Murder and the Movies by David Thomson

Author:David Thomson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

A LARK! AN ASIDE

I hope you can handle this gravity—so long as it does not topple into solemnity. But I have to say this: the folks doing these movie killings are having a grand time. So much so, they can hardly stop laughing. If you look closely, that corpse over there—the third one to the left, the one with the hole in his head—isn’t he simmering with suppressed giggles at all this pretending?

Long ago, when pretending was all the rage, kids studied shoot-out scenes in Westerns to see whether some villain could actually stop breathing in his death shot. Actors and crews knew that fun, just as they were tickled when blood sachets and electrical discharges came into use so bad guys could become a pretty light show of damage and destruction. Of course, by now, CGI can handle all those things, so there isn’t the same glee on set when lavish death scenes come into play, and strangers gather just to watch.

“We had to take Jake’s death scene twenty-seven times!” you hear the story. “He was a nervous wreck! But the laughter and the jokes? It was such a merry day.”

I made that up, but it’s not an exaggeration. And just as an aside, I do think it’s worth noting the disconnect between what’s being depicted and the ingenious hilarity in doing it. There are movie craftsmen who come home for dinner and family after a long day in which they disposed of several thousand stick figures with that wholesome feeling of weariness.

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