As Rear Window demonstrates, the active cueing of the presence of a narrator or implied filmmaker in a movie depends on a certain level of sophistication or receptivity in its intended audience, often referred to as the "implied" or "model" reader or audience. Umberto Eco defines the model reader as "a set of textual instructions, displayed by the text’s linear manifestation precisely as a set of sentences or other signals" (15-16). The multivocal nature of film, however, requires a redefinition of "model reader" just as it does for the ideal or model author [17]. As Eco recognizes, different kinds of texts require different kinds of attention to be paid to them: " . . . there is a model reader not only for Finnegans Wake but also for a railway timetable, and the texts expect a different kind of cooperation from each of them" (16). In other words, both Finnegans Wake and a railway timetable can be (and often are) unintelligible to anyone who is not prepared to look for certain kinds of cues and structures in each; as a corollary, one could try to read Finnegans Wake as a travel guide to Dublin or a railway timetable as a narrative, but only by an act of will that worked from an entirely different set of presuppositions than the (implied) creator of each text might be said to have.

Finnegans Wake and railway timetables both demand an awareness of context from their model perceivers if they are to be understood at all. Films too may demand such contextual awareness. A film like 49-17 might be said to display a certain lack of confidence in the competency of its model perceiver to understand film narrative, rather than literary narrative, as a context for understanding. Most films, however, assume such competency and do not require the redundancy of print or other narration that will be in excess of the other elements of film narration. Some films assume such competency to the point that they can play—and invite the model perceiver’s play—with such inferences. Both A Star Is Born and Rear Window invite such play in different ways. So does a film like Mitchell Leisen’s Hold Back the Dawn (1941), in which a character played by Charles Boyer tells his story to Leisen himself, motivating the flashback that forms the substance of the film’s plot. Thus Leisen as narratee becomes the implied filmmaker who will actualize as plot the story told to him by Boyer. Such play, of course, short-circuits the actual production of the story which comes from the screenwriting team of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, not to mention the entire shooting and postproduction apparatus of filmmaking. Similarly, Chuck Jones’ masterpiece Duck Amuck (1953) plays with the model perceiver’s understanding of animation to present an implied animator (eventually revealed as Bugs Bunny) who continually frustrates the attempts of Daffy Duck to be in a narrative at all. The cartoon acts on audience knowledge that cartoons are drawn and painted but stretches the limits of that knowledge by pretending that an animator can directly intervene and make changes in a completed film text while the film itself is running.

Many other instances of this kind of play with a model perceiver’s knowledge of filmmaking could be cited. Ingmar Bergman does it at the beginning of Persona. Frank Tashlin does it in The Girl Can’t Help It. And while the vast majority of contemporary American films avoid such deliberate play, I venture to guess that proportionally there is a greater number of contemporary films that act on assumptions about a model perceiver’s understanding of both narrative and the filmmaking process than in previous eras [18]. One recent example of the self-conscious play of narration is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999).

As a followup to Anderson’s critically and financially successful previous film, Boogie Nights, Magnolia has been subject to both critical adulation and fierce dislike. Comments from non-professional reviewers on the Internet Movie Database and at Amazon.com are typical in praising the film but also in denouncing its length, its "pretentiousness," its forced "artiness," and so on. Despite awards and nominations the film garnered, such divisions are typical among professional reviewers as well. Aside from its sheer length (over three hours), three elements seem to be the focus of objections: 1) the fragmentary nature of the narrative, interweaving stories about at least nine major characters; 2) references to "urban legends" of unlikely coincidences, culminating in the devastating rain of frogs at the film’s end; 3) a high degree of self-consciousness, including subtitles that sporadically update the time and weather, the recurring motif of the numbers 8 and 2 throughout the film, and a sequence in which the characters all mouth the words of an Aimee Mann song. Whether such elements are "pretentious" is matter of taste, but they clearly require a model perceiver attuned to certain kinds of challenges in narration.

Even though Anderson himself plays a small role in the film, the "model creator" is not strongly evoked by the film itself, unlike Rear Window or a handful of other movies besides Hitchcock’s. Narrational agency does, however, present a major challenge to viewers. To begin with, a context for viewing is created in the film’s opening sequences, in which a voiceover narrator tells stories about improbable coincidences, such as the swimmer found dead in the top branches of a tree far from the ocean. Most of these stories are accompanied by images that illustrate portions of these stories, albeit in a rather oblique way. The first challenge for the model perceiver, then, is to suppose that the context created by these stories is in some way relevant to the rest of the film. Those who see no context at all, or only a tenuous one related to the equally arbitrary rain of frogs at the end, are likely to be annoyed by the move.

The fragmentary main narrative presents a similar challenge. Of the nine main characters, two large groups are clearly interrelated. There is one set of stories about a long-running television quiz show, featuring a panel of young contestants, titled What Do Kids Know? The host Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall); Stanley, a current "quiz kid" (Jeremy Blackman); and Donnie (William H. Macy), a former quiz kid, form the core of this group. A sub-group is headed by Jimmy’s drug-addict daughter Claudia (Melora Walters) and a sympathetic policeman played by John C. Reilly. The second major group includes the rich and dying Earl Partridge (Jason Robards, Jr.), his "trophy wife" Linda (Julianne Moore), his male nurse Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and his estranged son, a chauvinistic male-motivational guru now going by the name of Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise). If an implied or model creator is the principle to which a (model) perceiver appeals as the source of unity and coherence within a film, the challenge here is to find the ways in which these characters’ stories connect at all.

