"Final Cut" and the Perils of Narrative Risk

People mostly like linear stories. It's true.

On Wednesday, the Scholar Wife brought the Renaissance Son and the Middlebrow to see a free preview of a French movie at The Angelika. If you are in a city with an Angelika movie theater, sign up for a free account. This entitles you to claim tickets for these free mystery screenings when they become available. At their theatre on 2nd Avenue in New York City, they typically have one screening a month.

This month's film was Final Cut (2022), which is a horror/comedy that involves Zombies. Critically, these Angelika screenings are mysteries. Going in, they only tell you a little bit about what you will see, including rating, runtime and genre. The Middlebrow hates zombies, so the forced ignorance helped get me in the door. The opening segment of the film is a low budget zombie movie. About six people left during it and thus missed the whole point of the movie. 

To avoid spoiling things, let's just say that the opening segment is what the rest of the movie explores and that all the cleverness that follows depends on it. There is no way to know that, though, so audience members turned off by the low budget zombie stuff will unknowingly deprive themselves of everything that redeems the movie's first thirty minutes.

So, this is an interesting conundrum for narrative entertainment in all of its forms. The usual solution is for creators to try to hook their audiences from the very beginning, which means starting with understandable action and plot that will rise to a climax and then fall to a denouement in a satisfying and predictable way. This is the form of Star Wars, where we meet two forces in battle and then our hero, who learns that he has a special role to play in the conflict and who heads off on an adventure to fulfill that role and grow as a person.

Stories that veer from that form risk alienating their audiences from the start. In Final Cut, one of the characters wears a "directed by Quentin Tarantino" t-shirt. The form of the movie borrows from Reservoir Dogs, where we see the result of a bank heist and then work backwards to learn how they got there.

But Final Cut is narratively more challenging because (and, again trying not to give too much away here) it mixes a reverse narrative with a film-within-a-film-within-a-film structure. It's as if Harold Pinter decided to rewrite Luigi Pirandello backwards. Adding to all the meta, by the way, The Final Cut is a French remake of a low budget independent film sensation from Japan, which factors into its plot. There’s a lot more going on here than the opening half hour suggests (I was worried I’d been trapped into watching “The Coven” from American Movie for a bit.)

Challenging openings are found often in novels. In a tour de force essay about David Foster Wallace (that nobody I know entirely agrees with but that is fairer to DFW than its online critics are crediting) Patricia Lockwood writes that so many people give up on Infinite Jest around page 150, just as the narrative begins to take shape. The readers who soldier on become transfixed. Everybody else misses out. Is that a feature, or a bug? William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury also famously drives readers away, though the work is justified by its revelations.

Writers like T.S. Eliot were famously unafraid of alienating their audiences by using difficult structures or obscure allusions. But that is a tough formula to follow in 2023, where audiences have become more fickle and an easier choice is only a click away.

This creates an interesting problem for writers, directors and artists as we clearly need new narrative forms to reach people in a heavily saturated environment, though every experiment is a huge risk.

There are a lot of good reasons to alienate an audience. In the case of Bertolt Brecht, it is to get them thinking, to open their minds for instruction. In the case of Final Cut it is to deliver the delight of surprise and revelation over little details that seem odd at first but bring a smile once explained. But how can artists do this while keeping people interested in an age of instant choice? It’s not a new question but, as we enter the next iterations of the comic book movie universes, which seem to feature the same story structures over and over again, it does seem vital.