In The Cinema Everyone Can Hear You Scream

Apparently the next big thing in the world of cinema is going to be 4D. A speculative truth (at best) that various cinema moguls would like to convince us of.

Essentially 4D is a fully immersive, interactive experience where your cinema seat is made to shake and veer during car chases, you get pummelled with air during onscreen whirlwinds, you get hosed down during rainstorms or deep sea dives and you get blasted with the odour of stale alcohol and garlic when the leading man / lady moves in close for a tongue sarnie.

To be honest, there’s nothing new about this gimmicky approach to movie watching – most kids’ entertainment / holiday resorts have some sort of 4D cinema these days where we willingly pay an exorbitant fee to allow our kids to be waterboarded whilst watching The Smurfs because it stops them whinging on about wanting an ice cream for all of 20 minutes. But family holiday resorts is where 4D should stay in my opinion.

There is nothing cinematically immersive about having your seat shaken so hard you end up wearing the popcorn of the person sitting next to you or hearing the neurotics in the front row squeal every time a hidden air cylinder blows a couple of bars of pressurized cold air up their trouser leg. If anything this totally removes you from the film; it shatters the pleasurable suspension of belief that you have lapsed into in order to enjoy the movie and places you undeniably back into a darkened room with a bunch of people who will immediately become your sworn enemy should the fire alarm suddenly go off and you find your way to the exit blocked.

Books don’t need 4D effects. I didn’t need the smell of wet dog to assail me when reading The Famous Five or to hear the jiggling of female flesh when reading Game Of Thrones. And I imagine I would not need to have my hands manacled and tied behind my back to get the full effect of 50 Shades Of Grey. Though you might need to do that and threaten the lives of my children in order to get me to read it in the first place. Such artificial devices would break the spell that reading a book – submitting yourself to an imaginary world – weaves. It is the same with cinema. The only senses that need to be catered for are sound and vision. You can never fully recreate the entire gamut of physical sensation that the characters onscreen are being subjected to as part of the plot – so offering the audience piecemeal approximate sensations is not going to add anything to the movie at all. If anything it will detract.

And to be honest if you really need your seat to be shaken for you during a moment of cinematic jeopardy in order to feel the correct emotional response then you plainly have major empathy problems and cinema is not for you anyway.

Indeed, anything that involves being around lots of people or dealing with any kind of quantifiable human experience is not for you - you’d be much better off getting your kicks in a vacuum where nobody at all will be able to hear you scream and I can watch the end of the effing film in peace.

Supercar

Things are simpler when you are a kid.

I don’t mean life itself. Life can be pretty complicated for even the most settled and content of children. But most problems can be solved with the merest touch of a child’s imagination. Of course, this solution often has little bearing on scientific reality and is beyond all physical and temporal restraints. I’ve seen this at work in my youngest son who, when watching the water aid adverts on TV, tells me quite earnestly that the lttile boy in the advert being poisoned by bad water can instantly be made better if we send him the £2 the advert is asking for. His solution is correct but also not quite correct and it is difficult to explain the nuances to a 6 year old.

To be honest, the fact he wants to help is maybe the best solution of all.

His solution to other world or home problems usually entail chocolate, hugs, money magically appearing from somewhere and things instantly changing because that would just be the right thing to do. Kids have an in-built magic wand that, were it to be real, would both make the world better and worse at the same time.

But I digress.

What got me thinking along these line was a memory I have of when I was a child. It will be of no surprise to you that I wrote stories as a child. Stories where I was the hero leader of a crime fighting gang of movie stars. My posse consisted of the cast of Star Wars (who all remained in character), Charlie’s Angels (all of them – including the replacements when Farrah Fawcett and Kate Jackson bailed out), the good guys from the Logan’s Run TV series (which I only ever saw once) and, for some unearthly reason, Abba. You can imagine the tension  that existed within my gang toward the end of Abba’s pop career.

Anyway, one of the main problems I had was: how the hell could we all get ourselves around town en masse to fight crime? Because my gang consisted of a good 25+ members. Catching the bus or hiring a coach was going to seriously cramp our style. And your ordinary four-door family saloon car wasn’t going to be nearly big enough (people carriers hadn’t been invented in the seventies).

My kid brain came up with the perfect solution.

A supercar.

A car that was made up of an ordinary car at the front but towing a long train of caravans. The car would be welded to the caravans – and the caravans to each other – by sheet metal, creating a metallic sausage of a car the length of the Chiltern Turbo. The spaces between the vehicle were completely enclosed and thus could be utilized by gang members to sit and operate (via hi-tech computers) fantastic weaponry – laser turrets and cannons – that were attached to the vehicle’s exterior.

The pièce de résistance was that the outside would be spray painted in garish colours with the word “supercar” emblazoned down the side. Just in case passers-by hadn’t cottoned on to the fact that this was a less than ordinary vehicle.

Perfect. So perfect.

I lived with that idea for many years (until my teens) and was quite determined that, when I was a grown-up, I would build this supercar and drive it around Leamington Spa. How could I not? A spot of welding one afternoon and it would be done. Simple(s).

The fact that I’d never get it to take a corner or the impossibility of an ordinary car pulling that much weight around without stalling (let alone ever reaching crime fighting speeds) never ever occurred to me.

And to this day I still know nothing at all about cars.

But dreams that are never going to work…

Well, I know all about them.