Like its representation in Nashville (1975), Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), The Player (1992) and Prêt-à-Porter, the world of entertainment is both treasured and condemned for its fascinating and coercive images.
Gosford Park reconstructs classical narrative form in many ways: It ironically interweaves numerous genres – the Agatha Christie murder mystery, the upstairs/downstairs social drama, and the country house comedy of manners. Forty-four speaking parts in the film provide glimpses into the tangled implications of over 25 separate plots and constitute one of the largest cast of characters of all his multifaceted narratives from MASH (1970) to Prêt-à-Porter (1994). In Gosford Park logical causality disappears under the pressure of traumatic engagements that are not only unspoken by the narrative but are repressed by the characters themselves. The classically requisite discovery of the culprit at the end is contravened by the geometric progression of alternative clues and Altman’s insistence that the murder is never resolved. The confusing multiplication of plot lines and the hybrid mixing of murder, manners, maids, and man servants critiques a singular and stereotypical view of crime, justice, and social class by subverting the classic detective story. The film breaks the ideological illusion of harmony between masters and servants valorised in cultural representations like the 1970s British television series Upstairs/Downstairs. It reveals hypocrisy and meanness in the class system where social crimes and misdemeanors multiply and expand beyond the ability or the interests of the mystery story to say ask “who dunnit?”.
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