the six dollar fifty man messes with expectations you didn't even know you had

In my post on Tuesday about the awesome New Zealand short The Six Dollar Fifty Man, I didn't get into some of the neater storytelling sleight of hand used by the directors for fear I would scare off some people. But the movie has two great ploys that it would have been sad to forget about just because they're a little hard to describe.

First, a great switcheroo, though you might want to check out the video before you read on to make the following more comprehensible. You'll see at about the 2:00 mark (and in the above screen shot) that our little hero Andy, dressed in red, has just jumped off a roof. This creates an immediate tension — what the ef is this kid thinking and is he going to be okay when he lands? — and the next shot is of the ground below at a blank spot where we think he'll arrive any second, probably disastrously. And then, suddenly, dropping into the frame ... is a doll, in a pinkish outfit that looks like Andy's, and, wait huh? Then the kid alights gracefully in the background.

What's great about this is that Andy's launch off the roof and the doll's landing on the ground are both legitimate things that could happen on camera, but putting the latter after the former was not what you were expecting. The best part is that you didn't even really know you were expecting something specific (i.e., Andy landing) until the film gave you something else (the doll landing). Not because you're dumb, but because anybody watching would make that guess about what would come next without being aware of it. Turning that on its head is an easy way for the filmmakers to gently remind us that we have expectations of movies without ever realizing it.

An even trickier bit comes a moment later. At around 3:00, we're watching Andy standing outside when some eerie music starts up in the background, presumably reflecting the kid's emotional disquiet. At about 3:18 the scene changes to some close-ups of Andy and a woman in what appears to be a classroom. That same song is playing, but now the timbre or acoustics of the music make it sound as though it's in the room, maybe being played on a stereo. This is disorienting because the sound of the music shouldn't change if the characters couldn't hear it anyway and it was just supposed to be the soundtrack.

But then a cut to a speaker box shows that this music is actually being pumped through a PA system into the classroom, and that's why the sound changed between scenes. Let's just set aside for the moment that this might be the most hopeless music ever played before morning announcements at any school ever; more to the point, the filmmakers are playing with the barrier between the audience and the fictional world they're observing by playing music for first one and then the other.

The technical way to put this is that the music was first non-diegetic (that is, not created within the fictional world) but then switched to being diegetic (that is, coming from somewhere in the story's universe). This is a particularly sly move if you think of it this way: At first, outside, the music was being piped into the movie by the filmmakers, and now, in the schoolroom, it's still being piped in, only now from the head office.

Anyway, from an emotional standpoint, this has strange effects. Maybe because non-diegetic sound often reflects characters' feelings or the overall mood of a story, filmmakers don't usually allow it to bleed into diegetic sound as it does here. It's another case where you weren't even aware of your expectation — that the soundtrack would stay outside of the story — until that expectation was violated. I suspect that the filmmakers knew this could have been confusing, so they added a small comment about the music from the principal right after the song ends on the PA, as if to reassure us the viewers that yes, Andy can now hear the music too.

Whether those really were your expectations, obviously I can't really say, but they were mine, and having them subverted was a nice touch to an otherwise well-done film.