What exactly starts a cliche?
No, seriously. How do a large number of the American tax-paying population, working their days and nights doing whatever it is that adults do, decide to fork their hard earned dollars over to watch a movie, and then decide “yeah, that’s the one. That’s the trope I wanna see in every movie until the heat death of the universe.”
It’s genuinely incredibly curious.
Have you ever been chased by a bogeyman? I mean, it’s gotta have happened to at least one of my readers, right? Well, you try your best to escape, you MacGyver your way out of whatever traps or strange happenstances have come about to stand between you and your freedom, and you finally make it to your automobile.
And your car won’t start. So of course, the bogeyman captures you, and you’re forced to sacrifice your… hot co-star in your daring escape? That’s its own cliche, but I really wanted to talk about the car, because it didn’t just start in horror. In fact, it started with noir. Film noir specializes in telling stories about morally gray characters who don’t really believe in anything or have very strong morals. “Double Indemnity,” made in 1944, is filled with that. In an almost throwaway scene in that movie, after killing the owner of a very large life insurance policy, the heroine dumps the body, and when she tries to get the car to start it stalls out.
It’s not life threatening, and the plot is still advanced by other means. But it’s an interesting start to what is now a time honored tradition whenever college co-eds decide to go to a creepy looking house or whatever B-rated horror flick is coming out this summer.
Or, if you want to go in the opposite direction, don’t you wish that you could experience some sort of intense academic training that magically changes you from a wiry nerd into some hulking beast of muscle and mind? Well, since I’m banned from selling my funny little pills this side of the Mississippi, may I interest you in a montage?
The montage traces its origins to the Soviets, which makes sense. It’s grand, over-the-top, a perfect way of describing the propaganda of a newly-formed country trying to find its footing in an increasingly hostile Europe, but while the Soviets claim the origin of the montage it’s an art that has changed radically since it was first introduced.
The Soviet montage, invented by Sergie Eisenstein, is certainly a provocative style. It’s essentially knitting together two scenes and from them creating a third. The montage was turned into a driver of time and change in America, thanks to, well, Europeans and their passion for mucking about in Hollywood (this is only the slightest of jabs at Sergio Leone, who I recognize was Italian). See, the Soviet montage was stitching together two shots, and the American montage could represent growth, change, time passing, things happening. There is the classic newsreel montage, where you see the presses printing, as newspapers and headlines flash in front of your eyes, something “Citizen Kane” found itself quite enamored with, or the narration told in training montages. There’s the most famous of all, “Rocky,” which has become the progenitor for the modern montage. Is it a cliche? Is it a trope? Well, the training montage is certainly a cliche, but the montage itself is a tool now used across film.
I’ve got just one more before I get shooed off this particular topic by a laundry list of other work, but it’s the two swordsmen, ready for a duel, striking quickly. Then, in the moments following, one simply collapses, killed, the other safe and barely harmed.
So where did it come from? You’ve definitely seen it somewhere, and it actually started in Japanese media, before creeping to the west. Now, I don’t think anyone would hazard a guess this was Western, the sort of stylized sword fighting necessary for this is very much still rooted in media portrayal of the Japanese, and that’s why this trope is so interesting — because it spilled over.
It was, in fact, Akira Kurosawa, a legendary Japanese filmmaker, who invented the two swordsmen dueling scene, in his 1954 movie “Seven Samurai.” The iconic duel hits every single part of the cliche well — the master telling the apprentice it isn’t worth it, the slow silence as you realize how bad this is going to go, the collapse of the challenger to demonstrate how fast and unexpected the blow was.
It’s interesting seeing how cliche/tropes have evolved and become part of the mainstays of movies — we now spend more time trying to subvert them or toy with them than playing them straight, but it’s interesting to remember that at some point, these were the fresh new way to tell a story. Before Kurosawa, duels were different. Before the montage, we didn’t know how to speedily imply movement. Before Rocky, did we even know how to train?
It makes tracking the growth of film incredibly enjoyable, and it’s a great excuse to crack open a few oldies and see what exactly aged well — and what exactly aged poorly.
See ya later folks!
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