How Slow Motion Became Cinema’s Dominant Special Effect

About 20 years ago, a neuroscientist named David Eagleman strapped a bunch of students into harnesses, hoisted them to the top of an imposing metal tower, and then, without warning, dropped them 150 feet. Though the students landed safely in nets, the experience was—by design—terrifying. Eagleton wanted to simulate the feeling of plummeting to one’s death. His goal was to figure out why survivors of near-death experiences almost always said the same thing: “It felt like the world was going in slow motion.”

Ultimately, Eagleman concluded that perception does not actually slow down when we crash our car or fall out of a tree. Instead, our brains—realizing this moment is important—retain much more detail: what we see, feel, think. The “slow-mo effect,” in other words, is retrospective, a trick of memory. Still, it indicates a remarkable theatricality, a cinematic flair, on the part of our brains. “We might experience almost everything in some form of slow motion if we thought that we were always dying,” the cultural scholar Mark Goble writes of Eagleman’s conclusion. “Which we are, of course, but not fast enough to matter to our brains.”

Slow motion is, today, the most popular special effect in film and television—a designation that leads Goble to label it, in his mesmerizing new book, Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion, “the very least special effect.” On screen, it has become so common as to be barely noticeable; it serves to ratchet up suspense, emphasize a meaningful moment, or reveal a reality viewers might otherwise miss. Most famous, perhaps, is the slow-moving bullet from The Matrix, but other iconic moments include the train station shoot-out from The Untouchables, the title sequences from Reservoir Dogs (men walking) and Chariots of Fire (men running), and, in a million permutations, the Zapruder film. Stylistically, the Marvel and D.C. cinematic universes seem to consist of little else but slo-mo, with a full 10 percent of Zach Snyder’s cut of the Justice League proceeding at a reduced speed.

Yet slow motion is no longer confined just to the silver screen. In the broader culture, it has become part of the stock vocabulary of trauma. Not only survivors of vertiginous falls but also drug users, victims of violent attacks, individuals pushed to their physical limits, even those who witnessed 9/11—all have invoked the feeling of seeing, or sensing, in slo-mo. This technique of filmmaking, in other words, has given us a new way of articulating—perhaps even perceiving—the world around us.