The Grip of Film

by Richard Ayoade

  Someone’s voice level can SPEAK VOLUMES.

  See: WOMANLY SHRILLNESS

  STAGING

  In McG’s 2014 modern classic 3 Days to Kill, a dying CIA agent, Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner), is offered a life-prolonging experimental drug if he agrees to perform one last hit for the agency. During the course of his mission, he has to unravel the ass of an assailant at a cold-meat and cheese counter. And though the cheese remains unweaponized, Renner’s face is pushed quite close to an electric meat slicer.

  Imaginative staging like this creates a NEXT-LEVEL VIGNETTE that lingers in the memory long after you leave the theater. Where would YOU assault Kevin Costner?

  A bubble-wrap factory?

  A ‘legitimate’ massage parlor?

  A blue whale’s heart?

  You’re the storyteller. YOU choose.

  See: ASSAULTING KEVIN COSTNER: WHEN, WHERE, HOW OFTEN; NLVS

  STANDING UP SLOWLY TO REVEAL SOMEONE’S TRUE HEIGHT

  Despite the fact that a person’s torso tends to be in proportion to the rest of their body, it’s always a surprise when someone stands up and is taller than average. Especially if he then crosses his arms. This often happens in holding cells after trash-talking an inmate who’s been crouching on the floor.

  See: PRISON RAPE, HUMOROUS INTIMATIONS OF

  STOP

  All good movies can be summarized as follows:

  We/I

  gotta

  STOP

  him/her/it/them.

  The key is ‘stop’. We want to see movies about people stopping shit. And then, after ninety minutes,* we want that shit to stop.

  * Agreed. Nothing should last 157 minutes. That’s longer than some labours – Ayo.

  STORY

  What is a STORY? Why do we tell them to other people? How much time do they take? Would it be better to sit down just in case? Why are there other people?

  Do all great stories overlap? Can a good story lap a bad story?

  Are there certain patterns that underlie all narrative? Then why can’t you knit them? Is it because you can only feel them? With what? Your heart? But what if your heart has stopped feeling? What if it’s calcified, blackened, heavy with hate, gridlocking your throat, damming your saliva – what then? Who’s going to help you? Your wife? Are you kidding? Don’t you remember her running away with that waffle magnate?

  These are all questions. Which makes us ask: what is a question?

  For isn’t a question a kind of story?

  We are all One Story, revealing itself to itself, in an infinite river of consciousness.

  But who owns the remake rights?

  Probably Disney.*

  But since we’re here, and there’s time left on the meter, let’s break story down to its rawest structural components. Let’s take a tale that we all know and love. A superficially simple yarn that’s stood the test of time:

  The cat sat on the mat.

  At first glance it seems to have everything: an interesting central character, a compellingly relatable central action sequence and a great location. But with a little grunt work we can make this story even better.

  Let’s break it down …

  T

  H

  E

  C

  A

  T

  S

  A

  T

  O

  N

  T

  H

  E

  M

  A

  T

  Woah there. That’s too much. That’s practically sub-atomic. Let’s build it back up a touch:

  THE CAT

  SAT

  ON THE MAT

  Straight outta the gate we meet our HERO: a cat. Who is this cat? We don’t know. What does (s)he want? A seat. (S)he so desperately wants to sit. What’s the resolution? The cat achieves his/her goal with the help of a mat. The end.

  There’s no build-up, no context and no backstory! And when (s)he reaches his/her goal, we, as an audience, are denied the emotional catharsis we crave. We don’t even know this cat’s name!

  Where are the stakes? Where is the drama? Why should we care? There are cats sat on mats up and down the country at any given moment – what makes this particular cat so special? What makes the story of this cat on this mat a story that we need to tell?

  How could we improve this? We need to tackle the character of ‘the cat’. Let’s make the cat a male. Straight away I’m starting to relate. Let’s call him Brad (Brad Pitt). What kind of cat is Brad? Maybe he’s a cat from the wrong side of the tracks, a dreamer, but with street smarts – good-lookin’ son of a bitch too. When he was a kitten his parents never believed he’d amount to anything. His talons only part retracted, he was slow to bury his feces and he hated string. ‘You’re gonna end up an alley cat like your uncle, Top,’ they’d meow, as they nosed round one another’s anal canals.

