1143: The Twist In The Middle

In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock pulled his most famous trick. He hired a major movie star and placed her at the centre of drama about passion and escape. In Psycho, Marian Crane steals $40,000 and flees across the country to marry her lover in California. And you already know what happens next. She's stabbed to death enroute by a motel owner's mother. This is cinema's most famous mid-point twist, the PIVOT around which the story WE THINK we are watching turns into something strange and terrifying. Suddenly, the world isn't what we thought it was. And we lean in. The shower scene is the iceberg in Titanic, the piano sex in Pretty Woman and the T-Rex attack in Jurassic Park. It's the moment that danger increases and attention deepens. John York's brilliant storytelling book, Into the Woods, goes deep on mid-points, quoting Macbeth after the murder of Banquo. "I am in bloodStepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more,Returning were as tedious as go o’er." Fair enough, but how can this help us tell stories that mean business? Here's one example from the best technology pitch I ever saw. In the early 1990s, I was watching a presentation on this new technology called Virtual Reality. It was the usual dull PowerPoint until – halfway through – the presenter pulled back from the screen to reveal that the presentation was playing on a virtual screen INSIDE a virtual room. Boom. Suddenly, the world wasn't what we thought it was. And we leaned in. Nick