Ryan McNeil
Last night, my intention was to watch NYMPHOMANIAC volumes 1 & 2 in one mammoth 4-hour sitting at TIFF Lightbox. I might grow to regret saying this, but I feel like if the whole things was conceived as one complete piece that I should be consuming it that way – for better or for worse.
Unfortunately, my plan was thwarted since Lightbox cancelled the late showing of volume 2. I do wish they’d updated their website a bit sooner so that I didn’t go twenty minutes in the wrong direction for nothing, but such is life.
As I headed home, I managed to get three subway stops away before an idea on how I could have still done my double feature occurred to me:
What if I’d watched them out-of-order?
Logistically, that would have avoided my wasted trip, and still allowed me to consume everything in one big sitting. It would have been pretty-much counter to what the director intended (since it’s one long story), and would have slanted my view of the film…but I wonder how it would have played?
Let’s be honest – what I’m proposing is opening a book to the middle, finishing it, and then starting at the beginning to get back to the middle. Even as I type that, I sense the absurdity. However, it leaves me wondering about seeing themes and motifs in the beginning that one wouldn’t pick up on until the end. If the story is sound, these brush strokes should be there. If the story is flawed, then its cracks will become all the more apparent.
Hell, there are whole films like MEMENTO and IRREVERSIBLE that are specifically told backwards! Now I realize that is a specific intent of those storytellers, but in a way, it underlines that it can be done.
The ship has sailed, since I stayed on the subway and continued home, and I have tickets in-hand to watch the films tonight. Still, was I out of my mind? Is there some experimental value in consuming a story out-of-order?
This is why I like your site Ryan, you talk about stuff no-one else even thinks about. Here’s why I think, in the case of critically acclaimed films at least, you should stick with watching them in the order the film-makers intended:
The first time I saw Pulp Fiction, I didn’t really like it that much. Why? Well, you could question whether I’d actually seen Pulp Fiction. You see, it was shown to me by a friend of mine who I’ve since thankfully evicted from my social group (or rather, I’ve left his), and this fella deemed Tarantino’s chopped-up cut to not be the optimal viewing experience, and he instead decided that the skip-scene and rewind buttons were going to be given a bit of a work-out during the viewing. He didn’t rearrange it into chronological order – that at least would have some kind of logic behind it – he instead mixed it up every which way to Sunday, even going so far as to eschew the Wolf sequence entirely. To this day I still don’t appreciate Pulp Fiction as much as others seem to, predominantly because I’m always thrown back to that horrific first viewing, and as such I recommend never playing with the order of anything. Ever.
You’re too kind man…but I’m certainly happy to see that the random thoughts I have late in the day at the office are landing for you.
By now, you’ve probably noticed that I lob the sentence “watch it again” around pretty often, and it’s because I believe that while we can outrun initial misgivings about a film, it takes a lot to get past those initial misgivings.
That said, your friend is a twerp for jumping around like that. You either show something like that in it’s running order, or in it’s chronological order…no “greatest hits” compilation mixes allowed.
There are many prequels as well as “out of order story” movies. I think we, inherently, as human beings want to know where we come from and as a result want to know where characters come from. So if you’d watched them out of order I assume it would feel like a prequel. It’s have been a fascinating experience (but I rather love trying new things – go figure!) Cheers.
Now that I’ve seen them, I can tell you without a doubt that watching them in the wrong order would have left me with a radically different emotional beat.
Narratively it still would have worked – and even made for some more interesting touches – but the conclusion would have felt so drastically different.
The movies are on-demand, so give ’em a look sometime (if ya don’t mind something dirty), and you’ll see what I mean.
I too have seen part one and your question is particularly apropos in regard to this pair of films.
I cant put review to paper yet at all and think I may be waiting until part 2. Even funnier is that I saw the DC preview for Winter Soldier and here is an example of nearly stand alone sequel film making! Crazy huh!
I think with franchises it’s even more fair game since there are narratives like reboots and origin stories that get woven into the fabric all the time. In that respect, watching THE FIRST AVENGER after THE WINTER SOLDIER might work pretty damned well in that “secret origin” respect.
The only place I think ivecreally done this is with book series – you get the 2nd or 3rd book and sometimes I go back to the beginning first and read them all but sometimes I just keep going.
TV shows sometimes makes this happen – I’m at a friends’ house and catch a random episode then go back and see them all.
Sparks the interest to consume even more of the story, don’t it?
Could have sworn I commented on this post the other day. I don’t think I’ve done that with anything on a first watch, but last year when the Amazing Spider-Man was coming out, I watched the Sam Raimi trilogy in reverse order so I could watch the two origin story movies back-to-back, and that was an interesting experience.
You’re reminding me of the way I now watch the first phase of Avengers films (which is not the order they were released in).
How did the two Spider-Man films play when you watched them back to back?
I think the Raimi origin suffered from the order, as I noticed both the flaws from the 3rd movie (Sandman wasn’t there, that connection makes no sense!), and the fact that it wasn’t as good as the 2nd movie, and so I preferred the reboot which I liked on par with Spider-Man 2.