The Trombone Shot
Imagine a man who finds himself at the center of an elaborate and malevolent conspiracy. He takes into his confidence the one remaining person he can trust only to discover, too late, that this mild-mannered and sympathetic stalwart is in league with his mysterious and multitudinous enemies. Or imagine a man struggling to allay a preposterous suspicion, aroused by dreams, omens and the observation of certain disconcerting but ill-defined anomalies of temperament and habit, that his wife has been supplanted by a doppelgänger. With the help of his therapist, the issue is resolved and psychohygiene restored. Then one afternoon, he answers the telephone in the living room. Let him have an unobstructed view into the sunny kitchen where his wife is baking cookies. Impossibly, unmistakably, monstrously, the voice he hears on the crackly line is that of his wife. She rasps, "That's not me! Get out of the house!" and while he listens to those words, the thing standing in the kitchen smiles sweetly at him across the intervening space. Or simply try to visualize the faces of the poor mother and her children who, according to the New Zealand Herald, witnessed the following:
There are certain experiences containing just the right admixture of incongruity and horror when it may seem for one nightmarish moment that the fabric of reality has been rent and that one is witnessing the violent intrusion of an impossibility into the real world. In film, the camera technique known as the trombone shot might be held up as the ideal representation of this feeling. I am shown a close up of someone's face at the moment they come to some dreadful realization or make some dreadful discovery. His or her mouth falls open and their face is blanched with terror or with paralyzing dismay. At this point, the camera zooms slowly forward while tracking back at the same speed. The result is emotive and unsettling: the apparent distance between the character and the camera does not change, while the background undergoes a queasy parallactic shift and seems to increase in size. A prickle sweeps across my forearms and down the back of my neck. I share in their sense of vertigo, their feeling of falling away from themselves.
Simulating on the screen the optical experience of someone whose gaze fixes on something from which their mind draws back in horror is a cinematic slight of hand. The viewer feels as if they were being pulled into the scene, or as if the false reality of the world depicted on the screen were suddenly threatening to spill out into the theatre. In the grammar of film, it is a powerful symbol for the sudden horrified recognition of malevolence. |
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