Someone pointed out that when extreme emotion is expressed in a movie, the character throws up.
Think about it.
Have you seen someone throwing up on screen recently?
Vomiting is one of those things that makes you gag. It is a similar reflex to yawning. When you see someone yawn it makes you want to yawn. When you see someone throw up it makes you want to throw up.
This could be one of the reasons why people don’t go to movie theatres so much anymore.
Do you remember the George Pal film of ‘Tom Thumb’? It starred Russ Tamblyn as Tom, There was a scene where all Tom’s toys came to life. This was a trademark scene for George Pal who loved pixillation and had come up with the clever device in the ‘Time Machine’ of having the passing of time demonstrated by the changing of fashions in a dressmaker shop window. At first the shop assistants appear in the window, changing the costumes on the mannequins, but as the passing of time accelerates , they are no longer seen and the costumes change faster and faster.
So bringing Tom Thumb’s toys to life would have been something that George Pal would have loved to do.
One of the toys is the Yawning Man, and he gets a musical number of his own.
He sings and he yawns. He sings and he yawns. And I yawned and my father yawned and i’m pretty sure a lot of the people in the audience were yawing too.
It’s a reflex.
Is it a herd instinct thing?
When one horse pees, all the other horse pee. So there’s one big puddle of piddle in one spot.
If the herd took turns peeing they would be leaving one long trail of peepee and this would make it easy for a mountain lion or cougar to track them. So the herd instinct means that there is a strong message that horses had been in this spot at some time, but you are going to have to do some guesswork about where they might be now.
A character is experiencing strong emotions. Raising an eyebrow in extreme closeup is too ambiguous for today’s sophisticated audiences. We have to really be shown that this guy is having a turbulent time. he doubles up. He retches. And, more and more frequently, he actually spews lie a volcano. he doesn’t just lean over the side of the fence and hurl in long shot, with the camera at a discreet distance and the sound effects doing the work. He leans toward camera, and watery stuff comes out of his mouth and the we cut to another angle so that he can put more stuff in his mouth real for the next take, and he throws up again.
Nice.
The yawning thing was funny. It was a practical joke played on the audience.
In my previous life, before Broinowski barged into my house and made his threats to make life difficult for me and for my family.
Whatever happened to all the fun in the world?
In those days, the old days, i planned to rob cinema audiences by making a film about a celebrated hypnotist, an incarnation of ‘Mesmo the Magician’.
The film would have strolled a long for a while before Memo appeared on stage. He would have started out with some routine stuff, the rabbit out of the hat, card fanning, stuff with a white rope and metal hoops, maybe a dove out of a handkerchief. The camera would have drifted closer and closer. Then he would have begun his preamble about your eyes getting heavier and heavier and his fingers would have been wiggling on either side of his face, like someone holding up two lazy spiders, and he would have persuaded you that when you woke up again you would be convinced that this was the best film that you had ever seen, that you would recommend it to all your friends and that you would leave all your cash and valuables in the bins provided on the way out.
I am going to count down from 10 and on 1 you will wake up refreshed and laughing. The house lights will come up and you will break into spontaneous applause. No-one will yawn or vomit.
You will make your way out of the cinema chatting and chuckling.
10, 9, 8, ….
Ellipsis.
Are you OK?
Are you OK?
Have you noticed the vomiting thing?
Have you noticed how ‘to be honest’ has crept into everybody’s verbal tic box?
Have you ever counted the number of times ‘to be honest’ appears in Mark Haddon’s ‘A Spot of Bother’?
If you haven’t read it yet, get a fluorescent yellow marker and get ready to highlight the to be honests. There will be yellow on every other page.
Sometimes twice on one page.
Are you OK?
Someone has just been shot at. The other character says, ‘Are you ok?’
Maybe they say, ‘Are you all right?’
Someone has just been shot. All right, i know they haven’t really been shot, but makeup has been applied to make them bleed everywhere, The other character says, ‘Are you OK?’
Someone has just been thrown off a dam. We have watched their body, or a pretend body with arms and legs that don’t quite move the way that the arms and legs of someone who has pushed off from somewhere high up would move (if it was me, I imagine that there would be a fair amount of flailing and thrashing going on) plummet from up there with the camera tracking the fall, down the face of the dam. into the gush water, through the rocky outcrops, along the river for a short way. The body washes up on a mudbank. Now it is the actor’s body. He looks wet but unbroken. Hs side kick runs up and falls to her knees. ‘Yew’, she says, ‘my trousers are all muddy.’
Cut.
We cut to her kneeling alongside him and now she delivers the line that has been written for her,
‘Are you OK?’
We have heard a lot of ‘Go,Go, Go.’ interspersed with some ‘Move. Move. Move.’ and then some more ‘Go. Go. Go.’
The car hits another car. It becomes airborne. In slo-mo, it heels over so that we can see the chassis and the exhaust pipe and everything. It arcs back to the side of the hill and raises a lot of dust when it hits. It starts to cartwheel. Bits fly off. The dirt stays just a step behind and describes a dirty spiral.
The car lands on its roof and slews along for while.
This time it is the pretty lead who was at the wheel. Her side kick who hasn’t shaved for a while, but still looks like an actor, rush to the side of the vehicle to the door which is all caved in and asks her if she is OK.
For fuck’s sake.
No.
It’s all right.
I am OK.