The Cold Open

Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction has one of the most thrilling pre-credit sequences in cinematic history. The film opens with a couple, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, having breakfast in a diner and discussing armed robbery. What’s the best place to stickup – a bank, a liquor store, a gas station? ‘This place’, Pumpkin decides. It’s perfect. ‘They’re not expecting to get robbed’. Honey Bunny agrees. They kiss. They grab their guns. Honey Bunny, sweet little Honey Bunny, who only moments ago was making cute quacking noises, swings around and screams at the other patrons: ‘Any of you fucking pricks move and I’ll execute every motherfucking last one of you’. Freeze-frame. The music kicks in. The opening credits roll. Wow.

In cinematic terms, this technique is called a ‘cold open’. It’s a powerful way to start a film because it throws the audience straight into the action. The cold open is a way of telling the viewer: ‘You like that? Well, there’s plenty more where that came from’.

Sometimes a cold open introduces the main characters of the film, sometimes it just sets the tone. The best kind of pre-credit sequence starts the film with a bang, like a couple talking, kissing, then holding up a diner.

It’s a narrative technique also found in academic writing. The most famous cold open in social theory is the first paragraph of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Among other themes, the book charts the shift in penal styles from public torture to imprisonment. It begins:

On 2 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned ‘to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris’, where he was to be ‘taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds’; then, ‘in the said cart, to the Place de Grève, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he commited the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds’. (1977/1995: 3)

The book starts in media res, in the middle of things. There are no prefatory remarks, no gentle introductions. We’re right there, alongside Damiens, as his body is branded, burned, and ripped limb from limb.

Foucault could have opened the book with a neutral summary of his main topic, which appears a few pages later: ‘Among so many changes [in penal justice], I shall consider one: the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle’ (1977/1995: 7). But Foucault chooses the cold open instead – a visceral mélange of sights and smells in pre-revolutionary France. He wants us to feel the horror of Damiens’ punishment, a horror that would come to be replaced over the ensuring century by the ordinariness, by the unsettling orderliness, of prison.

The cold open works just as well in journal articles, too. Here’s the first paragraph from an article published in Current Anthropology:

There is an urban rumor circulating in Hong Kong about its neighbor, the city of Shenzhen, that is so believable it was circulated in 2007 as an MP3 recording of a radio program purporting to be a firsthand account from a call-in listener. It goes like this. One day two young Hong Kong women head to Shenzhen for a day of shopping and leisure. They flop down at a nail salon for a manicure-pedicure. At some point, one of them gets up to go to the bathroom. Over 10 minutes go by, but she does not return. Her friend, and even the two beauticians, begin to worry. They all head to the bathroom to look for her. But when they get there, all they find is her body on the floor, sliced open down the middle, all her organs gone. (Wong, 2017: S103)

The first sentence provides context, then we’re into the thick of it. Two women on a shopping trip decide to get their nails done; one of them visits the bathroom and soon afterwards is found dead, her organs missing.

We know it’s an urban legend but it’s still chilling, like a ghost story told around the campfire. The passage sets the mood for the rest of the article, which is about how ‘special economic zones’, such as the sprawling city of Shenzhen, generate new anxieties about the value of human life.

Notice how the author grabs our attention. She doesn’t repeat the content of the scientific abstract, which goes like this: ‘In this paper I examine an urban rumor about the city of Shenzhen, China, circulating within Hong Kong and American public and popular media…’ (2017: S103). Instead, the author evokes a sense of uneasiness in the reader, the same feeling – experienced by Hong Kong residents – she examines in the paper itself. The paragraph foreshadows the main topic without explicitly announcing it, just like the pre-credit sequence in Pulp Fiction. And that’s what makes it so striking and memorable.

So, the next time you write an opening paragraph, resist the urge to tell the reader what the paper is about. Avoid starting with sentences like ‘This paper will explore’ or ‘Previous research has shown’ – these can come later. Try starting the action in mid-flow, with events already in motion. It can be anything: a robbery in a coffee shop, a public execution in a city square, or a shopping trip gone horribly wrong. That way, you’ll arouse the reader’s curiosity and sustain it beyond Act 1, Scene 1 of your academic contribution.