Reverse chronology

Reverse chronology is a method of story-telling whereby theplot is revealed in reverse order.

In a story employing this technique, the first scene shown is actually the conclusion to the plot. Once that scene ends, the penultimate
scene is shown, and so on, so that the final scene the viewer sees is the first chronologically
.

Many stories employ flashback, showing prior events, but whereas the scene order of most conventional films is A-B-C-etc., a film in
reverse chronology goes Z-Y-X-etc.

As a hypothetical example, if thefairy tale Jack and the Beanstalkwas told using reverse chronology, the opening scene would depict
Jack chopping the beanstalk down and killing the giant. The next scene would feature Jack being discovered by the giant and
climbing down the beanstalk in fear of his life. Later, we would see Jack running into the man with the infamous magic beans, then,
at the end of the film, being sent off by his mother to sell the cow.

Contents
Purpose
Examples of use
Literature
Theatre
Film
Television
Comics
Anime
Music
Video game
See also
References

Purpose
The unusual nature of this method means it is only used in stories of a specific nature. For example, Memento features a man with
anterograde amnesia, meaning he is unable to form new memories. The film parallels the protagonist's perspective by unfolding in
reverse chronological order, leaving the audience as ignorant of the events that occurred prior to each scene (which, played in reverse
chronological order, will not be revealed until later) as the protagonist is.

In the film Irréversible, an act of homicidal violence takes place at the start of the movie (i. e., it is the final event to take place).
During the remainder of the film we learn not only that the violence is an act of vengeance, but what exactly is being avenged. The
film was highly controversial for its graphic nature; had the scenes been shown in chronological order, this violent content would
make it a simple, and pointlessly brutal, revenge movie. However, as it is, told in reverse, the audience is made to consider the exact
consequences of each action, and there is often "more than meets the eye."

Examples of use

Literature
The epic poem Aeneid, written by Virgil in the 1st century BC, uses reverse chronology within scenes.[1] In "The Three Apples", a
murder mystery in the One Thousand and One Nights, the middle part of the story shows a flashback of events leading up to the
discovery of a dead body at the beginning of the story.[2] The action of W. R. Burnett's novel, Goodbye to the Past (1934), moves
continually from 1929 to 1873.[3] Edward Lewis Wallant uses flashbacks in reverse chronology in The Human Season (1960).[4] The
novel Christopher Homm (1965), by C. H. Sisson, is also told in reverse chronology.[5]

Philip K. Dick, in his 1967 novel Counter-Clock World, describes a future in which time has started to move in reverse, resulting in
the dead reviving in their own graves ("old-birth"), living their lives in reverse, eventually ending in returning to the womb, and
splitting into an egg and a sperm during copulation between a recipient woman and a man. The novel was expanded from Dick's short
story "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday", first published in the August 1966 edition ofAmazing Stories.

Martin Amis's 1991 novel Time's Arrow tells the story of a man who, it seems, brings dead people to life. Eventually it is revealed
that the story is being seen backwards, and he was a doctor at Auschwitz who brought death to live people. He escaped to the United
States, and the novel starts with his death and ends with his birth. Amis writes in the Afterword that he had a "certain paragraph"
from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1969) in mind. As he waits to be taken by aliens to the planet Tralfamadore, the
protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, watches a war movie backwards. American planes full of holes fly backwards as German planes suck
bullets from them; bombers take their bombs back to base where they are returned to the States, reduced to ore and buried. The
American fliers became high school kids again, and, Billy guesses, Hitler ultimately returns to babyhood.

Iain Banks's novel Use of Weapons interweaves two parallel stories, one told in standard chronology and one in reverse, both
concluding at a critical moment in the main character's life.

Julia Alvarez's novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents opens in 1989 with one of the characters returning to her native
Dominican Republic. The story of why the family left and their attempts to succeed in New York are told in reverse chronological
order, with the last events happening in 1956.[6]

Theatre
A number of plays have employed this technique. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's 1934 play, Merrily We Roll Along, is told in
reverse order, as is the Harold Pinter play Betrayal (1978). Kaufman and Hart's play was adapted as a musical comedy by Stephen
Sondheim in 1981, and Pinter's play was made intoa film in 1983.

