Top 6: Rug-Pulling Movies (Nothing is as it Seems)

A movie's going along at a great clip, the mystery is finally going to be solved, we're finally gonna find out what the deal is with everything, and then the screenwriter can't figure out how to end it so it ends up being a dream or a hallucination or some crazy shit like that. You think you're watching one movie and it totally turns into another. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but for better or worse, cinematic rug-pulling is here to stay. These are the Top 6 movies where it's all in their head.

Before I get complaints, this is littered with spoilers, so read on at your own risk.


VI - HIGH TENSION (2003)
This uber-gory slasher flick from France starts out as an above average "big-scary-guy-stalking-and-killing" movie and turns into a "that-doesn't-make-any-fucking-sense-at-all" movie. We start by following two young co-eds, Marie and Alex, as they travel to Alex's family farm for a holiday. Marie likes Alex's family, but not nearly as much as she likes Alex (wink wink), but soon it goes to pot when a big beefy guy with coveralls and a weird old truck breaks into the house, brutally murders Alex's family and kidnaps Alex for God knows what. Marie springs into action and tries to retrieve her poor friend from the big guy's clutches. A clever and nauseatingly suspenseful cat and mouse game ensues and we really fear for the lives of these girls. We're excited when Marie beats the scary killer to a bloody pulp and attempts to save her friend. It's a good movie. Then about 10 minutes to the end, we learn that Marie's the one who killed Alex's family and kidnapped her and the entire cat-and-mouse routine was in her head. But that can't be what happens, there are too many times when Marie was nowhere near the killer. There was a CAR CHASE for Christ sake! But in the end, instead of just making a good throwback movie, we get a silly twist that negates everything.


V - IDENTITY (2003)
Here's another thriller, which seems to be the bread and butter of this storytelling cliche. In this one, ten strangers meet at a roadside motel in the middle or a torrential downpour. There is a killer among them, picking off the strangers one by one, though when the known killer winds up with a baseball bat shoved down his throat, the mystery really begins. Throughout this, there are cutaways to scenes of a large, seemingly docile inmate is being examined by a psychiatrist with the district attorneys looking on. Could this man have some knowledge of what's happening in the hotel? What does this have to do with the ten strangers? The true story of why these seemingly unrelated people are gathered in one place and being destroyed is slowly unraveled until we realize the horrible truth: All ten people are personalities within the big inmate and the most violent one, who in yet another twist we learn is the little boy personality, is wiping out all the others. This movie works a little better because really anything can happen in someone's head, but given everything I know about multiple personality disorder (which is almost nothing), I am certain a person's mind isn't like The Matrix nor are personalities corporeal beings within it duking it out for supremacy in some Clue-like murder weekend.


IV - JACOB'S LADDER (1990)
Here's an example of this technique actually being quite effective, even though the end-result is still a cheat. This film tells the story of Jacob Singer who as a soldier in Vietnam witnessed atrocities and strange occurrences, and after the war has been having terrible, horrific nightmares. Throughout, we go from Jacob in Vietnam, to memories of his former wife and son, and to his present (which is 1975) with his new girlfriend, where his nightmares start to bleed through to his waking life. We learn that his young son was killed in a car accident before Jacob went to Vietnam and, as his hallucinations become more and more bizarre, Jacob learns of chemical experiments performed on soldiers during the war. It seems that one of these chemicals, a drug codenamed "The Ladder," reduced the recipient to their most primal urges, but that the soldiers it was tested on didn't target the enemy but attacked each other indiscriminately. His visions, which consist of people shaking their faces wildly and his girlfriend either being raped and destroyed by or turning into a large lizard-dragon creature, must then surely be a result of these tests, right? Well, we learn at the end that Jacob never even made it out of Vietnam. His body is lying in a triage tent and he's just about to expire. What the entire movie has been is a neural spike before dying. Jacob's experiences appear to have been a form of purgation in which he releases himself from his earthly attachments, finally joining his dead son Gabe to ascend a staircase (Biblically known as Jacob's Ladder) toward a bright light. The visuals in this movie are disturbing and haunting to the point where I was actually glad they were a dying man's fever dream.


