I was talking with a friend today about the experience I had many years ago seeing Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game for the first time. There is a plot twist in this film that most people don’t see until fairly late in the story.
But for some reason, I realized early on what was happening. From that point onward, my companion and I were essentially seeing two different movies. Which was weird, because we were sitting side by side in the same movie theater, watching exactly the same film up on screen.
In today’s conversation, my friend said that he has experienced that kind of things several times. For example, the first time he saw The Usual Suspects (another film with a late plot twist), he didn’t know what was coming. But then he saw it again, this time with his wife, who had never seen it, and he became aware that he and his wife were effectively watching two completely different movies.
He also said that when he saw October Sky, a film about a boy who builds rockets, with his wife and kids, they all had different experiences. Each one of them saw a movie they liked, but for extremely different reasons. One saw a movie about kids on an adventure, another saw a movie about parent/child connectinos, and so on. In some sense that’s the definition of a good family film: There is a good story up there on screen for everybody, even if everyone feel like they are watching a different movie.
I am fascinated by this idea of people sharing an experience, yet having highly asymmetric responses to that experience. I wonder, as writers begin to explore the immersive possibilities of shared virtual reality, how such subjective asymmetries will evolve, in the future of storytelling.
I had a similar experience watching _The Sixth Sense_. Somehow I figured out the late twist right at the beginning and spent the rest of the time wondering how nobody else in the audience could see it coming. Figuring out the twist early on effectively ruined the movie for me since it depends heavily on the surprise twist. Then again, I probably would have felt cheated and manipulated by the twist if I hadn’t seen it coming. So I’m not sure which movie I would have preferred watching.
I also remember seeing a cheesy/ridiculous action film (Cliffhanger?) with a large group of friends. Almost all of us laughed out loud throughout the film. For us, it was a comedy. Afterward, one person in our group complained that he really could have enjoyed it as an action movie if the rest of us hadn’t broken the tension with our laughter.
I had this experience with “The Atomic Cafe.” For me, it was a quirky history film. But an older in-law I saw it with had actually done the “duck and cover” drills in grade school. For him, it brought back scary cold war memories from childhood.