Filmmakers and showrunners devoted to mastering the art of twist endings work tirelessly to think of the most unexpected surprises possible. Unfortunately for all the Shyamalans and Abrams out there, forever studying the endings of Planet Of The Apes and Fight Club, The Usual Suspects and Gone Girl, no authored work can ever top the chaos produced by everyday life.
To understand the truth of this, please watch a 2014 clip—now circulating again thanks to a tweet from @iatemuggles—captioned with the only introduction necessary to a great work of art: “camera falls from airplane.”
It starts as you’d expect. A GoPro camera, apparently discovered months after the video was shot, is either dropped or tossed from a plane from what look to be skydivers (no other sport is extreme enough to explain the guy in sunglasses giving the finger at the beginning). It spins wildly through the air until, around the midway point when it’s gathered too much speed, all sense of place disappears to be replaced with a humming voyage through a kaleidoscopic blur of ground and sky that looks like the opening to a Gaspar Noé movie. And like a Noé film, the video ends with a shockingly grotesque scene: The camera hits the ground, somehow still intact, and a pig wanders over to try to eat it. We hear snuffling and grunting. The screen fills with a dripping snout, giant pink pig tongue, and strands of saliva.
The mixture of psychedelia and body horror, the twist ending that sees a found footage sports trip end in a way no viewer could possibly have expected—the dropped GoPro camera is a true visionary, blending experimental aesthetics with crowd-pleasing narrative payoff. We can only hope the camera will follow up its debut with an equally strong second film in the near future.
Send Great Job, Internet tips to [email protected]