Remember that amazing scene in The Princess Bride in which hero Cary Elwes crosses swords with temporarily villainous sidekick Mandy Patinkin? Oh, come on, you must remember. It was Chapter 7, the one before Chapter 8 ("Finish Him Your Way") and long before Chapter 23 ("Mawwiage!").
Just as the reader of a book can flip to a later chapter, the viewer of a DVD can skip to a desired scene with a click of the remote control. Anyone who doesn't want that long slog through Robin Williams's childhood in Jumanji can skip right to the part (Chapter 10) in which he emerges as an adult from the diabolical board game. The film version of the banned-in-Boston novel Candy (1968) is either a guilty pleasure or a self-indulgent mess, but clicking on Chapter 18 (Guru Grindl) takes you past Richard Burton, Ringo Starr and Walter Matthau to the game performance by Marlon Brando as a holy charlatan.
The popularity of DVDs has given movie directors enormous freedom to tinker with their films, by tossing in outtakes, deleted scenes and special director's cuts to show audiences at home what exactly they had in mind. But the medium has also given the viewers a degree of control they don't have at the cinema, where the sole relief from boredom is to visit the concession stand and hope the movie has improved by the time you return. Videocassettes offered a measure of control with fast-forwarding, but finding the moment you wanted was like trying to park a car while travelling at 120 kilometres an hour. DVD chapters, like CD tracks, get you there in an instant.
It's likely that most people watch a film the whole way through on DVD and use the chapter stops only for a second viewing. Want to see the ending to Casablanca one more time? Skip to the hill-of-beans speech in Chapter 31 ("We'll always have Paris"). But the ease of skipping is so great that it's tempting to delay the first viewing and cut right to the chase (Chapter 14, for the teeth-jarring bounce down San Francisco's hills in Bullitt). The medium may influence how we watch movies at home, far beyond the ability to press pause for a bathroom break.
Do directors mind? One of them does. David Lynch made it a condition of releasing his odyssey-on-a-lawnmower film The Straight Story and his intriguing/baffling Mulholland Dr. that there be no chapter stops. "For me," he told critic Terrence Rafferty in 2003, "the world you go into in a film is so delicate. It can be broken so easily. It's so tender. And it's essential to hold that world together, to keep it safe." While this won't stop the more determined skippers -- it's still possible to fast-forward a DVD -- it forces most viewers to be content with the linear path Lynch had in mind. Assuming Lynch has ever once in his life had a linear path in mind.
The chapter stop is particularly handy with musicals. You Were Meant for Me is an okay tune from Singin' in the Rain, but why dawdle there twice when a click will propel you to Singin' in the Rain itself? Compilation DVDs, such as the ones that assemble the musical numbers from The Ed Sullivan Show or Saturday Night Live, practically beg viewers to use the chapter stops. Mystery lovers who can't resist peeking at the last page of a whodunit will be delighted that episodes in the DVD of the Peter Falk series Columbo have chapter stops. They can bypass the first 37 times Columbo stops in a doorway and says, "Oh, one more thing, sir," and skip to the part where he zeroes in on the clues. "Listen, we're in luck. The right contact lens is missing, and it's not in the coffin."
Then there are the chapter headings, the pithy phrases that accompany the bare numbers. Somewhere in a Hollywood basement, with the espresso growing cold on the table and with the boss's phone calls growing ever more impatient, some poor scribe is trying to compose memorable names for all these breaks. Terminator 2: Judgment Day has No Problemo and "I'll Be Back." Showgirls has "Nomi's Got Heat" and "It's a Ver-Sayce." The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King has The Pyre of Denethor and Grond: The Hammer of the Underworld. The Maltese Falcon has Evicting a Cheap Gunman and Dead Man's Delivery. Sometimes, inspiration must fail. Perhaps that's why some DVDs have so many more chapter stops than others. Soapdish, Mallrats and Popeye have a measly 15, 18 and 12 respectively, while Smilla's Sense of Snow has 32 and Singin' in the Rain has 38.
This printed article has itself been designed along the chapter-stop model, using paragraph markers to permit instantaneous access. Some readers may be partial to Paragraph 5, with its quotation from a real, live human being. Others may skip to the Chapter and Verse sidebar, with its pick of four sample chapters. Please remember to shut down both reading machines before you go to sleep tonight.
EXTRA! EXTRA!
THE INCREDIBLES
Brad Bird, director of the Oscar-winning animated feature The Incredibles, is described by colleagues on this week's two-disc DVD as "a handful," "a madman," "very charged" and "strong coffee." It's a safe bet that any man who himself provides the voice for the most hyperactive character in the movie -- costume designer Edna Mode -- is a force to be reckoned with. Bird and producer John Walker explain on one of two commentary tracks that showing superhero Mr. Incredible running his hand through a hole in the fabric of his superhero suit was an almost insurmountable challenge for the computer animators, one of whom spent a month or two solving the problem. The DVD's highlight is a cartoon showing what happened when, in the film, the Incredibles' baby Jack-Jack was left with the babysitter while the family went off to battle evil. It recalls the cartoon that starts off the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The babysitter never wins.
CHAPTER AND VERSE
Some movie highlights are easy to reach without scene access. The tense confrontation between Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night ("I'm a po- lice officer") occurs in Chapter 2. But here are four memorable moments that lie an hour or two into the film.
1. The Devil and Daniel Webster (Chapter 18: "American Judge, American Jury"). The Devil (Walter Huston) picks a jury of the damned for his legal tussle with Webster (Edward Arnold) for a gormless fellow's soul.
2. 8½ (Chapter 26: Circus). Marcello Mastroianni, afflicted with director's block, imagines everyone in his life parading to Nino Rota's jaunty musical theme.
3. Dave (Chapter 14: "Who Does These Books?"). Kevin Kline, doubling for the U.S. president, invites friend and small-town bookkeeper Charles Grodin to the White House to "help me cut the budget a little." Grodin, poring over the U.S. ledger: "If I ran my business this way, I'd be out of business."
4. A Life Less Ordinary (Chapter 22: End Titles). After Ewan McGregor kidnaps Cameron Diaz, and after they run into a very creepy mountain man (Maury Chaykin), and after two angels (Holly Hunter, Delroy Lindo) are sent to make Ewan and Cameron fall in love, the movie closes with its sunniest scene: a happy-ever-after recap filmed in stop-motion Claymation.