Film
In 1927, Jean Epstein's La glace à trois faces (The Three Sided Mirror) features a sequence where the events happen in reverse,
beginning with the protagonist's exit from a room until the viewer sees the entrance. The Czech comedy Happy End (1966) is a farce
which starts with a guillotined man finding his head popped back on his shoulders and ends with him as a new-born being pushed
back into his mother's womb.[7] Atom Egoyan, influenced by Pinter's plays, tells the story of The Sweet Hereafter (1997) in reverse
chronology, with the first scene of the film set in 1977 and the last in 1968.[8] The technique was later employed in Peppermint
Candy (2000), by South Korean director Lee Chang-dong; in Memento (2000), a mystery directed by Christopher Nolan about short
term memory loss; and in Jean-Luc Godard's short film De l'origine du XXIe siècle pour moi (2000).[9] In Irréversible (2002), the
technique is used so thoroughly that the end credits are not only shown at the beginning of the movie, but they roll down the screen,
rather than upwards as is familiar.

The first several scenes in 2003's filmIdentity, starring John Cusack, occur in reverse order.

The 2004 film 5x2, directed by François Ozon, tells the story of a relationship between two people in five episodes using reverse
chronology.[10]

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind(2004), a main substory is told in reverse.

Coup de Sang, a French film by Jean Marboeuf (2006), uses limited reverse chronology. The film begins with the revelation that the
main character will commit a murder one week from the next scene, although it is not revealed who will be killed or why
.

In the 2007 movie P.S. I Love You, the scenes in which Gerry Kennedy (Gerard Butler) meets and courts Holly (Hilary Swank) are
shown in reverse.[11]

In the 2010 Tamil movie, Manmadan Ambu, the song "Neela Vaanam" (visuals inspired by Coldplay's "The Scientist") is shown in a
reverse sequence.

Television
The made-for-television drama Two Friends (1986), by Jane Campion, and the 1997 episode, "The Betrayal", of the hit sitcom
Seinfeld, employs the technique. The Seinfeld episode is a take-off of the Harold Pinter play "Betrayal" and has a character named
"Pinter."[9] The 2000 X-Files episode Redrum (in which a character experiences the events in reverse along with the audience) and
the 2002 ER episode, "Hindsight", does as well. A 1997 "Star Trek: Voyager" episode, "Before and After", which writer Kenneth
Biller claimed was based on a Martin Amis novel "Time's Arrow", also features a character experiencing the events in reverse along
with the audience. Sealab 2021 episode "Shrabster" is also in reverse order. For a few seasons, the revived "Doctor Who" had an
extensive storyline focusing on a relationship between the Doctor and his companions' daughter (River Song) from the future based
on "opposite timelines" (i.e., as the Doctor was travelling through time on one path, River was travelling on an opposite path) causing
them to interact in opposite chronological order. In 2017, the British tv mini-series Rellik (Killer backwards) tells a story about a
serial killer in backwards order. In 2018, the episode "Once Removed", from the series "Inside No. 9" uses reverse chronology to tell
a dark story about a family who is moving house, and the murder that subsequently begins.

Comics
The story "The Time Eater" from issue 40 of the comic "Vampirella", scripted by Jack Butterworth and published in 1975, included
the concept of human lives running backwards. People were shown to be exhumed, reunited with families, separated from their
spouses in order to attend school, and finally returned to the womb. Dialogue was reversed also. Alan Moore's 1983 short story "The
Reversible Man" from issue 308 of the comic "2000AD" told an ordinary man's life backwards, using the same concept as
Butterworth but recasting it as a first-person narrative. Brian K. Vaughan wrote an issue of the ongoing Midnighter series told in
reverse chronology. The issue explored the fact that the character Midnighter has the ability to calculate millions of possible scenarios
for any given situation.The issue does not have the scenes in reverse order
, but rather the individual pages run backwards.

