I am conractually obliged to mention this.

 

[IdleRich]

"man Descent was great i thought
i wanted to start that one up again as soon as it ended
very visceral and pheremonal"

I concur, I can't think of any horror films from recent years that are as good as this.

"it has been a while since i've seen lost highway (not since it was in theaters)
but mulholland drive uses this device, but somewhere in the middle, i think, rather than at the end, if i remember rightly"

Typical fucking Lynch, it might have happened or it might not. I'm sure that he's just taking the piss in Inland Empire - not that that prevented me from greedily lapping it up.

 

[Sick Boy]

Also Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho

Well sort of in the reverse. He doesn't die and have some sort of narrative that takes place in his brain just before he dies, but having died a kind of emotional death from being immersed in his narcissistic, back-stabbing and bleak corporate culture, he creates this enormous narrative in his head where he kills everybody and then confesses everything he's done on his lawyer's answering machine. Though by the end of the novel, nothing has actually changed.

 

[STN]

Chris Petit's The Passenger.

 

[IdleRich]

"Well sort of in the reverse. He doesn't die and have some sort of narrative that takes place in his brain just before he dies, but having died a kind of emotional death from being immersed in his narcissistic, back-stabbing and bleak corporate culture, he creates this enormous narrative in his head where he kills everybody and then confesses everything he's done on his lawyer's answering machine. Though by the end of the novel, nothing has actually changed."

OK, I hear you, it appears to all be in his head. But then in one of the other books isn't there a mention of Patrick Batemen where he's described as being a creepy guy with suspicious stains on his clothes - the implication being there that maybe he is actually killing people, or at least that's how I read it.

 

[Sick Boy]

OK, I hear you, it appears to all be in his head. But then in one of the other books isn't there a mention of Patrick Batemen where he's described as being a creepy guy with suspicious stains on his clothes - the implication being there that maybe he is actually killing people, or at least that's how I read it.

That was probably in Rules of Attraction, but there is also a running ambiguity in American Psycho itself, e.g. how his lawyer received Bateman's voice message congratulating him on such a sick joke, then when Batemen challenges him about the disappearance of the associate he killed, his lawyer claims he had dinner with him recently. However, people confuse people with each other throughout the whole novel and I'm pretty sure in that scene Bateman's lawyer isn't even sure who Bateman is.

I always read that book as most of these delusions and confusion being his though, not the reader's. Perhaps not such a good example then, due to its ambiguity, but I mean, if we're talking about David Lynch here...

 

[scottdisco]

[*]Sir William Golding's novel Pincher Martin uses a similar artifice as Bierce's story, and Golding admits the similarity in an afterword to the novel.

that book rocks.

top thread BTW!

 

[IdleRich]

Yet another winner eh?