  Then one day, while stripping flesh from a rodent, Brad looks up: it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. Rolled up, under the arm of a super-hot Cameron Diaz type, is a ruby-red mat.

  He knows one thing for sure: he must sit on that mat.

  So much for the set-up. Now for the complication.

  The super-hot Cameron Diaz type lives uptown in a fancy townhouse and only wears really tight clothing. She gets the doorman to set out the new mat. It looks beautiful. Brad’s never seen a mat that even comes close. He struts up to it, tail a mile in the air. But right as he’s about to park his ass for the afternoon, guess who sets up camp?

  Camera tracks toward a tough-lookin’ rough mutt called Rico. He’s non-American, big scar down his face, one eye’s kinda milky, barks with a thick accent. We immediately know this piece of shit’s bad news, but for some reason the doorman loves him. Maybe they do coke together. We can sketch in the details later. Upshot? Ain’t no way Brad’s getting on that mat any time soon.

  So Brad goes on a stake-out, trying to see if Rico operates any kind of mat schedule. He’s joined by a wisecracking city fox, Franklin (Kevin Hart), who keeps undermining him: ‘I’m tellin ya, man, that canine’s a 24/7 deal. Wass tha’ tatty-ass rug t’ya anyways? Yo’ no-good broke ass too good for the flo’?’

  The unlikely duo attempt to lure Rico off the mat using various methods (a sexy poodle, a juicy steak on a wire, etc.), but he ain’t goin’ no place no how. Somehow he always sees them coming. Cut to Cameron Diaz type in the shower. This has no real plot function, but why not shoot it just in case?

  In despair, Brad the cat hits a local bar. Gets lit on milk punch. Wakes up in a dumpster. Staggers out, fur smeared with prawn tails. A group of mice beat him up for what he did to their uncle. He coughs up some cream. He’s at ROCK BOTTOM. Even the moonlight hurts his eyes, so he picks some old shades out of the trash. He catches his reflection in a dirty puddle. What’s different? That’s it! Rico always saw him coming because cats’ eyeballs have a special reflective layer called the tapetum lucidum! Of course!

  He and Franklin both get sunglasses and decide to make their move. Only problem? Now they can’t see where they’re going. Cue a series of comic pratfalls that leads them straight to the city pound.

  There they meet a wise old tortoise, Speedy McNulty (Morgan Freeman), who’s serving time for tax evasion. With the help of a beautiful, feisty tabby cat, Miss Kitty (Jennifer Lawrence), the three of them break out, but McNulty loses his shell. There’s a moving scene where McNulty explains that although – yes – he does look funny now, the shell formed part of his spine, so now he’s going to die. ‘Momma said I never had much backbone. I guess she was right.’ Brad tells him that’s bullshit, that McNulty has more backbone than anyone he’s ever met. It just turns out that McNulty’s backbone is detachable. But ain’t no shame in that – that’s just how Nature designed it. Just like she designed it so that dogs always win and cats always lose. McNulty tells Brad to never give up and, above all, be patient – he’ll sit on that mat. He tells Franklin to go back to school –
he has the makings of a fine lawyer. He tells Miss Kitty to stop her relentless killing spree – it’s unfeminine.

  Cut to the Cameron Diaz type back in the shower. You might need it in the edit.

  Brad, Franklin and Miss Kitty try to crush McNulty’s shell flat so that it’ll fit in a shallow grave. But it won’t break.

  Which leads to our resolution.

  The camera closes in on a tortoise shell scuttling fast.

  We see Brad inside. I think we’ve got a pretty good idea where he’s goin’.

  As Brad finally sits on the mat, Rico wakes up from his snooze. What the hell is this shell doing on his mat?! Then Miss Kitty descends on Rico in a murderous flurry that finally sates her lifelong bloodlust. Miss Kitty is arrested. Franklin, with his new legal qualifications, wows the judge, who dismisses the charges against Miss Kitty and pins the killing on a transient Hispanic hamster.

  Brad and Miss Kitty get married. Franklin’s the best man. He buys them a brand-new red mat for their wedding present. Everyone applauds. Dissolve: the two of them with their wedding gift in front of their new townhouse. They stretch out on the mat together.

