It’s one of the most striking images in recent film: Guy Pearce as Leonard, an insurance investigator trying to figure out who killed his wife, in the process of tattooing himself: the odd words he applies to his body are clues, bits of information that he hopes will jog his fractured short-term memory.
The movie was Memento (2001), and it contained so many twist endings that most people left the theater scratching other people’s heads in confusion.
But nowadays, it seems more and more movies are trying to mess with our heads. Lately, it’s getting harder to watch simple, mindless Hollywood fare without being forced to do the unthinkable: use your brain. And let me tell you, that little extra bit of effort can hurt.
There’s even a wonky term for it: "retcon." Retroactive continuity is really nothing new in movies (hell, even Citizen Kane had its revelation about "Rosebud" to make people go "hmmm…") but it’s become an inescapable trend for audiences.
Just when you thought you had a storyline figured out, the moviemakers throw in a plot point that forces you to rethink the last two hours of viewing. I hate that. When a movie’s almost over, I don’t like doing any extra homework; I just want to head for the ‘EXIT’ sign and forget about it.
Not so with movies like Basic, The Life of David Gale, Vanilla Sky and even Down with Love. I call it the "mindscrew" (you may substitute your own four-letter alternative).
What are the reasons? Perhaps Hollywood, recognizing that audiences have become jaded, are determined to spoon down an extra dose of pap, just so we won’t feel like we’ve spent P100 watching simplistic garbage. Maybe they feel that endings with more twists than a Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner are somehow more complex and serious. You know, like life.
But nobody could mistake the shenanigans that go on in Basic, a recent military courtroom thriller starring John Travolta and Samuel Jackson, for real life. The movie follows an investigation into a military exercise in which the commanding officer (Jackson) was apparently killed by one, or more, of his own troops. But whoa-ho-ho, not so fast: nothing’s that simple in Hollywood. Not anymore.
The movie (like Travolta’s earlier flop, Swordfish) plays like a postmodern take on our finely-tuned movie expectations. Sure, we’ve all seen the military courtroom bit before: a brash, hard-nosed prosecutor, his reluctant new assistant (here played by Connie Nielson) and a showdown where, almost despite himself, the prosecutor manages to ferret out "the truth." Yeah, we’ve all seen A Few Good Men.
But in Basic, once the case is wrapped up, something doesn’t jibe for Nielson, who decides to tail her erstwhile partner to New Orleans. There she finds Travolta’s been working an undercover sting operation all along with – that’s right, you guessed it – the previously dead Samuel Jackson.
Ouch. That’s about the point in Basic where my brain began to hurt. A clever script twist may sound good on paper, but unfolding in real time, it can cause serious brain hemorrhage.
Postmodernism, arguably, is behind a lot of these loopy new "retcon" endings. We’ve reached a point in history where, even if the general audience can’t define "postmodernism," they recognize it when they see it. It’s the sly, winking tone of so many movies and TV shows that constantly remind us that, yes, we are in fact watching a movie or a TV show. It’s the in-joke guest appearances on Friends and Will & Grace. It’s the constant recycling into movies of ‘70s TV shows that the target audience is too young to even remember – except as reruns or in sly, smirking MTV slices.
Yes, postmodernism may even be behind Down With Love, a disastrously arch homage to Doris Day/Rock Hudson sex comedies of the early ‘60s. Renee Zellweger plays Barbara Novak, author of the anti-romance guide in the movie’s title. Her book causes problems for writer and "ladies’ man/man’s man/man about town" Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), who suddenly finds he can’t seduce every stewardess within leering distance. So he decides to con Novak into falling in love with him – thus proving her a fraud, debunking her book and returning to his playboy ways. As you would guess, the plan backfires.
The movie goes to great pains – it is indeed painful to watch – in recreating the color and tone of those earlier, more innocent sex comedies. In Down With Love, even a fine double entendre such as "Let’s catch a matinee" doesn’t refer to afternoon delight; it refers to catching a matinee. Yet the movie also resorts to split-screen gags that are so juvenile they would make Austin Powers blush. Oh, behave!
Anyway, very near the end we learn, through a breathless exposition by Zellweger, that she’s not really Barbara Novak after all; she’s the plain-Jane secretary whom Block fired years back, when she had the hots for him. And now, as Novak, she’s finally gotten her revenge as a successful author, and has even tricked Block into falling in love with her.
Double ouch. The scriptwriters clearly wanted to update the hopelessly dated sexism of ‘60s comedies by adding a postmodern feminist twist (Novak uses her vast royalties to start a magazine called NOW, in direct competition with Block’s magazine, KNOW). But by the time Zellweger launches into her mind-twisting speech, most audience members I saw were thumbing through their cell phone messages, killing time until the big "duet" number between the two stars.
Retcon endings may be asking a little too much from audiences, who usually prefer to be simply entertained. Entertainment was certainly far from Cameron Crowe’s mind when making Vanilla Sky, a remake of a Spanish film called Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). Here, Crowe simply emptied the original script of all its texture and nuance and dumped in his own one-liners, pop-culture references, sound-track tastes, and casting choices (Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz). The result is a retcon nightmare, more shocking than the original Spanish movie because you realize this is probably what it’s like inside Cameron Crowe’s brain. It’s gobbledygook of the worst kind, tolerable only to those who enjoy postmodern in-jokes. Or those who enjoy a good mindscrew.
At the root of audiences’ dislike for retcon endings is a sense of distrust: we are willing to go along with a movie, or a director, quite a long way as long as we feel we’re being dealt a clean hand. We don’t like it, for instance, when the plot of Fight Club reveals to us that Ed Norton was actually Tyler Durden all along (well, some people did). We’re willing to swallow a straight story up to three hours, as long as we’re not given too many macaroni twists.
A retcon ending can mar even a serious "message" movie like Alan Parker’s recent The Life of David Gale. This one stars Kevin Spacey as an anti-death penalty activist who ends up on death row for raping and murdering his colleague; of course, he claims he’s been framed, and it’s up to journalist Kate Winslet to discover why and by whom at the 11th hour.
Director Parker, who tackled civil rights violence in Mississippi Burning, seemed to want to make a statement about the death penalty. But once all the twists have been smoothed out in this technically-dazzling but confused thriller, you end up wondering who’s crazier: the death penalty supporters, or the loopy activists who cook up convoluted plots to abolish it.
Spacey does a fine job of engaging our sympathies for much of the film; then the director decides to jerk our attention this way and that like a schnauzer on a short leash, and by the end we don’t know who to believe or trust, or why we should even care. The gimmicky "twist" ending manages to muck up whatever message – pro or con – that was buried in The Life of David Gale.
Maybe, after all is said and done, we’ve seen too much. Maybe Hollywood knows we recognize all the plots by now, so that’s why they throw in the zinger endings. It may just be old wine poured into new bottles, but Hollywood has to ensure that movies at least seem new. Or maybe they’re afraid we’ve forgotten how to enjoy good, solid storytelling. Maybe they think we won’t line up for a straight story anymore. Maybe (to quote Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men) they now believe "You can’t handle the truth!"