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...

I was told that when a young child challenges his parent, it’s actually a battle that he has no desire to win.  He craves delineation, the clarification of what is and is not permissible, and being told precisely where the line is drawn is often the only answer he needs.

I was also told that many actors, unsure of whether a director on a new production has any idea what he or she is doing, will challenge their new director to a symbolic duel, and that this, too, is a battle they do not truly want to win.  What they really want is reassurance that there actually is a mother- or father-figure on the shoot, one in whom they can place their trust, and who will allow them to play--fully, freely and with fewer inhibitions.

Which part is playground, which part is fence, and which part is forbidden, the Great Unknown?

I was riding with my mother in the front of the Beast, the pre-seat-belt-era station wagon with what appeared to be miles of bench seat from one side to the other.

I cautiously broached a tender subject, the most tender subject of a tender year:  what to do about Bruce.

Bruce was many things, including a little overweight, not very bright, prone to rounding his shoulders and ducking his head in reflexive deference to all, and operating without a clue how he might carry his massive vulnerability with anything resembling grace or style.

Bruce wanted to be my friend, and this was something he was making painfully clear to me all the time now.

I should mention at this point that I saw my existing social standing as problematic.

I was smart enough to almost get lumped in with the Brainiacs, but it’s important to remember what the world was like before it was cool to be a nerd.  

I would never be mistaken for an athlete.  

Occasionally I could get a solid laugh, and a good sense of humor could lead to a certain kind of popularity--but only if it could be sustained, if you could be the Clown On Demand.

It was entirely possible for me to end up a Zero--a kid who lacks the definition to belong anywhere.

If I started hanging out with Bruce, it was over for me.  It would be an unsurvivable mistake.

I brought my dilemma to my mother, there in the front seat of the Beast.  She was not a fan of eye contact, and since driving is a good excuse for not looking directly at your children, this was a perfect setting.

I had a vivid sense of how she would respond, when I asked her what I should do about the terror I felt about Bruce and his awkward, slobbering-puppy advances toward friendship.

She would refer, I was pretty certain, to some passage from the Bible that would remind me how Jesus exhorted us to be kind, especially to the unpopular ones, the ones to whom no one else would extend a hand.  I knew that it wasn’t likely to contain any concrete tactics for me, no implementable strategies, but it would offer instead a hearty shame-based motivation to be a better person, to quit being so selfish.

She started nodding, her eyes narrowing.

“Don’t you just hate people like that?” she asked rhetorically.

I sat, stunned, staring out the front window until I had the courage to sneak a glance her way, to see if that was all I was going to get.

“Yeah.  Yeah, I do,” I mumbled, when I realized she was done.

All at once, I saw that the playground had no fence, the Great Unknown was actually the Great Unknowable, and it was even possible that I had been wrong about the playground being a playground in the first place.

It was also when I began wondering if there might be someone else in my world to whom I should be bringing questions like this.