  Tonight, they’ll fuck on that mat.

  Slam cut to credits.

  See: AMERICA AS MAT; HERO, THE; ROCK BOTTOM

  * But who owns Disney? Is it still that mouse? How is a mouse richer than me, a man? People used to say, ‘What are you? A man or a mouse?’ Who knew it would be better to be a mouse? – Ayo.

  SUSPENSE

  Alfie Hitchcock.

  Met the guy for a hot second. I was a struggling screenwriter; he was struggling to fit in his pants.* Yours truly had a story about some stiff correctly accused of something he didn’t feel guilty about. I thought it could be a nice change of pace for Hitch; he could cast it with unknowns and shoot the fucker on the streets. It was pretty rough and in no way ready, but I managed to wangle a sit-down with the big guy for reasons that I’m not prepared to lay out in print.† So I washed up and cruised down to this high-class waffle joint, where I got primo service on account of the fact I had the waitress there on a maintenance fuck. She was actually a very special lady. I think her name had an ‘L’ in it. She definitely had gigantic tits. That I do remember.

  Each time the door opened, my heart was in my mouth. Which, being filled with teeth, is no place for a heart. Unless you’re a cannibal.‡ But for personal reasons I was in one of my pescatarian phases§ and the only things I wanted in my mouth were that waitress’s gigantic tits.¶ Laverne? Maybe the waffles were making me think of tits. Or was I eating waffles because they reminded me of tits? You really can’t beat tits or waffles. Why does life sometimes make us choose between them?

  Kelsey? Ashlynn?

  ‘Great,’ I remember thinking, ‘now I’m hard, and if I have to stand up to shake Hitch’s hand, I’ll probably flip the table with my massive whang.’

  Laycee? Lola? Earlene?

  And I thought about all the times when I’d been socially compromised by getting a giant boner, and wondered whether The Feminists ever took THAT into consideration when they were saying how tough life was for them. They ought to try living with sudden boners for thirty years!

  Melody? Maybelle? Kayla? Lori?

  So I ordered some rye to take the edge off, plus two rounds of corned-beef hash, which always seems to help me stop thinking too much about tits.

  Crystal? Taylor? Darlene? Shelby? Something-Lynn?

  And I was reminded of when Hitchcock famously said that if two people are talking in a restaurant and a bomb suddenly goes off, all you have are a few seconds of surprise, but if you see someone plant a bomb under the table and two people sit down at that table, you have SUSPENSE. So anyway, I thought it might be fun to rig up a fake bomb to put under the table. Luckily, I always keep a bunch of differently colored curly wires in my flak jacket, and I had a couple of dynamite sticks left over from summer. So I’m sitting there with my ‘fake bomb’, sweating off the rye and the beef and the waffles … but no Hitch!

  Talk about suspense!

  Finally, Hitch waltzes in, fifteen minutes late! He waddles over to me and says, ‘Have you seen a blonde woman with a neat beehive?’ So I say, ‘Well, I guess this is one Hitch that ain’t in time.’

  I was of course referring to the hit proverb ‘A Stich in Time Saves Nine’, while also giving a tip of the hat to how much the word ‘Hitch’ sounds like ‘stitch’. Fact was, Hitch was a very punctual man; indeed, he wasn’t late at all. I had given him the WRONG time just so that I could make the pun! The poor sap didn’t know where to look. He was going all red in the face (the exertion of walking up the stairs must’ve been catching up with him), and I had this eat-shit grin plastered on my kisser.

  I decided to put him out of his misery and tell him that I wasn’t Grace Kelly, and even if I were still willing to pretend to be, there was no way I could do the things I’d said I could on the phone. I expected him to double over with laughter, even though there was no way this guy could double over, he was that huge.

  He spun round and left. Or maybe he left and then spun round. I was pretty soused, and I was so full up/horny I could barely focus. I could’ve been the one spinning round. Point is, he heaved his hefty heinie out of what must’ve been a specially widened door.

