What's the director trying to say when he abruptly jumps into flashbacks
without giving any hint that they're coming?
Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea liberally uses these unannounced flashbacks
It opens with one - with Casey Affleck's Lee Chandler and his nephew
the young Patrick engaging in playful banter on a boat
Back in the present when Lee takes the elevator down to see the body of his brother Joe
We flash back to the time when Joe was first diagnosed with a heart condition
By setting the two scenes in the same building but years apart
Lonergan makes us wonder for a moment if we've misunderstood to think that Joe's died
Lee's going down in the elevator and then he's in a hospital room with the still alive Joe
Then we noticed that the doctor Dr. Bethany was referenced in the earlier scene
as being on maternity leave
And when we returned back to the elevator
we understand clearly that we've just seen a flashback
Later as Lee is faced with the prospect of becoming a guardian
"I can't be his guardian"
We cut back and forth between this scene and the most crucial unannounced flashback
Giving us a window into the pain inside Lee's mind
And explaining why he feels unequipped to father Patrick despite his evident love for the boy
All this brings us to the question: why does Lonergan keep us on our toes
by making us decipher where each scene fits in the timeline
To answer this question, it's helpful to look back in film history
and see how flashbacks have been done in the past
how they're usually done in the present
and the different roles they can play in a narrative
The director usually credited with first using flashbacks is D. W. Griffith
Griffith referred to them as "switchbacks"
But the flashback remained a rarely used technique in the 20s
audiences weren't used to seeing flashbacks so they needed a long clumsy
or a natural explanation to understand what was going on
A writer in 1921 called the flashback a "murderous assault on the imagination"
By the late 30s and early 40s the flashback became less experimental
and more standard fare in Hollywood
William Wyler's 1939 film Wuthering Heights, like the novel
is mostly told through flashbacks via Ellen the housekeeper
In 1941's Citizen Kane, Orson Welles uses flashbacks creatively
framing Kane's life retrospectively through different points of view
to reflect on the enigmatic protagonist
And in 1942, Michael Curtiz's Casablanca seamlessly flashes back to Paris
to explain the lovers' backstory without confusing his audience in the slightest
In all these classic cases, flashbacks don't come out of the blue
In Wuthering Heights, the camera tracks out from the narrator
to introduce the story of Heathcliff and Cathy
In Citizen Kane the flashback begins with a sequence of a track in from behind
An extreme closeup of the words the reporter is reading
and a cross-dissolve to the childhood scene in the snow
In Casablanca, the camera tracks in on Rick as he sits alone
and the picture blurs before cross dissolving into his Paris memories
1944's Double Indemnity, told through multiple flashbacks
focuses on a narrator talking into a dictaphone
and uses cross dissolves as the means of transition
1950's Sunset Boulevard, told by a dead man in a pool
begins with a cross-dissolve as well
All of these examples use clear visual means to announce the flashback
and to bookend our journey back to the past
While a really obvious zoom or dissolve might look a Gimmicky in a flashback today
a lot of the visual announcement techniques in the 30s and 40s are still used today
in combination with some other developments
Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects in 1995 sticks to the old school in one scene
where the camera tracks in on Verbal
but it also goes with extreme close-ups, tinted and choppy sequences
and other techniques for the flashbacks that invariably follow Verbal's narration
Just as if he were the noirish narrator of Double Indemnity or Sunset Boulevard
In the Bourne Identity, the flashback sequence literally flashes
cutting back and forth and also featuring jarring images
Pulp Fiction announces its non-linearity through title cards
So does 500 Days of Summer
Over time, film language has developed a variety of types of flashback
such as the testimonial or confessional flashback
the conversational flashback
The object-triggered flashback
The thought-triggered flashback
And the filmmaker-initiated flashback
Flashbacks can also have mixed or contradictory functions
The obvious function of many flashbacks is to provide exposition or backstory
but when the flashback only serves its purpose
it's often regarded as lazy and unimaginative storytelling
Used more creatively it can serve as point of view, either of the protagonist
or of a variety of characters to show different sides of a story
or present competing views of a character or an event
Or flashbacks can also create the feeling of a puzzle
Forcing the audience to piece together moments like detectives solving a mystery
So that we're invested in answering the deep questions of the story ourselves
Other films like Manchester choose to cut the effects and the middleman, namely the narrator
and go straight into flashbacks without announcing them
Alain Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour offers an early example
of using unannounced flashbacks to mimic flashes of memory
suggesting how vividly past feelings persist in the present
Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall flows freely between the past and present
Flashbacks can take place with no hint at all
as when Alvy reflecting on how he first met Annie
or with lines that lasts a split second
"You were very hot for Allison at first"
"Were you always funny?"
"We had that argument just last month, don't you remember that day?"
As Alvy states at the beginning
"I keep sifting the pieces of the relationship through my mind
and pieces are exactly how Alvy remembers Annie
As he reflects on what went wrong, time becomes of little relevance
Alvy can't get over in his memories
Lonergan's flashbacks in Manchester give us total fluidity of time
to represent a character who is tortured and imprisoned by his past
Just as for Alvy or Elle, Lee's memories intrude on his present
and shape his ongoing life
So to set them off as finished or behind him would be misleading
The past isn't over for Lee
His past colors his present and makes life unbearable
The non-linearity mirrors the experience of grief
for a heart that will never be unbroken
Also far from being purely expositional
the flashbacks here are emotional
Each one presents an event of life-changing consequence to Lee
The flashback to Joe's first diagnosis is the beginning of his loss of his beloved brother
which from that point on is certain and only a matter of time
The flashback to Lee's great tragedy explains the thing that we can't shake off
"I can't beat it"
The reason he's terrified to be Patrick's guardian
and why he won't involve himself in normal human interactions
The flashback to the happier days revolve around Joe's boat
and joyful time spent on the water
In many films water tends to be a symbol for emotional states
and a coastal area or beach can represent the place
where our daily logical selves meet our emotional selves
When Lee looks out the window at the Manchester landscape and punches the window
He's grappling with his painful past but he's also
refusing to confront and accept his own emotions
He tells Randy "there's nothing there"
Because he views himself as dead inside
like the frosty winter ground that is evidently too cold for Joe to be buried in
But the happy flashbacks reminding Lee of the life he wishes he could go back to
torture him the most
because while he would prefer to be dead inside
his emotions remain all too painfully strong
The film's title and namesake, the town of Manchester by the Sea, Massachusetts
is Lee Chandler's dream and nightmare
He led a happy life there until the unspeakable tragedy
from which point on he's been fighting to leave it behind
Manchester is more than a place
To Lee, it's romance, it's fatherhood and all forms of human connection
None of which Lee now feels capable of sustaining
Like some other flashbacks mentioned before
Lonergan's have an element of the puzzle or mystery too
As audiences work to stitch together Lee's timeline
The central mystery we're solving is the question of
whether Lee has really changed or can change
The non-linearity plays into this mystery because it highlights Lee's own fear
that he can never again recover, connect or be responsible for another human being
"Do you want to be his guardian?"
But like the winter that thaws into spring at the end of the film
Lee returns to the boat with Patrick in a final scene which echoes the very first
The mirrored framing suggests that Lee is finally thawing too
If only in small limited steps like looking for extra bedrooms
so Patrick can stay with him overnight
"Yeah I was looking for one extra room"
He's recognizing that some emotional life still exists in him
and no longer denying his deepest self or his potential to feel again