Can Soup Be Evil? The Power of Editing in the Language of Film and Filmmaking

I know I'm late to the party, but I was able recently to watch season one of True Detective, an HBO crime drama from 2014 about two homicide investigators, a ton of prostitutes, and several bundles of sticks. It's an excellent character-driven story that underscores how many shades of grey there are between right and wrong and how bizarre, even contradictory, it can be to even try to define a moral scale in an objectively neutral cosmos that doesn't love you or even notice that you exist.

While the philosophical questions that True Detective poses are positively Nietzscheian in nature, the story remains a clear, though complex, whodunnit that leaves me asking one question over and over again.

Can soup be evil?

Without going too far into spoiler territory, True Detective unambiguously delves into the seedy underbelly of a crime-laden world full of hookers and murder. HBO may bill itself as "not TV", but there are distinct limits to what it can put on the air without getting fined by the FCC. I found that the writer/director pairing of Nic Pizzolatto and Cary Joji Fukunaga executed a potent and effective method of getting under my skin without ever needing to resort to sensationalistic violence or grossly exploitative visuals.

They just did a Reverse Kuleshov. And it works.

Is a "Reverse Kuleshov" a real thing? Is it possible? Or is a Reverse Kuleshov still just a regular Kuleshov and sequence doesn't matter? I don't know. I'm not a professor of film studies.

The Kuleshov Effect is an old technique. It's been studied and put to use by filmmakers since the dawn of moving pictures. Folding Ideas has a great summary of the Kuleshov Effect I recommend you watch. Simply put, the Kuleshov Effect is an editing technique that transitions the emotional weight created by an A shot to the facial expression of a person in a B shot. The actual film experiment that Kuleshov created intercut a single shot of a man with a neutral expression on his face with other images: a plate of soup, someone laying in a coffin. Watchers of the short film inherently conveyed the feeling generated by the imagery with the man's reaction. The soup shot made him look hungry. The coffin shot made him look sad.

It was the same shot of the man's neutral expression in every instance. He wasn't really looking at food or at a dead person. The emotion invoked in the viewer by the first image was naturally and necessarily carried over into the image of the man that proceeded it. As humans, we inherently look for continuity from moment to moment, and where there is none, we create it in our own minds.

This is a simple rule of moviemaking, almost too obvious to mention, but critical in tricking an audience to understand your film as a cohesive narrative and not what it really is: an enormous collection of still frames of actors, pretending, made separately on different days over the course of several weeks and carefully revised to make it look fluid and natural. I think that a Kuleshov Effect happens every time you see a character react to something out of frame: when the teen finds a dead body in a horror movie, when Orson Welles starts clapping like a mad man at his lady love's mediocre performance in Citizen Kane, when Sam Witwicky starts muttering "no-no-no-no-no-no" and goes running ostensibly from one giant CGI robot to another, when Spock's dad Sarek sheds a tear while listening to the classical music recital in that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, though. Perhaps this effect is rarer and more subtle than I talk it up to be. I like to think that film has a narrative flow to it that links every shot together to tell a story and isn't just a random compilation of things the director got to point a camera at before he ran out of money. I don't know for certain if the Kuleshov Effect is a special thing that only master moviemakers use or if it's a core component of cinema that is essential to the process and language of editing. To roughly compare it to music, is it an advanced idea like augmented ninths and pentatonic scales, or is it as foundational as volume and pitch?

Back to the soup.

The Kuleshov Effect conveys a relation from a thing to a person's response to witnessing it, even though in movie-making terms that person may not actually be seeing it, or anything similar. Nowadays, when actors film their scenes, they are typically only ever going to see a guy dressed in a green suit with a tennis ball on the end of a stick taped to his back.

Then I watched True Detective and I asked myself a question. Can the opposite also be true? Can a person's reaction in shot A be conveyed into an object in shot B?

True Detective effectively uses this Reverse Kuleshov Effect, if there is such a thing, better than anything I've seen in a long time. You may recall all the scenery that Nicolas Cage chewed, wincing and flinching as he watches the alleged snuff film at the beginning of 8MM. The same thing occurs here wherein people, including a hardened homicide detective, look at images and video of bizarre, horrific abuse. The images are either not revealed or are relatively tame; tame enough to air on premium cable American television, but in order to convey to the audience that seriously fucked-up shit is being witnessed, the actors freak the hell out at what they are seeing as they see it. It is a really amazing blend of acting and editing that delivers a chillingly uncomfortable visual and an uneasy, goosebump-inducing feeling in the viewer. I compare it to the decrypted video log from the film Event Horizon only better, because the True Detective producers do much more with much less.

You never see an uncensored version of what the characters see, and you don't need to. Your comprehension of the video is informed by their reactions to it. And from that point forward, you know that the VHS cassette is, for lack of a better word, wicked. Whenever it appears in frame it has a sinister, warped feeling about it, and it's just an assembly of plastic and magnetic tape. It's generic, it's uniform, and you have a dozen tapes that look just like it in a box in a closet somewhere. It bears no unique shape or design, and it's not doing anything per se, but you, having seen not it but people's reactions to it, grow an intense feeling of disdain for it. You see it not for what it really is, but for what the True Detective cast and crew have concocted it to be: something vile, something unnatural, unholy. Mysteriously, supernaturally so.

I chalk it up to the power of visual storytelling. It's a natural human trait to see soup and think hunger. I think it takes talent to do the opposite: showing a person and then a thing, and getting an even stronger link between them. It takes real talent to do that so well that you feel physical revulsion, that sick to your stomach feeling, from an inanimate object.