catch his face as he coughs several times, then it backs down again to the pendants that swing around his chest. It hurries a second time up to his face, then swishes right to his blurry image in the mirror. Swish back to the face and down to the hands, which open a box of sleeping pills. Cut to a wider shot that tilts to the side as the man puts some pills in his mouth. Cut to an extreme close-up of his hand on a faucet and the glass being filled with water. Quick tilt to the face: he swallows hard. We catch his face as he removes his jacket and notices new marks of the disease on his body. The camera jerks back up again in a close-up to note his reaction. His fingers in extreme close-up gently touch the blemishes on his skin. Back up again. Then down the arm. He hits the sink in a shot that is defocused. Etc., etc. This remarkable sequence makes us share his anguish, his pain, his anger. With the help of the handheld camera, the tight subjective shots, the defocused moments, the quick displacements on the body that are motivated by the character's own preoccupation rather than outside interests, we become one with the man. Like the surgeon, we are with him, inside of him. We respond to his impulses. We "experience" what he is going through. We become him.
Showing, telling, experiencing: these are the choices. To prefer one does not mean you have to exclude the others. Also do not forget that all three approaches involve manipulative strategies for, in Wayne C. Booth's words, "the author cannot choose whether to use rhetorical heightening. His only choice is of the kind of rhetoric he will use. 58
XII
If all three arrangements involve a level of storytelling and all three provide readers with instructions "about how to read the text and how to account for the selection and ordering of its components," does it really matter which one is selected?59 Isn't it a question of what works best for this particular subject? Or even one of personal style? Most of the time it probably does not matter. Will the protagonists survive the sinking of the ship? Will the meteor hit the earth? Will the aliens be repelled once again? At times though the issue becomes critical. What are we to make of the scene when someone is butchered with a chain saw in Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983) or the car murder scene in Quentin Tarrantino's Pulp Fiction (1994)? In the first case we are left to imagine what is taking place in the adjacent room, in the second we are immediate witnesses of the "acci-
