Of Director's Cuts and Deleted Scenes

"There's a point at which auteur perfectionism slides into decadent excess, and the film suffers," writes Alex Rose in the spring issue of the American Scholar. Rose is addressing the phenomenon of "director's cuts"—re-released versions of movies in which scenes previously deleted have been restored, or to which, in a few cases, some computerized cosmetics have been applied. His examples include Apocalypse Now Redux, with its "inexcusable interludes of colonial romance and stranded Playboy bunnies"; the twentieth-anniversary edition of E.T., in which the cops' guns are digitally replaced with walkie-talkies; the "Special Edition" Star Wars, with its "egregious Pixarification of Jabba the Hut"; and the "Collector's Edition" DVD of Amadeus, which reinstates a scene wherein Mozart's wife explicitly offers herself to Salieri in hopes of securing her husband's acceptance by the emperor's court. Finding this last instance particularly deplorable, Rose contends: "The scene is boring, weird, redundant and finally detrimental in that it tips Salieri's libidinal hand. No longer is he a chaste Italian craftsman whose devotion to God is corroded by tyrannical jealousy, but an ineffectual pushover whose petty sexual frustrations threaten his lust for retribution." Rose goes on to argue that production constraints which prevent directors from getting everything they want can sometimes benefit their films. Such constraints, he says, can force a director to find inventive ways around them and produce a better end product. By contrast, director's cuts, which offer "the opportunity for infinitely many do-overs," too often serve only the filmmaker's vanity.

Though Rose's points are all well taken, something he neglects to mention bears notice: the inclusion on many DVDs of deleted scenes as part of a "special features" section. These, I would argue, are not a bad thing at all. The original theatrical versions are left intact, and for anyone who's interested, seeing the stuff that landed on the cutting-room floor can spark insights into the creative process. We get to judge for ourselves how certain omitted scenes might have harmed—or enhanced—what did make it into the final cut. An example from the DVD of Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah leaps to mind. In the film, Tommy Lee Jones plays a straitlaced retired MPO investigating the murder of his son, a soldier who was killed near his base shortly after returning from Iraq. The scene in question depicts Jones's visit to the hospital room of his son's girlfriend, herself an Iraq veteran who lost an arm and a leg to a roadside bomb. When she reveals that the son responded to her injuries with a crude sexual joke, the father is taken aback and apologizes to her on the boy's behalf. The scene underscores both the father's naivete and his essential decency; and it makes an important point about the desensitizing effects of war—effects that turn out to have been a crucial factor in his son's death. Whether retaining this scene would have lent the finished film more texture or richness can be debated. But its inclusion as a DVD "extra" makes that debate possible, and if you're at all intrigued by how movies get made and the choices (not to mention the compromises) involved in the process, deleted scenes can be particularly illuminating.