Adam-Troy Castro

Writer of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Stories About Yams.

 

On Moviegoers Who Ignore the Story To Get to the “Good Parts”

Posted on June 16th, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro

A movie thread encountered on a friend’s Facebook wall included a reply that, in all seriousness and with no leavening irony, painted THE GODFATHER and THE FRENCH CONNECTION in particular, the movies of the early seventies in general, as the dark age that STAR WARS rescued us from.

Gad. God. Gad.

When I reacted with horror, somebody said, “To be fair, Godfather and French Connection are BORING. I can’t even get through all the talking in Connection to get to the cool car chase.”

Gad. God. Gad.

I think what may be going on here is akin to what happened when I showed somebody the great John Sayles film, MATEWAN. There’s a lengthy sequence where two sympathetic characters have been manipulated into thinking that a third is a traitor, and that their only option is to kill him. Maybe ten minutes on screen of inconsequential conversation, leading up to the moment of truth, even as, elsewhere, another character finds out that they’ve been played and races to alert his friends that the assassination will be a bad mistake.

Incredibly tense.

Immediately after the assassination is called off and the two would-be killers react with relief at not having to do this awful thing, my friend said, “When will something happen in this movie??”

To me, everything that had gone on before that was apocalyptic. He didn’t even realize anybody was in danger. He just thought the movie was marking time.

Another friend said this to me three quarters of the way through JEAN DE FLORETTE. “Does this movie EVER start?” On that occasion, there were four other rapt individuals watching it in the same living room, and they all said, “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you get that major stuff is happening here, that crimes are being committed and that there‘s a tragedy looming?”

I got that verdict from a young man exposed to TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE for the first time, who started saying it while Bogey and Holt were still hanging around that Mexican town, bumming handouts. “Nothing’s happening!”

Look, plenty is happening. You are watching the trap these men are in, you are seeing how Bogey burns through any money he gets the second it’s in his hands. You are seeing who they are and you are getting your first clues to how they will react to the prospect of wealth. THAT way, what happens next will matter. But he was incapable of seeing it.A lot of what goes on in great, great movies is not on the surface. It’s beneath the surface, the shadow of the shark as it glides through shallow water, even if the actual dialogue spoken obscures it.

In contrast, a lot of today’s movies are made up of declaratory sentences, meaning all lying on the surface for somebody with a pool net to scoop from the ripples. They’re made so that they can perfectly understood even when your eyes are focused on your texting.

A lot of what goes on in great, great movies is not on the surface. It’s beneath the surface, the shadow of the shark as it glides through shallow water, even if the actual dialogue spoken obscures it.

The problem is that for too many of you, brutalized by too many productions that take place all on the surface, *dialogue* is just the shit you have to sit through while awaiting the next set of explosions.

I have actually heard that from kids in their early teens, but also seen it in adults: “I don’t actually pay attention to the talking parts.”

Which is fine if the only movies you see are the ones which have heroes who are dressed like heroes fighting bad guys who are dressed like bad guys, and the action scenes comprise more than fifty percent of the total. I can understand the appeal of this. You can in many cases “follow” a James Bond film, or one like it, just by zoning out during the exposition and waiting for the next car chase sure to come along in ten minutes; you won’t get any other story values, but sometimes there aren’t any. (And sometimes there are.) What you won’t do, if this is the way you’ve trained yourself to consume a movie, is get anything else. You won’t know that when Indy talks to Belloq in that Cairo café, he’s in deadly danger though no guns are drawn; and you certainly won’t get that the one coal miner, misled by company propaganda, is about to unnecessarily murder the other in MATEWAN. Nor will you ever be able to appreciate the fine dance of manipulation that is THE MALTESE FALCON.

Telling stories is a skill. So is following them.

And what we’re seeing is that many folks have allowed that later skill to atrophy, to a horrifying degree.

26 Responses to "On Moviegoers Who Ignore the Story To Get to the “Good Parts”"

  1. Not all slow-paced, quiet stories work for me (confession: I do like me some explosions), but that slow build of tension as something monumental looms and the characters process it? That’s one of the great joys of storytelling, for both readers and writers.

  2. I’m in the group that thinks The Godfather is overrated, but not because it’s “slow”. I don’t think it is.
    But then again, my favorite Bogart movie for a long long time was The Treasure of the Sierra Madre…I think it’s probably The Maltese Falcon now (try as I might, the McGuffin in Casablanca still throws me out of the story).

  3. I’m reminded of people who skip around romance novels in search of “the sexy bits”… :: facepalm ::

  4. Even in a move full of xplody stuff, can’t those folks be bothered to even WONDER why the stuff is going all xplody? Gah indeed.

