The big shift

Have you ever had a movie achieve escape velocity?

I enjoy, and maybe you do too, those Twitter movie threads where someone says, to take a recent example, “What is the most moving film ending you’ve ever seen?” and people just spool out their faves as if they’ve just been waiting for someone to ask that question. (I was pleased to see in this case one person cite the surprisingly ecstatic finale of Mr. Bean’s Holiday.)

I have one of those questions for you now, but it’s not so neat as “best ending,” “scene that makes you cry,” “scene that makes you laugh,” etc. It’s about a moment in a movie when suddenly everything changes — the movie, or your feeling about the movie (or the main character, or the message, or whether or not you like it). It can be a good experience or a bad one; the movie can go off the rails or into the stratosphere.

I’ve had a few moviegoing experiences in which the shift achieves what I call escape velocity — where the picture just takes off, and goes from okay, I’m interested to holy fuck.

Take Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture. Sharon is an “information operator” by day and a swinger by night, but it’s not working for her. Christian proselytizers start showing up in her life, intimating the End of Days. Sharon is skeptical but open to the argument. “You have to believe,” one Jesus freak tells her. “If you don’t, you go to hell.” “That doesn’t seem fair,” she says. The carriers of God’s words talk about “the boy” and “the pearl” and uniformly seem like creeps, but the guys Sharon’s been hanging out with seem like creeps, too, and their philosophies, such as they are, are no more convincing. (A neat thing the movie does is make us think of ordinary people’s rationales for the way they live their lives as if they’re ideas worth taking seriously.) A mystical-seeming tattoo she sees in one of her fuckfests starts a ball rolling in her mind.

When Sharon is finally convinced these signs and portents mean Christ is Lord and he’s coming back, she goes all out; at her job, she starts asking callers if they’ve met God. Her boss Herman, a non-nonsense fellow in a middle-management suit calls her into the office about it. “God made me an information officer for a reason,” Sharon tells him. “…I know you can’t believe this but God is coming back to judge the world and it’s important; I have to tell people we have to prepare for his return.”

Pause. “When’d you first see the light?” Herman says.

Now, up until that point, though there are hints that something weird is going on, it’s still possible to think of The Rapture exclusively as about Sharon entertaining a delusion. When Herman and Sharon start to talk about how Jesus is coming back and he takes her to a meeting where “the boy” is prophesying, though, suddenly you see it’s not a psychological thriller, and you feel the whole premise change: Is this really about the End of Days?

It gets much weirder after that, but that’s when the switch flips for me.

I think The Rapture is brilliant, but I’ve had the experience in reverse, too — when I’ve suddenly realized, oh dear, this movie has no chance. I recall back in the 1970s seeing Lipstick, the vaunted debut of Margaux Hemingway, the model and novelist’s granddaughter. (I’d heard bad things about it but I went to everything back then.) Hemingway played a model in the movie and the credits showed her basking glamorously for the camera in a variety of outfits. It took a good fifteen minutes for her to enter a scene as the character, and when did and she opened her mouth the teeny-tiniest voice came out, like she’d been doing helium, but everyone acted as if this were normal. What’s worse, her character was somehow inveigled to invite an avant-garde composer, played by poor Chris Sarandon as a gibbering lunatic, to her apartment, where he played her a tape of his work, which sounded like a couple of people making science fiction noises with their mouths. The model didn’t show the composer music the proper respect, so he raped her. That was it for me.

What about you?