a movie...and a Book by Daniel Wagner

the movie
    We see a big empty room.
    Of course, it’s not a room the way we know them, with length, width, height, and all. It’s just a room projected on a screen.
    In a way, it’s a dirty trick. We aren’t used to empty rooms. Yet an empty room is understood in one glimpse. So after the short time it takes your brain to realize,
It’s
an empty room,
you start to wonder,
What for? Is it possible that the whole thing blows up all of a sudden? Or is
it a lousy movie and they simply couldn’t afford more?
And while thinking about it, while thinking about these kinds of things, the movie makers have you already glued to your seat. I guess they teach this stuff in art school nowadays.
    As expected, the big empty room is still on the screen . . . and some whispering is already spreading through the theater—
What a setup.
    In a way, you can’t blame the movie makers, though. It’s us. It’s our messed-up attention span. If you just start telling a nice story, right from the beginning no one is interested. Me neither, naturally. Sometimes I sit in front of the TV thinking about—
    Hold on, an old guy enters the picture, holding a chair in his hands. He places the chair in the middle of the room and takes a seat. Basically he looks like a typical old man. He wears a baseball cap and old-fashioned glasses, and there is some excess skin around his mouth.
    That’s another trick. Just use a guy who looks a little funny—with too much skin around his mouth, for example—and the viewer, again, starts to think about it. Probably only half consciously you start to wonder if he had this excess skin even as a child. Then you try to picture him as a child. It doesn’t make much sense, so your brain starts to look for other solutions.
It could be a side
effect of arguing with his wife,
some might speculate. Others may even start to worry a little and wonder if gravity can do this over time.
    That’s how the brain works—and don’t think the movie makers don’t know it! They use your curiosity, they make you wonder, that’s all they do; and while you’re thinking about those things, you already start to relate to the characters. That’s the whole trick.
    I didn’t even notice it. He’s holding a book in his hands. He gives it a little shake. He gives it another little shake . . . and the excess skin around his mouth joins the shake a little.
    Now he’s leafing through the book.
    It looks as if he’s starting to read from the book.
    But no, he just looks up again, starting to speak. “They asked me to read this book to you. Actually, it’s not a book; it’s a movie they said.” The way he’s acting, it’s clear he doesn’t have any idea what’s going on—they probably just picked him from the street and shoved some money in his pocket. All you need to do is take an old guy who doesn’t have all his marbles, then give him an assignment—but make sure you don’t explain it so well to him that he will behave awkwardly—and in nine out of ten cases it comes off as funny. No one knows why. But it’s funny anyway.
    He’s leafing through the book again, as if he’s not sure how to begin.
    “I probably should start to read now.”
    Now he’s looking all around the place for some sign of confirmation . . . a nodding head, or a thumbs-up from the movie director, I guess.
    Someone probably nodded. In any case, the old guy puts his shaking index finger to the book, squints a little, and then finally starts to read.
    “We see the outside of a suburban house from a moving perspective,” he reads, then stops and sends a puzzled frown into the book again.
    Ha!
You should see what happens now. He twitches, as if a fly were bothering him on his neck.
    “Ahhh . . . I guess that’s a comment for the movie director,” the old guy says.
    Now he smiles proudly into the camera and the flesh around his mouth tightens a little.
    “Okay, let’s start again,” he says, and clears his throat. “We see the outside of a