232 EPILOGUE: DIGITAL VIDEO AND NEW FORMS OF NARRATIVE
band, Alex (Stellan Skarsgard), is bleeding to death from a wound and she is helpless to stop the blood. As the woman continues to discuss the problems with her marriage, the action of the quadrant on the upper left portion of the screen appears. Lauren (Jeanne Tripplehorn) approaches a car, deliberately lets the air out of one of its tires, and retreats to her limousine. Soon after, the owner of the sabotaged car, Rose (Salma Hayek), discovers the flat tire and somewhat grudgingly accepts a ride to Los Angeles in Lauren’s limousine. While this action occurs, the bottom quadrants of the split screen are filled in. They focus on action in various spaces of an office building that houses the Red Mullet film production company. As the plot evolves, we learn more about the characters and how they are related to one another. Alex, the wounded man described in the dream, is the depressed alcoholic head of Red Mullet Productions. Rose is an aspiring actress who is having an affair with Alex, hoping to get a part in one of his films. Lauren is Rose’s possessive lover who has lured her into her limousine by means of the flat tire so that she can put a listening device in her purse and hence keep her under constant surveillance. At the end of the film, as the result of her discovery of Rose’s affair with Alex (by means of her eavesdropping), Lauren shoots Alex in a fit of jealous rage. Alex ends up dying in a pool of blood, making Emma’s dream at the film’s beginning prophetic. Although it might seem that an action unfolding in four separate quadrants on the screen would be utterly confusing and hard to follow, several factors keep viewers oriented. First of all, Figgis employs the sound track to help focus our attention on important plot elements. We never hear the dialogue from all four quadrants simultaneously. Rather, the volume of the sound shifts from one quadrant to another, cueing us into which quadrant of the action we should focus on. Secondly, the action is carefully composed so that events important to the plot take place in only one, or at most two, of the quadrants at one time. Until she murders Alex at the end, Lauren’s action is confined to the upper left quadrant of the screen. Mostly she stays put in her limousine, accusing Rose of being unfaithful or, after she puts the bug in Rose’s purse, reacting to what she hears through her headphones. Emma, Alex’s wife, whose actions primarily occupy the upper right quadrant of the screen, announces to Alex that she is leaving him, and then spends a lot of time walking from place to place, leafing through books in a bookstore, or in fatuous conversation with Cherine (Leslie Mann), an aspiring actress who has auditioned for a part at Red Mullet Productions and, it turns out, was once Emma’s lover.