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Only the first 2/3rds of a movie are interesting
February 2005
The common perception is that the climax is the most important part of a movie; that the entire movie builds up to the climax, that it is or should be the best part, and that it should put a cap on the story and make sense of it all, giving shape to the entire story.
That is all in theory. But when you look at the reality that most movies are crap, most stories utterly unoriginal, and most screenwriters and directors apparently unable to come up with a climax that both caps off the story and provides a satisfying subtextural resolution, it’s easy to see that all the interesting stuff is in the first two-thirds of most movies.
Here’s why:
Because the first 2/3rds sets up the atmosphere
Since there’s less pressure for the first parts of a movie to be exciting [excepting current movies that need to begin on 10 and proceed immediately to 11], this is where all the exposition of the setting and atmosphere takes place, which is often more interesting than whether they save the girl or slay the beast or not. This is ESPECIALLY true in Horror and Sci-Fi movies. The main content of those movies is not the story at all, but the atmosphere they create, the subversive subtext they are able to slip in under the guise of being “about” something else, the rules of the world they create, and the statements all of that makes about the world.
Because that’s where all the subversive content is
There was a fascinating article in the New York Times a few years ago about the way Hitchcock handled the resolutions to the stories on his TV series. It mentioned one famous episode in particular, in which a woman kills her husband by bludgeoning him with a frozen ham hock, then cooks it and serves it to her guests for dinner. Of course you couldn’t get away with showing this deed going unpunished, but Hitchcock quite rightly didn’t want to bother showing the whole rigmarole of her being caught and arrested. So he came up with a typically brilliant solution: He appeared after the show had ended, and told the audience verbally: “the woman was later caught and sent to prison.” This accomplished the function of “setting the world right,” and provided a moral to the story, but without forcing the viewer to sit through the boring and pointless moral to the story.
Since the climax of a film usually has to tie the story up in such a way that the bad guy gets punished or the situation set right again, that’s usually where things get dull. The interesting part is the earlier part, where the bad guy’s being bad, because that’s where the nastiest and most subversive parts of the writer’s imagination are revealed. Take the case of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which contains extremely raw scenes of marital hatred before settling into the light show at the end. Or The Exorcist, whose first hour is scarier than its second for showing the harrowing medical probing of the young Regan, and the slow unraveling of her mother. These scenes are far more riveting than the later swiveling heads and window leaps. Or consider Amityville II: The Possession, in which really shocking early scenes of incest and child abuse that reveal a much darker “explanation” for the bad juju that taken hold of the house, gradually give way to a completely pedestrian Exorcist rip-off. Or The Killing Kind, where the detailing of the bizarre psychosexual urges going on around that house are far more interesting than resolving the question of whether the guy goes back to jail or not.
Because you have to wrap the story up
…and that usually includes upping the intensity and providing a resolution, which usually means that all the interesting subtext and relationship content gets jettisoned in favor of chases and explosions. And let’s face it, you pretty much know the endings of most movies anyway. The bad guy will get killed. They good guy will get the serum through. It’s rarely a surprise. It’s the first 2/3rds that is far more likely to have aspects that you don’t expect.
Because most filmmakers apparently aren’t capable of coming up with a good ending
Faced with the pressure to up the intensity and wrap up the story, it seems that most filmmakers just can’t really come up with something that accomplishes those two aims, but also provides a satisfying resolution or continuation to the subtext, gives a nice overall shape to the film, and isn’t something we’ve seen a hundred times before. I also think that this is the part they spend more time making “right,” allowing more interesting and textured aspects to slip through during the earlier parts.
So, there you are; because of the pressure to crank up the intensity, provide a resolution, and “set the world right” again at the end of a film, the first 2/3rds are usually where the majority of the interesting atmosphere and subversive content of a film reside.
