Hunter S. Thompson and James Bond

This week’s opening comes from one of my favorite books: “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas,” by Hunter S. Thompson. You are crazy if after this first paragraph you don’t want to read more.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

Instantly, the reader is given a place and the situation, desert, drugs and then terror. The opening builds intensity with each passing sentence.  The paragraph climaxes with the main character yelling “Holy Jesus!” and then asks a question to provoke the reader into finding the answer. The paragraph doesn’t need a long build up or an explanation of events to put the reader in a position to know what is going on. The way he describes the scene the reader gains a clear picture of what is going on.

This week’s error comes from the new James Bond film, Spectre. There is a scene where an intoxicated woman is lying down and as Bond sits in a chair she says she see two James’s. Then she starts speaking a different language and the subtitles read “to killers, to liars…,” “to” not “two." I was surprised and couldn’t believe my eyes. I wish I didn’t have to pay to see it again but I was taken back by this simple error.