Reasonable expectations

My brother-in-law, Jim, and I were talking last night about movies. He said the kind he doesn't like are movies that jump around in time. I'm sure a lot of people--maybe most movie-goers--might agree. The best example of this would be Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, which was told in a circuitous way. When I first saw it in a theater I was surprised and discombobulated by seeing the John Travolta character killed, then alive in a subsequent scene. I figured it out, though, and enjoyed the unusual way of telling a story.

What Jim says makes a lot of sense if you consider the way people view movies, or what their reasonable expectations are while watching them. If a story is told in a series of flashbacks or flash forwards it risks confusing and/or enraging the audience, who have come to an understanding of how movies are constructed. We go into the theater expecting a beginning, middle and end. If we get end, middle, beginning, or middle, end, beginning, or any other combination it can cause us to distrust the storyline, maybe even give up trying to follow it.

While I might like an unusual approach to storytelling, I'm also a believer in not pissing off or confusing the audience. If a filmmaker has a good story then tricking it up doesn't make it better, it just gives it a gimmick. About the only gimmick Pulp Fiction didn't have was 3-D. The order of the scenes was a gimmick; it also had the mysterious glowing contents of the suitcase, the fake background in Bruce Willis' taxi scene, and Samuel L. Jackson's Jheri Curls. Any one of those would be enough to either engage an audience or make them leave the theater wondering what the filmmaker was thinking.

Tarantino wasn't the first to make movies in an altered time format. Over 50 years ago Stanley Kubrick's film, The Killing, starring Sterling Hayden, was constructed in a way that it jumped around in time. The studio got nervous and dumped it on the bottom of a double bill in 1956 with Bandido starring Robert Mitchum. Since then it has taken on a classic status.

I have a coworker who gets confused by movies, and that's because she doesn't know what to pay attention to. She gets flustered by MacGuffins. For those of you who know Alfred Hitchcock's work, a MacGuffin is how he described the thing that the characters are interested in that means nothing to the audience. It's a plot device to move the story along. The MacGuffin would be the blueprints the spies are after, the stolen jewels the crooks are fighting over, etc. If you start worrying about the MacGuffin then you lose sight of the bigger story. I wouldn't know how to train my coworker to look at movies, because I thought we'd all learned how to watch them. They have a language, and we've learned to speak that language. If you're watching a film and it starts out in English and then switches to Swahili without explanation you're bound to be upset. Filmmakers should try to be less tricky about how they make their films, and just concentrate on the really important stuff, like swearing, nudity and hot sex. No, I'm kidding. I just wanted to see if you were following my own non-linear thinking.