As I’ve said before in this space, many factors determine the effect a movie sequence has on a viewer: her mood on the day, her emotional connect with the setting, how much she relates with a character. But as a recent experience showed me, a scene’s impact may also hinge on the chair you are sitting on.
Going in to watch Damien Chazelle’s First Man, I had heard that the opening scene — in which Neil Armstrong narrowly escapes a rocket-plane accident in 1961 — was a marvellous bit of filmmaking, both for the claustrophobia-inducing sense that we are in the shuddering cockpit with Armstrong, and for the pre-echoing of things to come: we know this man will walk on the moon years later after an inter-space journey more complicated and fraught than his current adventure.
Unfortunately, I barely registered what was happening to Armstrong, because I was worried about the state of my own vitamin D-deficient bones. Without realising it, I had bought tickets to a 4DX show. This apparently means the sort of immersive experience where your chair performs calisthenics each time something bumpy (like a plane ride or an astronauts’ training session or maybe just two people dancing the salsa) happens onscreen.
Beautifully boring
Midway through, my friend was thanking her stars she hadn’t brought her father along as initially planned. To reference other Chazelle films, the experience was less la-la-land and more whiplash.
So I couldn’t fully appreciate First Man — though I made up by listening to the beautiful Justin Hurwitz soundtrack at home, sitting on my boringly stationary sofa. And yet, much as I would have liked to watch the film without all these accoutrements, I was also left with the feeling that the 4D could have been more imaginative. All we got was chairs shaking every few minutes, and on one occasion, a small quantity of cool vaporous liquid sprayed on us from the side. (I forget now what was happening in the film to necessitate this: did Armstrong’s miffed wife throw a glass of wine in his face?)
There were so many other unexplored possibilities. For instance, when our hero makes it to his zero-gravity destination, our chairs could have detached themselves from their moorings and floated about the large hall with us in them.
It’s exciting to think about what the technique may accomplish for Indian cinema. When we stand up for the national anthem or watch an Akshay Kumar film (or stand up when the anthem inevitably plays during an Akshay Kumar film), perhaps nozzles will spit itchy tricoloured powder into our eyes, making us feel even more patriotic than we already are? Or imagine a show of Tumbbad — a cautionary horror story about greed — with gold coins thrown into the audience and when we bend to pick them, a neon-lit demon Hastar snarling from under the seats.
Over our heads
Much can also be done with holograms. That scene in Andha Dhun where evil Tabu defenestrates an old woman? How much more thrilling if, at the moment of the assault, a spectral Mrs. D’Sa were to appear shrieking and flailing over our heads.
Notwithstanding our conceit that such bold innovations are the prerogative of our age, none of this is new. As far back as 1959, American producer-director William Castle used a vibrating device — Percepto — in select chairs during the screening of his B-horror film The Tingler; it would come into effect in the creepiest scenes, which had a wriggling creature attacking its victims’ spines. My favourite part of that story, though, is that Percepto was accidentally used during a tearful scene in the Audrey Hepburn starrer, The Nun’s Story (a film as austere and high-minded as its title sounds).
In the Netflix age, I feel we could do with such mix-and-matches to enliven theatre experiences. Imagine the last scene of Badhaai Ho: Neena Gupta’s baby has made its appearance and, instead of a hologram of a cherub dropping flowers and glitter and baby spittle on our heads, we get a tired-looking Big B instead, in pirate regalia, waving his sword feebly and calling out to his bird.
If that won’t get lazy viewers away from their laptops and into the halls, nothing will.