What is the most shocking opening scene in Hollywood history?

What is the most shocking opening scene in Hollywood history?

Directors love to begin their film with a narrative shock, a immediate hook that will surprise the viewer into instant investment.

But what Christopher Nolan does with the opening to his masterful Memento goes beyond just a shocking murder, it’s equally shocking in how it plays with form.

The first thing that will become clear when the movie opens with a backwards murder is that the film begins at the ending.

This is hardly a new idea, after all Sunset Boulevard and Citizen Kane, two of the greatest films ever made, both also have a main character die in the opening scene.

Memento’s new idea is to also introduce the films structure as it introduces the film’s narrative, combining these two ideas into one moment.

And it starts simply too. The first shot of the film is just a picture. The audience immediately expects the camera to pan out from that picture and give us some exposition.

But nope. Instead it holds on that picture for nearly 30 seconds as the credits continue to roll. The audience starts to realize that this is that necessary exposition.

Or at least we would think that it’s the exposition, instead Nolan was misleading us all over again. Right after holding on this picture for about 30 seconds the protagonist begins to shake it.

What? The Polaroid is already finished developing! Why is he shaking it? It’s the first shock, and one that doesn’t announce itself in the same way as the second.

Nolan continues to focus on this picture un-developing for about 40 more seconds as he asks the audience to process two bits of information:

1. The film goes backwards (it will be like nothing else you’ve ever seen).
2. The person holding this picture just took it, meaning that he was near the murder.

But we still don’t know a lot, after all he just as easily could have happened upon the murder as anything else. That is until the third shock of the scene. This shot:

Blood on the floor, moving backwards back into a recently murdered person. Now we know the murder just happened, and it was likely the man that took the picture who did it.

But all these shocks aren’t loud. They are being conveyed cinematically, by Nolan using the unique form of his picture to peel away the layers of ambiguity. That is, until the final shock:

The murder. A bullet goes back into the gun and shoots that man dead. The man who took the picture is the man that killed.

But even this fourth shock doesn’t solve all the problems for one reason. Imagine that you are watching the film totally blind, like someone would have during its premiere in 2000.

You would have no idea that Guy Pearce was the hero. You wouldn’t know that this was a vengeance killing. It could just as easily be a villain, with the hero starting off the film dead.

This scene isn’t just shocking because a murder is a bombastic way to start a film, it’s shocking because it simultaneously introduces a narrative and formal ambiguity.

We don’t know why this killing is taking place, but we also have no clue how the film will tell us. The combination of beginning at the end and going backwards in time is something there is no template for. It isn’t that expectations are being subverted, they are being totally removed.

It was the scene where Christopher Nolan announced himself as a force to be reckoned with.

Picture Source Wikipedia

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