The Tyranny of Logic
A few words about suspending disbelief
The other week, I attended a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 thriller Spellbound, newly restored, starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. I’ve seen many Hitchcock films—most, I believe—but not this one. I didn’t know much about the film going in, other than having once watched its famous Dalí-designed dream sequence, and that it was the most famous of that early wave of Freudian psychological thrillers. Nearly 80 years old, and the film still had the sold-out audience wrapped right around his finger. Master of suspense, indeed.
Allow me to run down the basics of the plot for you: Bergman is a psychoanalyst at a mental hospital. She’s a classic Type. Friendly, but emotionally cold, matter-of-fact. She doesn’t believe in love. Enter: Peck, the new psychiatrist taking over the facility from its current direct, forced into retirement by the board after a recent mental breakdown. Instantly, Bergman loses herself for Peck. How could she not? But things take a turn when he goes through his own mental breakdown, and Bergman surmises that he’s actually an imposter. And more than an imposter, he’s an amnesiac, who now believe’s he’s killed the real psychiatrist and stolen his identity. The pair go on the run, as Bergman attempts to unlock the secrets of Peck’s mind, proving to him and the world that he can’t possibly be a killer. Why not? Well, as she explains later, she loves him, and she no man she loves could be a murderer.
Absolutely nothing about Spellbound is plausible. The psychology simplistic, the romance absurd, the legal implications nonsensical. None of it matters at all, because this is cinema, which few filmmakers in history understood better than Hitchcock.
Not to put it on the same level as Spellbound, but the movie had me thinking a lot about my reaction to Trap, the latest from M. Night Shyamalan. The Sixth Sense director has always had a keen sense of cinema. We tend to remember the plots and their twists, but it’s his formal acuity that makes the films work. It’s about where you place the camera, the timing of an edit, the staging. But where Shyamalan once chased a kind of prestige in art, he’s since let himself loose, using his ability to self-fund his pictures as a vehicle for pure filmmaking. The run of films from The Visit onward has been among the more exciting second winds in recent Hollywood history. Not that every film has been good, or even great (I didn’t even bother to see Glass), but Shyamalan has become unburdened by the weight of expectation, allowing his filmmaking freedom to chase form to its logical conclusion.
Trap is that logical conclusion, a movie with a plot even more absurd than Spellbound, but similarly tuned to keep the audience entertained and in suspense. There’s really nothing more to it. Whatever thematic depth one might mine from Shyamalan’s sicko father-of-daughters serial killer story is fine enough, but not at all the point. Rather, the point is to watch as Josh Hartnett’s The Butcher move from obstacle to obstacle, the situation escalating endlessly. Literally. The final shot of the film suggests only further escalation. That you can feel the writer-director chuckling as he typed out the screenplay only adds to the film’s charm, and coupled with his instinctual use of the camera, Trap becomes something far better than its otherwise direct-to-video material.
It’s not entirely surprising to me, then, that many have taken issue with Trap, particularly its last act. As though what transpires was one twist too many, one escalation more than was needed, and moreover, completely illogical. The tyranny of logic has consumed cinema. As the art form pushed further and further into the realm of “realism,” audience’s ability to suspend disbelief began to fade. YouTube channels picking out every narrative “flaw” in a movie proliferated, and even those who railed against such nonsense seemed to inherit the attitude. While people are happy and eager to accept wild fantasy in their films—Marvel movies are still the biggest on the planet—they must all adhere to the precision of plotting demanded by a public afraid of witnessing true imagination, and even more terrified of being asked to have some themselves.
Spellbound demands imagination. All of Hitchcock’s best films do. They don’t exist in the real world. They are fantasy constructions of high emotion and sinister dealing, the absurdities of which feel right even as a few moments consideration would topple their house of cards construction. That’s why they’re good. When Ingrid Bergman says that Gregory Peck can’t be a murderer because she loves him, despite only having met him a couple days prior, and him being an amnesiac she actually knows next to nothing about, there might be an urge to laugh. Great as the audience was at my screening, I did hear some chuckles. But there’s nothing funny abut it. What the film is expressing is entirely real: the alchemical trust earned by our emotional reality. A more “realistic” version of the same story would be a lesser one. Trap, meanwhile, is a funnier film than Spellbound. It’s filmmaking with a sly smirk. Still, the magic of it rests in Shyamalan’s disregard for the logic of the proceedings, because in each moment the emotions are bold and the stakes high. It’s a kind of filmmaking very much out of fashion these days, but it’s good to see someone still trying it.