  And if truth be doled, it was a mercy that he walked out then, because I wasn’t really sure how to develop the pun into the ‘saves nine’|| part. Meaning if he’d got in my face and been all, ‘How does my being slightly tardy – if indeed I am – relate to the idea of a timely action averting the unnecessary expenditure of energy in correcting an earlier error of omission?’, I would’ve had to go, ‘I gotta ’fess, Hitchie baby, I only had the first part of the wordplay sketched out, and any follow-up would have been something that happened in the moment depending on what you said.’ So I started to wonder whether there was a more layered pun to be had – perhaps something centered around the word ‘itch’ – when someone shouted, ‘Bomb! He’s got a bomb!’

  Next thing I know, there’s a piece in my face and the cuffs go on.

  Anyway, that was my time with Alfred Hitchcock!

  That slob took my dreams.

  But up until that moment, I’d felt more suspense than I’d felt watching any one of his peepy-pervy films.**

  * I’m struggling to see the connection. I imagine a man as prepared as Hitchcock would’ve made sure he was stocked to the gills with jumbo pants – Ayo.

  † One rumour I heard was that LaSure was able to do a very good Grace Kelly impression – Ayo.

  ‡ I bet if you’re a cannibal the heart is the best part, the thing you save for last – Ayo.

  § Whenever Gordy had blown all his dollar on rye, he would switch from meat tacos to fish tacos, figuring fish were free, whereas mince was for high rollers.

  He would go down to the LA aqueduct and steal the catches from local anglers, claiming to be a park ranger. The problem he faced was storage. As a lover of rye, ice could not be wasted, and he certainly couldn’t afford to power a fridge – Ayo.

  ¶ I tried to suggest that the phrasing here has the disconcerting effect of making it sound like this waitress’s breasts were ‘fishy’. His voicemail response? ‘Listen, fucker, there was nothing remotely fishy about those headrests! I trusted those things with my life!’ – Ayo.

  || Which, BTW, I’ve always found weird. How could they be so confident the ratio of ‘saved’ stitches to ‘made’ stitches would always be 1:9? I honestly think that ratio was only selected because it rhymes! And if we start living our lives simply on the basis of what rhymes, where will we draw the line(s)?(!) – Ayo.

  ** Whenever someone asks me which films are my ‘guilty pleasure’, I say, ‘Hitchcock films’ – cos that’s exactly what they are – Ayo.

  SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

  Every time you go into a movie theater you SUSPEND YOUR DISBELIEF.

  How else would you get through it?

  ‘Maybe this one will be good,’ y
ou think to yourself. ‘I like that actor. He’s sometimes okay. And that woman on the poster is attractive. I think she might even be of above-average attractiveness. She’s looking at me in a very seductive way. If the circumstances were right, I think she could fall for me. Given time. And this whole franchise is getting richer and more complex with each new instalment. Didn’t I read somewhere that superhero movies are the nineteenth-century novels of Our Time? I definitely read something that made a very compelling case for the value of superhero movies within The Culture. How they’re mythic sagas, embodying storytelling that’s been around since the dawn of narrative itself. That if Dickens were alive now, he’d be operating within the Marvel Universe.* And even though they feel like narcotizing pap designed to give the false illusion that life contains resolutions, they for some reason aren’t.’†

  Sure, baby. Whatever gets you through the next ninety.‡

  In most people’s lives, the biggest suspension of disbelief comes right before you say, ‘I do.’

  But if you got real, what you’d really say is, ‘I’d kind of like to, but I doubt I can.’

  See: MARVEL’S ORPHAN RISING: THE NEW ADVENTURES OF OLIVER TWIST

  * How can Marvel have its own universe? If the universe is All Time and Space and its Contents, wouldn’t the Marvel Universe be contained within the universe in which I hitherto believed myself to exist? And wouldn’t that make the Marvel Universe not a universe per se, but an aggressively policed set of intellectual property rights? And please don’t start with the multiverse thing. It’s bad enough that I was excluded from all the cool parties at school. Now you’re telling me there are whole realities I can’t access? – Ayo.

  † As opposed to relationships, which seem to operate under the laws of entropy: each time one breaks down, a little piece of you disappears – and no one can tell where that piece has gone – and that hole in your chest gets wider and wider until you wonder whether this is a cavity inside you or the infinite black of space! – Ayo.