  5. The son of a friend of mine, grown, says to him, “Why do they even bother putting in the talking parts?”

  6. He must love silent movies!

  7. This is how we get movies like that recent first-person shooter.

  8. A friend of mine does this. We were watching Picnic at Hanging Rock and she starts fast forwarding through the movie. I kind of freaked out.

  9. One of the screens great suspense films SEVEN DAYS IN MAY has perhaps five minutes of action in it, everything else is incredibly fine and perfectly cast actors talking and reacting to each other. One of the most dramatic scenes between Frederic March and Burt Lancaster actually works because one character does not escalate the conflict by introducing an element of the plot introduced earlier.

    I recently watched the film LISA about a Dutch policeman who helps a concentration camp survivor reach Palestine in post war Europe. Afterward I wanted to check something on IMDB and looked at the comments. I was shocked to find how many could not follow the ending because what happens is not shown but implied and left for the viewer to understand based on the protagonists character.

    To some extent people have forgotten how to read and interpret film storytelling.

  10. I ran into something like this just this week regarding Game of Thrones. Apparently, Arya Stark’s character arc over the last two seasons was all a big “waste of time” where “nothing happened”. I guess all that tension over whether or not she would completely surrender her identity, continuation of her cycle of bonding and loss, and constant subtext (occasionally made text) about the hollowness of revenge didn’t matter because it didn’t end with her flipkicking onto the back of a dragon while something exploded. Character development? What’s that, and how loud and shiny is it?

  11. I just tell them to watch some more Jackass videos and leave the “boring” movies to the grown-ups.

  12. Oh, you have just made my day – no, make that my month – by mentioning one of my favourite movies, Jean de Florette!

  13. The first time I can recall a major film ending with a cliffhanger, an event that came more and more frequently in times to come.

  14. Well, it is based (very accurately too) on a novel which was one half of a two part story. The equally wonderful sequel, if you haven’t already found it, is called “Manon des Sources”.

  15. Oh, believe me, I know. Way back when, I made a point of seeing both, got the books, and now own both DVDs.

  16. If you haven’t come across them, you may also enjoy another pair of films based on books by the same author, Marcel Pagnol – ‘La Gloire de Mon Pere’ and ‘Le Chateaux de Ma Mere’. Beautifully filmed, expertly crafted, absolutely heartbreaking in places.

  17. I had a friend who only liked “explosion” movies. One night we were all tripping on acid and we made him watch “My Dinner With Andre”. WE were quite amused. Him not so much. :p

  18. I think some of this has to do with how the modern world has eroded our attention span. Kids who’ve never known a world without the Internet are used to instant gratification, even in – maybe especially in – their entertainment. They’re not used to having to work or think to understand something. And so the film industry caters to them and we wind up with movies full of explosions and very little else, and a generation that can’t understand subtle and nuanced storytelling.

  19. Nah, there were always people like that, and there always will be (just, thanks to the internet, you actually hear from them more).. I’ve run into people like this my whole life and I’m over half a century old.

  20. Except people said the same thing about my generation and our video games and Sesame Street. Or my parents’ generation and TV. Probably my grandparents and radio, too.

  21. Probably true, but I think the Internet has made it immeasurably worse. As recently as 20 years ago, I don’t think you saw nearly as much of the kind of thing Adam-Troy talks about – and, not coincidentally, you still saw more movies with the kind of storytelling he talks about. Everyone had seen classic movies like THE GODFATHER and they were an integral part of the broad cultural conversation. Today, not so much.

    This is a terrific book I recommend to everyone, about the impact the Internet has had on our modes of thinking: http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=16

  22. Well, my 17yo son the other day sat down to rewatch his favourite recent film, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, but considering the shit he has to put up with when he goes to see films with his friends, I’m guessing he’s the exception.

  23. It is astounding, people, how slowly-paced RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (for instance), comes off, nowadays, and even THEN, even THEN, I observed audience members, halfway through the film, asking things like why Indy was in Egypt.

  24. Last weekend my partner and I spotted that ‘Silent Running’ was about to be shown on one of our channels, so we eagerly sat down to watch it. Loved it as much as ever, but at one point early on, I turned to Phil and remarked “They’d never put such a slow, quiet ten minute section of ‘nothing much happens’ in a modern movie”.

  25. I guess you haven’t seen DRIVE.

  26. One of my favorite movies: GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS. No explosions, no car chases, ten times the gripping conflict of ten superhero movies.

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