Thought for Food

Mar 17, 2009

"The screenwriting trope known as the reversal"

This article on Tony Gilroy — the screenwriter behind the first and second “Bourne” movies, “The Cutting Edge,” “Michael Clayton,” etc. — did exactly what it was intended to do. I now want to see “Duplicity” (a Julia Roberts/Clive Owen vehicle which Gilroy wrote and directed). Ms. or Mr. Publicist: you deserve a raise.

I found this bit particularly interesting:

Gilroy told me, “A reversal is just anything that’s a surprise. It’s a way of keeping the audience interested.” […]

Gilroy believes that the writer and the moviegoing public are engaged in a cognitive arms race. As the audience grows savvier, the screenwriter has to invent new reversals—madder music and stronger wine. […]

As Gilroy says, “How do you write a reversal that uses the audience’s expectations in a new way? You have to write to their accumulated knowledge.” Before Gilroy wrote “Duplicity,” audiences had been trained by the mixed-up time schemes of “Memento,” “Amores Perros,” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Moviegoers got used to an aesthetic of disorientation. They also have DVDs, so they can watch a film twice to untangle its story, and the Internet, which allows them to look up a bit of jargon or insider information. Reality is a confluence of fragments, to be apprehended bit by bit; watching a movie has begun to approximate the rhythm of a Google search.

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