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3 months ago
2
Some movies have the same function as comfort food, we’ve seen them a thousand times and we will see them a thousand times more, they are probably really good but whatever they are they are absolutely to our taste, especially when we are tired or depressed about something in life and need something to make us feel better.
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But these movies were not made to be comfort food, which means that they often have extraneous bits that were made to serve some other original purpose that no longer needs serving.
I noticed this watching The Fugitive, a Comfort food movie for many men who probably had their best decade in the nineties. I’m sure if you’ve seen it a few times you know exactly what part of the movie is no longer needed.
That’s right, the part where they do the big fakeout about 44 minutes in that Richard Kimble is shacked up with some babe and they can go get him in the morning, and then they go get him and do a big U.S Marshals raid and it turns out to be Copeland
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The guy Harrison Ford told to be good, well everyone can see he didn’t take the advice and went off to have probable unmarried sex with a lady!
Which hey back from here, let’s just point out the obvious: poor black ladies get the doors to their house kicked in and pointed guns at them, and look at the U.S Marshall showing restraint — didn’t shoot her or anything!
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But anyway Copeland ends up both getting their guy and shot for his troubles.
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I mean I don’t know what Copeland’s original crime was but I do know I always sort of rooted for the guy, but he didn’t make it.
Aside from the fakeout this part existed to better establish the character of Marshall Sam Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) as well as what a great shot he is who of course kills the black guy and makes his young assistant nearly lose their hearing (one of those two things being really unimportant and not needing empathy in mainstream Hollywood 90s movies) so that he can at the end say “I don’t bargain”
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Now I know some of you are probably getting annoyed by my annoyance regarding the shooting of Copeland, after all Copeland was obviously a bad guy and got what he deserved, to which I reply — was he really?
Sure, he was angry and violent towards the police but the only criminal procedure we have witnessed in this show so far was a farce that sent an innocent man to death row so maybe Copeland is innocent as well? And we will witness more criminal procedure in this movie that implies Chicago at least is fucked up and does not care about rights or innocence or any of that shit.
So Copeland’s a black guy, Kimble is a rich white guy, I’m thinking Copeland probably didn’t have the advantages in court or pre-court that Kimble did so maybe he’s so angry because he shouldn’t have ended up where he did either. I’m saying if I was being sent away for a long time and had the opportunity to escape I would, but probably when I got their man I’d just shoot him because screw it, I don’t expect cops to make deals anyway. Or if they make deals, I certainly don’t expect them to honor those deals.
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So really the story of Copeland is harshing my comfort feels from this movie; it is just not comforting to think about how things are screwed up unless the comfort comes from fixing the screwed up stuff at the end.
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I mean really with cops like these who needs a bad guy, oh wait a minute, the bad guy is cops like these.
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But also the purpose the whole side story serves is done away with when The Fugitive is no longer an unknown story but a comfortable known story. We know Kimble isn’t there, it’s Copeland, and we know who Gerard is, and how he doesn’t bargain. Having seen it once or twice in the past it is no longer needed.
This is what is meant by the comfort food cut of a film, when the film becomes comfort there are parts that could be cut out or perhaps even parts that could be added in that would increase its comfortableness. Just as you might have a Director’s cut of a movie to bring out the artistic value or the Snyder cut of the movie to bring out the badassity, bruh, or the Chinese mainland cut to remove anything remotely gay or anti ruling regime. The Comfort Food cut is the cut that emphasizes all the comfort viewing aspects of that particular film.
Obviously The Fugitive is a special case in it has such a clear and egregious stretch of film that could be cut with no detriment to the plot or the comfortableness of the movie, in fact if I go look at the plot description on Wikipedia (at the time of this writing) it is actually cut from the plot description:
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See the space in between “the water below and escapes” and “Kimble returns to Chicago” that’s where the 4 minutes of time was given to executing Copeland U.S. Marshall style!
Only 4 minutes?! Why did I read all this?
Again, The Fugitive is an interesting example in that it has a special section that is just so obviously not needed that they even threw it out of the plot description, but the principle remains — there is a large category of movies that function as comfort viewing and as such are valuable long after you might expect the bloom to have gone off the rosy cheeks of Mr. Ford’s patootie.
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But despite this fact nothing is really done to market to the comfort viewing demographic — no special cuts, no acknowledgement of the movie’s status as comfort viewing (the time for the cute comfort food gimmick of the title passed some time ago, and as you have probably noticed it is no longer in play), cult movies get hyped up as being cult movies but comfort movies don’t get that hype. — although there is some shared feeling and overlap. If I were to attempt a slightly mean but accurate definition (and why not, it is my forté) comfort movies are in the cult of normalcy — they are in the mainstream and make us feel like we belong there whereas cult movies make us feel like there is a place where the weird parts of our character, our differences from the comfortable mainstream, are welcome.
Comfort cuts for movies also make sense, because we know there are parts of the movie when comfort watching that you just fast forward through, I’m pretty sure the streaming services have this data. Cutting out the comfort nullifying parts of the film make sense because when we fast forward by ourselves it takes us out of the comfort zone the movie is putting us in, we might stop and consider and think “Ok, I love this movie, but is this really a good use of my time to sit here and watch it for the thousandth time?” and maybe conclude it isn’t a good use of our time, I mean really only 4 minutes for Copeland! That guy had presence.
Especially in the case of The Fugitive where we have probably had 40 minutes of being comfortable and are sufficiently recuperated from whatever caused us to need comforting that we could now do something else when it’s time to fast forward past those problematic 4 minutes that make us feel bad Chicago is a corrupt place.
Instead of that we could go out for a jog or read, something that makes us less likely to renew the streaming service next month. So that’s really what I’m advocating —a sound business decision that the streaming media providers should better service the comfort seeking mainstream, to paraphrase Bill Hicks: That’s a nice market.
This article was written by IG Agents 77 and 13, two guys as sincere as life is short for someone in the Chicago Police Department line of fire.
some extra suggested light reading: Police Brutality and Torture in Chicago
