I’m a great fan of Don DeLillo, and his Underworld is one of my all-time favourite novels, but Point Omega is a bit disappointing.
There is, however, a lovely passage about staying in cinema to watch the credits rolling. Here it is:
I used to sit through the credits, all of them, when I went to the movies. It was a practice that worked against intuition and common sense. I was in my early twenties, unaffiliated in every respect, and I never left my seat until the full run of names and titles was completed. The titles were a language out of some ancient war. Clapper, armorer, boom operator, crowd costumes.
I felt compelled to sit and read. There was a sense that I was capitulating to some moral failing. The starkest case of this occurred after the final shot of a major Hollywood production when the credits began to roll, a process that lasted five, ten, fifteen minutes and included hundreds of names, a thousand names. It was the decline and fall, a spectacle of excess nearly equal to the movie itself, but I didn’t want it to end.
It was part of the experience, everything mattered, absorb it, endure it, stunt driving, set dressing, payroll accounting. I read the names, all of them, most of them, real people, who were they, why so many, names that haunted me in the dark. By the time the credits ended I was alone in the theater, maybe an old woman sitting somewhere, widowed, children never call.
I’m not quite this obsessive; but nearly…
I always sit to the very end of the credits – it started back in my teens because I often wanted to know the artist of a particular song I’d liked during the film and the music credits always come at the very end. Now, I stay as I see it as a metaphor for all sorts of things in life – seeing it through even if on the surface it seems ‘boring’. I love staying until the end and often being the last out of the cinema – it makes the whole experience more magical!
Yes, I started sitting through the credits of films I watched after World Youth Day ’95, which was held in Manila. My university hosted three catechetical sites – call it a daily major production which lasted for almost a week, and entailed preparation months ahead of time. I was amongst the student volunteers in the nerve centre of activities. After the event, I realised that those who work behind the scenes just earned my full respect. It has been sixteen (16) years and I still sit through the credits.
Love to sit through the credits, and read the names of all of the people whose livelihood is the film industry. It brings another reality to the film. . . someone worked on this, someone’s parent is watching for the name of their child [key grip] up on the big screen.
If I don’t stay for the credits, especially after a good film, I feel as though I haven’t seen the whole thing. This is especially the case where the final music score is good, I particularly recall Captain Corelli’s Mandolin where the music was brilliant.