The Audience Cut

On movies that don't know when to end, comfort films, and the critic in each of us.

Not long ago, I was convalescing from an illness of indeterminate seriousness. My wife called it “the lurgy” with pantomimed pity, but it was stomach-knotting and muscle-gelatinizing enough to confine me to a makeshift bed on the sofa. I asked plaintively (with only slight exaggeration of my woeful state) for soup to be brought to my sickbed, and I relaxed into my self-pity. I wondered if I should pick up the densely experimental novel I’d been reading or watch one of the comfort movies I go to when life delivers a K.O.

I chose to watch Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright’s almost perfect buddy-cop comedy. Almost? Its perfection runs right up to what I insist is the film’s proper final scene: the quick-cut montage of the movie’s villains having their mugshots taken, shot with such melodrama that the bureaucracy becomes funny. There’s another scene after that, sort of an epilogue and sort of a third-act climax, but not really either. It’s the film awkwardly lingering after it’s already finished, like when you say bye to someone but you both walk off in the same direction. The film struggles to find its full stop, so instead it drifts off with an unsatisfying ellipsis...

This failure to call “cut” at the right moment is a pet peeve that’s given rise to my pet project of compiling a list of offending films. Spielberg’s The Lost World is an entertaining sequel with one too many final acts. Iñárritu’s Birdman should end with the cut to black after Riggan’s last stand on stage; the three minutes that follow say too much and contribute too little. Baz Luhrmann’s Australia is an entertaining piece of escapism trapped inside an excessive runtime burdened with a fourth act. Luhrmann has said that he wrote six endings and shot three, and he appears to have included two of them in the finished film. There are many other examples, but I don’t want to commit the sin I’m condemning.

Birdman (2014)

As another wave of nausea spread through my pathetic figure, I reconsidered the soup I’d been slurping. It transformed in the wake of that nauseating wash from cubes of vegetables floating in a hearty broth to something more like vomit in its consistency and... chunks. I swallowed hard and focused on the film. Our heroes had just finished their showdown against the village vigilantes. As I watched the ending of Hot Fuzz that followed, the real one that Edgar Wright gave us, I was also sitting in the front row of my mental cinema, where the curtains had already closed at what I think is the correct moment.

I often keep two sets of books like this. Part of me watches the film as it is, while another part works out how I’d improve what I’m seeing on screen — or reading in a book, or hearing through headphones. There are the words inked on the page as written by the author, and the words inked in imagination as corrected by me: a missing comma added here, some sloppy dialogue corrected there, perhaps a whole chapter excised. Forget the Authorised Edition or the Director’s Cut; each of us has our own Audience Cut.

The film critic Roger Ebert alludes to this idea in his reappraisal of Midnight Cowboy, written twenty-five years after his first seeing the film.¹ Ebert describes it as “one of a handful of films that stay in our memory after the others have evaporated”, going on to explain:

“What has happened to Midnight Cowboy is that we’ve done our own editing job on it. We’ve forgotten the excesses and the detours, and remembered the purity of the central characters and the Voight and Hoffman performances. Seeing the movie again was a reminder of what else, unfortunately, it contains.”

Ebert laments that Midnight Cowboy “comes heartbreakingly close to being the movie we want it to be”, adding wistfully, “If films could be revised, or rewritten, it is possible to see now how this one could be more pure.” But films can be revised and rewritten in the private editing room of the mind. In our imaginations, we reshoot scenes, fix clunky editing, demand more from something lacking or request less of an excess.

This idea might seem — to indignant directors, no doubt — like hubris. As I ejected Hot Fuzz from the Blu-ray player, I was suspicious of myself. Did I really think I’d have made a better film than Edgar Wright? For that matter, did I think I could do a better job than Jane Campion or Martin Scorsese; than Jonathan Franzen or Jane Austen (seriously — Jane Austen?); than Bach or Bloc Party? I can be arrogant, but am I that arrogant?

No, of course I can’t do what they do. All I can do is hypothetically refine what the artist creates. They cook the meal; I just re-season and re-heat the food later. But this isn’t nothing. It’s the gear shift from passive to active consumption, the difference between listening to a monologue and taking part in a conversation. On one side, nodding along in compliance; on the other, having something to say for yourself, forming your own opinion, debating a point for clarification. It can even be arguing for its own sake, which Christopher Hitchens used to advocate for, because “the grave will supply plenty of time for silence”.

This is the beginning of criticism, which A. O. Scott calls “the lifeblood of art”. In Better Living Through Criticism (2016), Scott argues every work of art is essentially a corpse until we reanimate it with our curiosity, by challenging it and accepting its challenges. “We need to put our remarkable minds to use,” he writes, “and to pay our own experience the honour of taking it seriously.” Criticism is the art of taking experience seriously.

The iconic critic in Ratatouille (2007)

As I belly-flopped onto the sofa, sick and tired of feeling sick and tired, I could hear Max Jamison, the titular critic of Wilfrid Sheed’s 1970 novel, begging, “Please, not another piece on the role of the critic. It was an occupational disease, defining and redefining one’s role.” My thoughts about the nobility and necessity of criticism were too highfaluting. In that sorry state, I wanted my faluting much lower. Why, then, was my mind still active — if somewhat sluggish — as I watched comfort films? Why was I still creating my own Audience Cuts even though I wanted to relax?

That’s easy: because it’s fun. The creative act of mentally editing films is part of the joy of cinema. That I could imaginatively collaborate with artists, even when I was too unwell to do anything else, was a lifeline in my time of need. This casual form of criticism offered me a bridge between the heart and the head, a route to joy through the mind. It was a way of addressing, in Scott’s words, “the works that answer our bottomless hunger for meaning and pleasure”. Not meaning or pleasure, but both.

Too often the notion of a comfort film (or comfort read) hangs on ideas of ease, of not being challenged intellectually. The idea is that we can “switch off”. I certainly thought I wanted that in my self-pitying state of sickness. I realised, after watching Hot Fuzz and while watching Jurassic Park (my other go-to for cosiness and consolation), that the best comfort films and books are those that function at two levels: they work perfectly well with the mind idling in standby mode, bringing entertainment with ease, and yet also provide enough cognitive fodder to keep the critical faculties from stalling altogether. Both, not either/or.

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Looking Beneath the Surface

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1. Midnight Cowboy, retrospective review on rogerebert.com (1994)