Seeing is believeing...unfortunately

When you watch a movie, your brain doesn't really have to do a whole lot of work in terms of interpreting what you are seeing. But the movie is playing a trick on you. Film is composed of tiny little pictures, or frames, moving by the screen very fast, kind of like a flip book. A movie is watched at 24 frames per second, or fps. So the first trick is that your brain thinks you're seeing smooth movement when you're really seeing 24 pictures flying by per second. (Slow motion photography is shot with many more frames a second. If you were to shoot a rattlesnake striking at a mouse at 24 fps, you'd miss the strike. You need to shoot a rattlesnake at 300 fps to catch the strike. Then you can slow it down and play it back at 24 fps so it appears to be going slower.) So already, at its most basic, film is making jumps and your brain is filling the gaps on its own.



When a movie tells you about something, your brain invents the rest itself. The movie hasn't actually shown you anything, but you assume you've already seen it and that you know how it went down. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, there is a scene wherein Judge Doom "kills" a 'toon shoe by slowly dipping it into The Dip. It's not shown on screen, but given the onlookers' facial expressions and the sound effects, it's pretty obvious that what happened wasn't pretty and was most likely painful to the 'toon shoe. You have this picture in your head of some awful and horrible death of this shoe. It's far worse in your head than it could ever be on-screen. Of course, you get to find out the difference between where your mind took that scene and the filmmakers' reality of the situation at the end of the film when you watch Judge Doom die-by-Dip. It is not impressive or scary. I had envisioned something like the deterioration of Quentin Tarantino's character in Planet Terror.

Which brings us to the fundamental difference. In Planet Terror, everything is shown. You get to see the bodies melt and ooze all over. It's goddamned disgusting...and awesome...and nothing is left to the imagination. However, Planet Terror does use a trick in this vein with Naveen Andrews' character, Abby. Abby has a testicle collection. He keeps it in a jar. You never see him go collecting, but you see the ridiculous weapon he uses and you see the jar full of balls. This is all you need to get a clear mental picture of how Abby gets the testicle for the jar. You don't need to see him cut anyone's balls off, you're already seeing it. And what's going on in your mind is far far worse than what anyone could show you on film. The best way to get the point across is to let the viewer play with the elements on their own and be grossed out on their own.

A recent personal experience in this vein happened with Eli Roth's Cabin Fever. Cabin Fever is "famous" for a scene in which Cerina Vincent is shaving her legs in the bathroom and her skin is coming off with every stroke. Yes it's gross, but it's a whole lot more gross in your mind right now than it is on film. Roth used CGI to film this effect, so the gouges that Cerina makes aren't really that realistic. They look like decals on her legs, with little depth. When I heard about this scene I thought we were going to see the skin peeling and building up behind the razor. I expected blood to come out and I expected bits of skin to be caught between the blades. I had built up a lot of fear of watching this scene. It turns out I didn't need to worry about it.

Takashi Miike did it much better with Imprint when he filmed the scenes with the needles being inserted under the girl's fingernails. He used fake fingers filled with blood, and slightly transparent with a light behind them. That way you saw the needle going in and you could still make it out even after if was underneath the nail. Miike's style is different, and he likes to show you all sorts of things, but he makes them really hard to watch, so he doesn't let you down. It is always as bad as it seems like it's going to be.

I bring this up because people tend to vilify movies for things that don't actually happen. in Se7en, the example I mentioned yesterday, there is a man who is forced to fuck a prostitute with a strap-on knife. You don't see anything. You don't even see her body afterwards. You see the guy talking about the ordeal to the cops, and you see a brief picture of the knife in question. Boy, is that all you need! I put that pic into my blog yesterday, and I'm sure not everyone enjoyed it. That knife, along with the mention of its use, could have pushed that movie into an R-rating without any help from the other violence. On the other side of the spectrum, a movie that is thought the be one of the bloodiest and violent movies of all time, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, actually has almost no blood at all. People always think back to that movie and remember all this blood, but really they only saw the chainsaw, heard the motor and saw people about to get ripped apart. No one actually gets killed in a graphic manner on screen. It's all implied. Sometimes it's better to have it implied, but it really works your fears overtime. For squeamish people, it's really better to just watch it. Hearing about can just mess you up.