III - David Lynch
I was debating whether to put a David Lynch movie on my list, as a lot of his movies have elements that are within the parameters of the list, yet don't contain enough of a pay off either way to make them fully part of it. So I decided I would split the difference and just put David Lynch himself on the list. Most of his movies feel like hallucinations to begin with, but couple that with surreal imagery and disjunctive narrative and you get something other than else. In ERASERHEAD (1977), a man living in industrial hell has a hideously deformed worm-baby out of wedlock that he is forced to raise on his own, he has a tiny woman with a big, creepy face living (and singing) in his radiator, and eventually his head pops off and is made into erasers. In LOST HIGHWAY (1997) Bill Pullman talks to The Devil, gets accused and jailed for killing his wife, then released when he wakes up as Balthazar Getty with no memory of anything and gets wrapped up with a woman who looks exactly like who was his dead wife when he was still Bill Pullman. And, lest we forget, The Devil. Then there's MULHOLLAND DR. (2001) where a whole bunch of unrelated things happen to characters we're not really sure about, a woman loses her memory and tries to get it back from a blue box, maybe was also another woman who was murdered by her girlfriend who may also have been an actress or an aspiring actress, and a guy is scared to death by a thing he dreamed about, or something like that. And of course, the entirety of "Twin Peaks," (1990-91). David Lynch constructs such troubling and twisted stories, it's really too hard to pinpoint whose fevered mind they inhabit: the character's, David Lynch's, or our own.


II - FIGHT CLUB (1999)
An insomniac who lives in an Ikea world finds comfort first in the shared grief of people with debilitating diseases and then, once that's ruined by Marla Singer, another phony, in the organised chaos of men beating the living tar out of each other. The latter escape is the brainchild of himself and his new best friend, the handsome rabble-rouser Tyler Durden. Soon, Tyler's machinations turn the ever-growing group of fatherless nomads into domestic terrorists, bend on causing as much damage to the status quo as possible. The man, whose name we never learn, begins feeling alienated by Tyler, who beds Marla and does things without consulting ____. The narrator's world is finally turned upside down when he discovers that he is actually Tyler Durden, or more accurately Tyler Durden is part of him. What's more shocking to him is that Project Mayhem has become an unstoppable force of its own that not even Tyler can reel in. The first time I saw this movie, I was suitably shocked, as was the point. It's one of those movies that benefits from having no prior knowledge of and the first viewing will always be the best. Still, this is one of my favorite movies of all time and, like THE USUAL SUSPECTS, offers a great deal to people in the know.


I - THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)
If you haven't seen this movie, you're not a human being and probably have never been a child. For those from the planet Skaro, OZ tells the story of Dorothy who is a precocious Kansas girl who feels under-appreciated by her family and longs for somewhere else, perhaps over the rainbow. Well, a damn tornado appears and takes her farm house from black and white to full-blown Technicolor where she encounters Munchkins, flying monkeys, a wicked witch, and a whole slew of people mostly played by Frank Morgan. She is aided in her journey back home by anthropomorphic things that would scare the living crap out of anyone in a different movie. She finally returns home only to find that she got knocked the hell out during the tornado and has been in a coma for several hours. She swears it was all real, but probably she was just dreaming. Either way, there's no place like a shitty little dustbowl farm during the Great Depression. THE WIZARD OF OZ sets the benchmark for movies where it was all a dream, but never once do you feel gypped while watching it. For being one of the first and best examples of someone's imagination creating an entire other-worldly adventure, this movie gets the honor of being the best rug-pulling movie ever.

After writing this whole thing, I woke up and realized I'm actually a World War I fighter pilot who got shot down over Frankfurt and was hovering between life and death for many hours. My entire life as I know it was the result of the synapses in my brain creating an alternate reality, complete with feeling, love, loss, and the ability to enjoy and write about nerdy stuff. When I finally came to terms with the fact that my own reality is that I'm lying in the middle of a battlefield in Eastern Europe and soon to be taken prisoner or killed by a German spike-helmeted soldier, I promptly cracked my skull on a rock and returned to my trauma-induced existence. Sometimes it's just better that way.

You're welcome.
-Kanderson