Today's movie chase scene is vehicular - a toddler tantrum enabled by horse power. It revels in destruction for its own sake, writes Joe Bennett. Photo / Getty Images
Today's movie chase scene is vehicular - a toddler tantrum enabled by horse power. It revels in destruction for its own sake, writes Joe Bennett. Photo / Getty Images
A DOG'S LIFE
Today's subject is cutting to the chase, a phrase that has recently come into vogue, its meaning being obvious, its derivation less so, though it is clearly an Americanism.
I had given the phrase little thought until the other evening in the pub when one of our party used itand another of our party said what the hell does it actually mean and a third of our party said it was originally advice to movie directors suggesting that rather than faffing about with plot or character or similar trivia it was advisable to go straight to the important bit of any movie which was the chase scene, at which point the fourth of our party, who as it happens was your correspondent, brought his mighty beer flagon down on the table with a noise that silenced every patron in the room and bellowed in that Zeus-like voice of his, what?
Now I do not pretend to be a movie buff. I had a brief flirtation with the medium at the age of 7 during which period I saw Where Eagles Dare twice, but since then my enthusiasm has waned.
Nevertheless I have inadvertently caught enough movies or bits of movies over the years on television, aeroplanes and wherever else to know that by and large they still simplify the world into goodies and baddies, just as we used to do in primary school when we had a playground game called cops and robbers and another one called cowboys and Indians, both of which consisted of good characters (cops/cowboys) chasing bad ones (robbers/Indians.)
(Those two playground games from half a century ago, I realise now, illustrate the influence the North American movie industry had already had on delicate little minds, for in the village in southeast England where I was raised we had nothing much at all in the way of cowboys, Indians or robbers, and though we did have a cop we called him a policeman.)
Such comic subtlety evident in the silent movie era is a long way from today's movie chase. Photo / Getty Images
Anyway, given the infantile goody/baddy dichotomy, it is clear that the chase scene in a movie has only two possible permutations, one being that the good are chasing the bad, presumably with the intention of capturing or righteously killing them in order to prevent them getting away with whatever they have done or stolen, and the other being that the bad are chasing the good with the intention of capturing or unrighteously killing them in order that they, the baddies, should so get away.
You may think this to be a pretty limited set of permutations to sustain an entertainment industry for a century or more and you would think right, nevertheless there was a time when the movie chase was worth cutting to.
Back in the days of silent movies the chase involved Charlie Chaplin and similar likeable imps using their wits and the blessings of youth to evade fat policemen and other representatives of authority, thus inverting the conventional moral order to the delight of one and all. But such comic subtlety is a long way from today's movie chase.
Today's chase is vehicular. The vehicles can be anything from bicycles to spacecraft via scooters, go-karts, tanks and planes, but they are most commonly cars because men like them. Cars give certain men the sense of potency they crave and think they deserve.
The standard chase involves driving in a manner both lawless and fearless through streets occupied by people going about their business in a manner both lawful and fearful.
The lawful and fearful are your and my representatives, and the sort of business we are going about is the sort of thing that will look good when a car goes through it at high speed, such as rearing chickens in a flimsy shed, or, and this is especially popular, piling fruit in pyramids on market stalls, which pyramids we are about to crown with a final orange at the precise moment that the first vehicle comes through giving us only enough time to fling ourselves to one side as the fruit erupts in a volcano of juicy disorder and then to shake a feeble fist at the departing exhausts.
In sum, then, the chase scene is a toddler tantrum enabled by horse power. It revels in destruction for its own sake. It's a trumpian orgy of mindless self-gratification. It is narcissism on wheels and vandalism excused, a dumb male fantasy of speed and power and violence.
All of which I explained to the pub with the eloquence that fury sometimes lends, and if, I concluded, the phrase under discussion does indeed prove to derive from the language of movies then I shall never, repeat never, use it again.
