Part of the reading this week, the comic Blood in the Gutter by Scott McCloud, explains that people are very good at filling in the blanks when given partial or incomplete information. For example, if in one image we see a woman riding a bicycle, and then in the next image the bicycle is upturned and the woman is lying on the ground, we can infer that between the two images the woman fell off the bicycle, even if we don’t actually see this part of the scene occurring. This is called closure.

Closure is a really intriguing phenomenon, and when reading McCloud’s piece I was reminded of an incredible example I discovered at the Melbourne International Film Festival a few years ago.

The film is called Michael, it’s a relatively obscure Austrian film from 2011 that follows an insurance salesman as he quietly and unassumingly goes about his mundane daily existence. It’s all very boring, but for the fact that he has a 10-year-old boy, Wolfgang, locked in his basement. The relationship between Michael and Wolfgang, on screen at least, is basically parental: they have breakfast together in the morning, Michael goes to work (having locked Wolfgang away), they play musical instruments together at night, watch television, etc.

The film never actually portrays Michael abusing Wolfgang in any way, but that is clearly the subtext of what’s going on. Amazingly, this aspect of the story happens entirely in the mind of the audience. The viewer has to realise and understand what’s happening off screen, and how awful it is, using closure. And because of this, in many ways Michael is a far more disturbing film than if it had shown the abuse on screen.

This is an extreme example, obviously, but it’s interesting how editing can force a viewer to imagine things in their own mind against their will.