Issue 43 of Bongo's "Simpsons Comics" is told in reverse order: the story opens with a depiction of a crane lifting a crashed car out
of a lake; each subsequent scene (which lasts for one page) carries a caption informing the reader that it took place, for instance, "20
minutes earlier". The penultimate page jumps back thirty years and showsHomer Simpson as a child

Anime
The 2007 anime television series Touka Gettan employed entirely this narrative method. All 26 episodes were aired in
chronologically reverse order, with the first episode being the ending of the story while the last epi
sode being the beginning.

Music
The lyrics to "All Along the Watchtower", written by Bob Dylan, are, he says, "in a rather reverse order"; indeed, the final verse
begins with the words "All along the watchtower", and if reversed, theverses would tell the story in the correct order.

The lyrics to "Apparition. Apparitions." by Trophy Scars describe the events leading up to a woman's suicide in reverse order,
beginning with her death and ending with her initial romance with her boyfriend.

The song "One Thing Leads to Another" by the Pet Shop Boys (on a limited release of their 1993 album Very) describes the events
leading up to a man's death in reverse order.
Multiple music videos, includingColdplay's "The Scientist" use reverse chronology in which a scene plays backwards while someone
sings normally. This is done by filming the video chronologically but getting the actor to sing the lyrics backwards. The music video
for Enigma's "Return to Innocence" uses reverse chronology showing a man's life, beginning with his death as an old man and ending
with his baptism as an infant. The music video for Linkin Park's "Bleed It Out" also uses the same method, whereas the band
performs normally, but everything else is reversed. In 2016, Malaysian Singer-Songwriter Yuna uses reverse chronology in her music
video "Lanes".

The events of the song "Reverse" bySomeKindaWonderful, as said in the title itself, are told in reverse chronology
.

The lyrics in "Rewind" by NaS also tell a story in reverse chronology

, with some of the dialogue even being in reverse order
.

"Good Mistake" Album by Bahram Nouraei is the first Iranian concept album ever made inspired by reverse chronology as the
storytelling method.[12]

There have also been several discussions as to how the picturisation of Neela Vaanam "Manmadan Ambu" (sung by Kamal Haasan
himself) has been slightly inspired from official video of Coldplay's The Scientist. The whole song has been depicted in such a way
so as to highlight the events that led to the death of Mannar's (Kamal's character) French wife Juliet, in reverse.

Video game
The announcement trailer of 2011 video game, Dead Island, also present in reverse chronological order with flash of chronological
action edited into the whole video.[13]

See also
In medias res
Nonlinear narrative

References
1. Albrecht, Michael von; & Schmeling, Gareth L. (1997).History of Roman Literature: From Livius Andronicus to
Boethius, Vol. 1. Brill. p. 681. ISBN 90-04-09630-2
2. Pinault, David (1992). Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights. Brill Publishers. pp. 86–94. ISBN 90-04-
09530-6.
3. Bordwell, David (April 2006).The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. University of California
Press. p. 91. ISBN 0-520-24622-5
4. Serafin, Steven; & Bendixen, Alfred (2003).The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature
. Continuum
International Publishing Group. p. 1189. ISBN 0-8264-1517-2
5. Head, Dominic (2006).The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. Cambridge University Press. p. 1036. ISBN 0-
521-83179-2
6. http://www.arls.org/2011/11/arls-teen-book-review-how-the-garcia-girls-lost-their-accents/
7. "Cinema: Happy End" (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,841358,00.html). Time. 1968-06-28.
Retrieved 2010-05-22.
8. MacDermott, Felim; & McGrath, Declan (2003).Screenwriting. Focal Press. p. 172. ISBN 0-240-80512-7
9. Gateward, Frances K. (2007).Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema
. SUNY Press.
p. 136. ISBN 0-7914-7225-6
10. Scott, A. O. (2005-02-07)."We're Sorry" (http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=313595)
. The
New York Times. Retrieved 2010-05-22.
11. Calamari, Alexandra (2007)."P.S. I Love You" (http://www.cinemablend.com/reviews/P-S-I-Love-You-2797.html).
Cinema Blend. Retrieved July 7, 2014.
12. "Bahram Nouraei — Official Website" (http://bahramnouraei.com/about#/). bahramnouraei.com.
13. "Dead Island: Official Announcement Trailer" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZqrG1bdGtg). youtube.com.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reverse_chronology&oldid=851283194
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