One working assumption, especially given the context of the opening vignettes, might be that there is little or no connection, that these stories simply form a kind of "omnibus" of narratives linked by a particular historical time and general sense of place (the San Fernando Valley). Thus, many commentators compare Magnolia to Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, also an omnibus film set in the San Fernando Valley. However, in the course of the film, we gradually discover the links. We learn that Jimmy Gator, seen at first with his daughter, is also the host of the TV show; that Donnie used to be a contestant on that show; that Frank is Earl’s son; and so on. We also learn more about the individual characters themselves—why Donnie wants to have braces on his teeth when he does not need them, how Linda actually feels about her dying husband, and so on. In the absence of such connections, revelations about character and explorations of theme (such as the consequences of the lack of love, the need for self-affirmation in childhood, and the like) will seem individual, isolated and trite at best.

In addition, not all of these links among the characters are immediately obvious; they may be overlooked by viewers who are not open to such discoveries. The most obscure link among all these relationships is how the two major groups—the ones connected with Jimmy, his job, and his family and the ones connected with Earl—might also be connected. That link is revealed casually at first, as the final credits for What Do Kids Know? roll by on a television screen. We discover that the show is an Earl Partridge Production, a source of the dying man’s wealth and a cue to the film’s overall theme. The title can be, and often is, a dismissive comment: kids really know nothing compared to adults. But it also implies that kids know love and anger, shame and pride, and that they know what they really need. The closest that the film comes to explicitly pronouncing such a "meaning," though, comes toward the end when Stanley tells his overbearing father that he ought to be nicer to him. Beyond this visual and that verbal hint, there is one other clue to the structure (and the agency of the implied creator) binding these stories together. When Donnie goes to a gay bar, he talks about his past and the frustrations it has led to in his life. Once, he claims, he stood out as a Boy Genius. "Now," he continues, "I’m just another . . . another . . . "

As the model perceiver begins to grasp for appropriate cliches ("cog in the wheel"? "face in the crowd"?), an aging barfly (Henry Gibson) provides an apt but unusual metaphor: "Another spoke in the wheel." If we posit a creative agency such as an Implied Filmmaker, this one line is the key to its operation. All of the major narratives are linked not directly or as subsets of each other, but radiating as it were from a central point, in this case the television quiz show, What Do Kids Know? The most outrageous example of the manipulation of the diegesis, when the characters all lip-synch Aimee Mann’s "Wise Up," further underscores the film’s implications with its refrain of "It’s not going to stop . . . "

Whether such an explanation of the film’s structure and of the model filmmaker’s activity is adequate is undoubtedly open to debate. However, it does suggest a way in which the frustrations of a number of viewers and critics can be both explained and (perhaps) mollified. It is less easy to reconcile the operations of the lip-synch, the opening vignettes, the final froggy downpour, and the recurring numbers 8 and 2. All of these elements are much more overt acts of narration by a nondiegetic agency than the stories of the individual characters. As such, the film displays an unusually high degree of self-consciousness. Again, the model perceiver is prompted to look for a link among these elements and then to link them with the rest of the film’s narrative. As Eco points out, "The criteria [for understanding a text] . . . have to be presupposed even as you are trying to infer them from the evidence of the text" (112). If we take one criterion for understanding Magnolia to be that almost all of the connections in the film are meaningful ones, then we cannot dismiss the frogs and the numbers as mere, arbitrary play.

One cue for understanding the connections comes again from the film’s "hub," the television show, when the 8 and 2 references are clarified. A member of the studio audience holds up a card reading "Exodus 8:2," like those sports fans who constantly advertise "John 3:16." In this case, though, the biblical reference is to the Plague of Frogs, one of the plagues that eventually led to the freeing of the Hebrews from captivity in Egypt: "And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs" (King James Version). Even if such an overt reference links the numbers, the opening vignettes, and the final, actual "plague," there is still no overt link between this set of elements and the characters’ stories. However, assuming a purposeful agency, one final link might be made. The last of the Plagues was the death of the firstborn of Egypt. By inference, the sacrifice of children is the final answer to the question What Do Kids Know? [19]

Magnolia, then, presents us not only with overt acts of film "narration" that go beyond the usual visual and auditory agencies, but presents us in the end with a model creator deliberately manipulating the elements of the text to portray a moment in contemporary society and to call attention to the very act of that portrayal. Its closest fictional counterpart is not in some modernist or postmodern text, but in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, with its puppetmaster-narrator who takes the characters out of their box, displays them, and puts them back at the end. It was precisely this kind of overt manipulation that writers and critics in the realist tradition, following Henry James, have objected to. Whether the individual film viewer will accept—or even find—such agency in Magnolia will probably continue to be equally controversial.