It was during a quiet scene of Josie and the Pussycats when I realized how increasingly rare serendipity is on camera.
The realization came during a scene in an aquarium where Josie (Rachael Leigh Cook) and Alan (Gabriel Mann) sneak a moment together away from the mobs of Josie’s new fans. Josie confesses her misgivings about her new and sudden fame in front of a tank of gentle beluga whales (and an underwater Evian logo, part of the film’s cheeky running gag about product placement). The belugas drift around as background players in the wide and medium shots. One makes a particularly satisfying cross as Josie claims she’s not a rock star.
The scene was shot on location at the Vancouver Aquarium and those are real whales making cameos. Belugas can be trained, but do not take direction in the cinematic sense. The filmmakers must have rolled until the whales drifted into a satisfying pattern, cut to close-ups when they were distracting or out of continuity.
Josie and the Pussycats is a good movie for any kind of watching, but it’s particularly good as a time capsule of a very specific pop cultural era in the very small sliver of post-90s, pre-9/11 America. In 2001 digital effects were standard tools but still costly. Peter Jackson would start pushing CGI expectations with the first chapter of the Lord of the Rings saga later that year. The sea change in visual expectations signaled by The Matrix was only two years earlier. A sea creature drifting by on cue still relied on patience and providence.
As of at least the last ten years or so, the beluga bystander would almost definitely be played by a 3D animated model, a model that could be maneuvered and manipulated to cross at the exact right time and place in the frame. And if the filmmakers decided to do it old-school and catch a real whale at a less-than-perfect angle, we’d wonder why. After all, I can download a functioning 3D beluga for less than the cost of a single admission to the Vancouver Aquarium.
Our expectations have irrevocably changed. Yesterday I was subjected to Godzilla x Kong: Rise of… you got me. I have no idea what that movie’s subtitle is. Suffice to say, there’s not a lot of room for improvising animals in the latest “MonsterVerse” entry. The animation is so ubiquitous, so many of the decisions made before or after shooting, that not a person on set could have experienced a moment of the spontaneous or unexpected. The sense of discovery during the creative process would be left (maybe?) for the legions of animators spread across the globe as they created an army of giant apes living at the center of the Earth. And I think divorcing that serendipity from the set is part of what drains much of the sensation out of many modern films, even as the possibilities of what they can show are near limitless. Post facto wonder only translates so far – we’ve been so spoiled with post production creations that a (somewhat) photorealistic Kong giving an emotional performance in a silly pre-Summer release is no suprise, as opposed to the marvel of an ape with feelings in 2005’s King Kong (and of course the original 1933 King Kong could give memorable a performance with fingerprints across his nose).
One of my favorite instances of in-camera serendipity from the early 21st century comes at the end of the 2002 adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. During the climactic duel between Edmond and Fernand (Jim Caviezel and Guy Pearce, speaking of 2002), the weather appears a little dodgy. Clouds fill and depart the sky between shots. During two key shots (spoilers for the end of The Count of Monte Cristo, I guess) a bloodied Guy Pearce gets photobombed by a vivid rainbow in the clouds behind him.
Catching one of nature’s most ephemeral beauties, in the biggest moment of your movie – what luck! Of course, now that every movie can fill the sky with rainbows, a rainbow ducking in for only a shot or two would be a distraction or an affectation.
If a medium contains our expectations of what it can and cannot contain, we’re watching a different medium than the one that produced Josie and the Pussycats, or Die Hard or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for that matter. For some this change came when the medium literally changed – when theaters transitioned from 35mm celluloid to digital projection around 2010 – and it’s true that motion pictures officially ceased being “films” by the strictest definition at that point. But the change isn’t just that – it would be unthinkable to believe Chris Nolan wouldn’t take advantage of animated effects just because he’s shooting on 70mm. More than the material, it’s the constant knowledge of what’s possible to do in digital to the point that we can’t even trust the sky.
The genie’s been out of the bottle so long I classify this as an observation, not a revelation. And despite my displeasure with the new Kong, I don’t mean for this to come off as a rail against current movies or some misguided nostalgia about how things were so much better back in the day. I’d rather use my Josie mini-epiphany to articulate what I appreciate about what movies – old and new – are doing. That monkey hitting his mark in Raiders of the Lost Ark is so much more impressive to me now. The surprise effects at the end of Love Lies Bleeding are richer to contemplate knowing this is what the director chose when most anything could have been shown.
And now and then we’re still gifted with a bit of film in the old sense. Scorsese isn’t shy about using effects, so when a live owl makes an unplanned flight directly into the lens of the camera (shooting 35mm, incidentally) in Killers of the Flower Moon, it’s still breathtaking. There’s still an energy when something unplanned gets captured. Serendipity is a tool that moviemakers could use to remember.