Playing with narrative reconstruction

Narrative reconstruction is a cognitive process in which the viewer actively creates neural connections to make sense of a story. This playful and particularly rewarding space represents one of the richest interactions between a work and its audience.

A Widely Practiced Game

Screenwriters are often very skilled at playing with what I call narrative reconstruction. For instance, at the beginning of a film, we are immersed in a story without yet knowing its full context. As new information is introduced, we mentally reconstruct the logic of the story we are witnessing—if not participating in—since we are, in a way, the main character. This process brings great pleasure and, in my opinion, represents the most powerful moment of audience participation. It is something quite exhilarating.

The same process of narrative reconstruction occurs in a TV series, especially when we jump into the middle of it. In such cases, friends may explain the context to help us reconstruct the narrative. However, since they cannot tell us everything, we become highly active in piecing together the story ourselves. We grasp details within the plot, forming neural connections that allow us to navigate the narrative in an increasingly structured, ordered, and intelligible manner—ultimately making it a constructive experience for us. This is truly a construction happening within our brains, as concrete connections are formed between neurons.

Screenwriters deliberately play with narrative reconstruction because they understand that films are often watched with varying degrees of attention depending on the moment or even episodically in the case of TV series. This is especially relevant when, for example, we must wait a year and a half for the next season of a television series or the next episode of a franchise.

Creating a Connection with the Film

This space of narrative reconstruction is, in my view, one of the key areas where a film connects with its audience. It is one of the most rewarding and immersive interactive experiences for viewers. Everyone engages with it—whether consciously or not—which is why I wanted to highlight it explicitly. Sometimes, it even becomes the very subject of the film and a central source of enjoyment for the audience, as is often the case in franchises.
Take, for example, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction: one of the film’s unique aspects is how it invites the audience to engage in narrative reconstruction. Why do the two main characters, who were always dressed in black suits, suddenly appear in shorts and Hawaiian shirts while maintaining their usual unshakable seriousness? This film is often analyzed in terms of narrative inversion. While its overall narrative structure can be examined, a film’s subject is not merely its structure—it is its interaction with the audience.

In Pulp Fiction, the order of the sequences is ultimately secondary; what matters is how the film invites the audience into a game of narrative reconstruction. That is one of its essential themes.
This is why I emphasize the relationship between the spectator and the film. What I propose is to focus on the present moment—on pleasure, fear, laughter, curiosity, and questioning. Experiencing a film is not just about following a story and projecting emotions onto fictional characters; it is, above all, a sensory, emotional, physical, visual, and auditory experience.

I believe that Quentin Tarantino’s great strength in this film was his ability to make us experience something on a neuronal level—not just narratively—by transgressing cinematic conventions and playing with genre codes.

Writing in the Viewer’s Neurons

Of course, understanding emotions and engaging with a well-constructed story is important. But by focusing on narrative reconstruction, I want to emphasize that, ultimately, everything presented on screen organizes itself in our minds through the creation of new neural connections. It is possible to deliberately shape storytelling with this in mind.

I don’t have a ready-made solution, but as Quentin Tarantino attempted and experimented, I believe each of us can explore this concept in our own way—always keeping in mind what we aim to construct in the viewer’s brain.