 SOMETHING'S ABOUT TO HAPPEN, AND IT'S GOING TO GET UGLY. | I think I can permanently alter one of the ways you think about films. Screenwriters know that the opening moments of a film should offer some of the sights, sounds and visceral sensations of its ending. It’s one of the tools filmmakers use to heighten the experience of their story feeling resolved at its end: "Wait, this place looks familiar--hey, look, we’re home!" A matching pair of bookends. The makers of lower-budget horror films, long a busy training ground for new directors, sometimes don't realize the importance of this idea until post-production. The script always had that iconic opening: a beautiful sunny day in suburbia, the whir of a bicycle’s wheels as the paper boy weaves up the street, tossing papers… We love this. It’s movie code for: Everything may look okay now, but something’s about to happen, and it’s going to get ugly. But it doesn’t make a good bookend for the grisly, harrowing ending. They can sense that there's a problem in early screenings, something to do with the ending, and finally someone with more experience clues them in: the title sequence needs to feel like the ending. So in come the jagged sound effects, the jittery, blood-drenched titles and the screeching violins--a nifty title sequence is born, and the movie finds its missing bookend. I like to ask student filmmakers to explain how it is that The Sixth Sense, which has a famously satisfying reversal at its end, can work at all. Hasn’t the whole movie presented itself as a psychological thriller with paranormal overtones? How can an ending be satisfying if it says, essentially, “Just kidding, this isn’t that kind of movie, it’s a straight-up ghost story!” Most filmmakers pay dearly with harsh reviews and poor box office when they pull a fast one, starting in one genre and jumping the tracks to end up in another. With this in mind, I ask students to describe the opening scene of The Sixth Sense. They oblige by describing a scene in which Bruce Willis and Olivia Williams have a little bit of wine after returning home from an event at which he has received an award for being such a terrific child psychologist. Only when they head upstairs to their bedroom do they realize someone has broken into their home and is hiding in their bathroom--and the story is set in motion. But that isn’t the first scene of the movie. Even after challenging devoted fans of the movie to think very carefully about this, they always insist that it is, indeed, the first scene. In reality, the movie opens as a classic, by-the-numbers ghost story, with a dim light bulb in close-up, barely flickering to life. Olivia Williams tiptoes down the creaky basement stairs, seen in what might be a point-of-view shot (is someone hiding in the basement, watching her?), a gust of chilly air startles her, and she hastily selects a bottle of wine and races back upstairs--all the hallmarks of a ghost story. No one consciously remembers the scene, and yet it does its job, serving as the perfect bookend to help the enormous reversal at the end feel inevitable. Sometimes bookending is completely literal. J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III actually starts with its harrowing final scene, and abruptly cuts away to start the story at the beginning. This is the most in-your-face way to announce to an audience, “That was our mind-blowing destination, now sit back and wait till you see how we get there.” Would our anticipation of rollercoaster rides be anywhere near as powerful if we couldn’t hear, before we buckle in, the screams of the riders ahead of us in line? I dare you not to think about this trick during the opening scenes of movies you watch from now on... |
