As I get older and presumably wiser, I revel in the fewer and fewer times I am genuinely surprised, like those jaw-dropping, “Oh Shit” surprise moments in movies. It is probably the result by my screen writing experience, together with my voracious reading, vivid recollection and pattern recognition.
When watching a movie, I am just one of those annoying people who reveal the whole plot and ending of a movie before the first 30minutes and moves on to the next, unless compelled to watch because of the director or cast, not to mention the peer pressure of family and friends.
Some examples of popular, well-known movies I watched after the “reveal” are The Usual Suspects, The Matrix and Memento. During The Usual Suspects, I remarked how great the movie would be if Verbal was the mastermind and his “cowardness” and “deformity” a ruse. My friends at the time had no idea what I was talking about or why I would make such a claim, but there was just something about Verbal and his mannerisms that reminded me of a character in a book… The Mule!
What? Is that a Who? or an It?
No, the Mule was not some character you forgot from Animal Farm, nor the donkeys (if they were misclassified as mules) in Pinocchio.
In Isaac Asimov’s historic, Hugo Award winning series, The Foundation Trilogy, the Mule pretends to be a silly and cowardly court jester named Magnifico, who was used, abused and escaped the Mule. However, this was a ruse as he secretly was the almost galaxy conquering mutant antagonist, who through his mental powers had brought the Foundation Empire to its knees.
I had a similar experience with The Matrix, hoping that Neo’s real brain was actually hooked up to a computer and the movie was a simulation. Of course, I never imagined the whole “humans as battery” farming and I marveled at the entire story line, suspending disbelief regarding the flaws and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Why wasn’t I surprised overall? I was reveling in the similarities to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, as well as the classic Philosophy of Mind literature like Mind And Cognition by Lycan (I own the 1990 original). The ideas of us seeing “shadows” rather than reality or if we would be able to distinguish between a realistic dream from reality are “old hat” in philosophy. As philosophy has developed in line with Artificial Intelligence and replication vs. simulation of intelligence, the examples of reality and knowledge have been further complicated with interesting examples. One that was well known to philosophers of mind in the 1990’s, is how could you tell the difference if your brain was removed from your body and submerged into a gelatinous substance with wires attached to it which provided a perfect simulation of reality- could you tell the difference? Now of course, with virtual reality and micro-processors for the brain being more and more of a reality, along with movies like Transcendence (main character “uploads” their mind into computer), The Matrix would be far less surprising in our current times.
A movie like Memento was another I figured out right away and I was compelled to watch as the Nolan brothers did a great job, as well as the terrific cast (Pearce, along with Moss and Pantoliano reuniting from The Matrix). The whole Edgar Allen Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart with the deceptive, delusional narrator, maybe even Ring Lardner’s barber Witey in Haircut…
I will conclude this entry with one of my major misses and a movie I thoroughly savored from that same period, just turning 30 when I watched it… Fight Club. Here I loved the movie, the dialogue and themes of anti-consumerism, together with Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment‘s Rasholnikov’s nihilism, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra‘s Zarathustra’s Übermensch (Superman values) over nihilism. I savored it all BUT I thought it was just so obviously flawed that I should have but failed to realize what was actually occurring. I kept watching it, not understanding why these flaws and strange occurrences happened but enjoying it nonetheless. For example, Brad Pitt’s character’s image just flashed in several scenes before he was introduced (similar to how it was revealed that his character spliced pornography into the reels of children’s movies). What were the chances Pitt and Norton’s characters would have same similarities and the whole deal with Singer and those fights. I was totally excited and happy when Norton revealed they were the same character!