Didn’t Oliver Sacks write about a guy who seemed to not have an emotional module, who considered everything logically, and who couldn’t even buy a box of cereal because he couldn’t just make a decision since he had no instinct/emotional impulsivity?
It was something like that. I think it was on Radio Lab, or maybe This American Life. The poor guy would pick up two boxes of cereal and then he was locked into analysis for hours before someone else chose for him.
I remember helping to build a heinously large bonfire when I was a scout. It had a solid foundation of duraflame logs, trash, and about a whole Honda trunk’s worth of candles. The main fuel was a 50’ Western Red Cedar we’d spent all day chopping into 6’ chunks. The kindling was a year’s worth of dryer lint from 20 scouts’ dryers.
That thing went up in a blaze so fast, and the smoke was so thick I had to drag one of the brand new scrub-level scout out because he started choking and puking and couldn’t stand on his own. This was in the great outdoors, and the air wasn’t still, but it was still a Bad ThingTM. I have no idea why the adults didn’t stop us from putting all our garbage in there. There were so many plastic bags and plastic bubble-type packages for equipment. Totally ruined the smell of the cedar when you can still smell organosulfates.
Can I still make them?
sure. you’re a treasured persistant trope hereabouts.
I know, I just camembert it.
Related: space helmets that have bright lights pointing directly into the wearer’s face, and no reflective/darkened/polarized visor to defend against the solar radiation sleeting in where there’s no magnetosphere or 10-mile-thick blanket of atmosphere to protect you.
Yep. In the book “the Martian” it specifically noted that the NASA PR folks were disappointed that Watney’s helmeted face was not visible in the “selfie” he took upon re-establishing communication. But for some reason the movie version didn’t seem to have this problem.
(Does that require spoiler tags? Because I don’t know how to do that)
One that popped into my head for no particular reason. You know that scene you’ve seen where the protagonist tricks the evil scumbag politician, etc. into an Engineered Public Confession? Once upon a time, this quaint idea seemed remotely possible, I mean surely people wouldn’t let someone who expressed their view of the voting public / their customers / the local Rotarians as complete idiots be elected to office, etc. … except of course, I think it’s obvious that this trope has been completely disproved, especially by the current election cycle. If anything, the people that the speaker was insulting would rush to defend the statements and proclaim loudly what they really meant.
Ah, the Engineered Public Confession. It’s the key behind my “Jessica Fletcher is a Serial Killer” theory.
I mean, every killer confesses, in front of the cops, based on flimsy evidence. She never actually proves the case beyond a reasonable doubt, she always just tricks them into confessing. And the person who is the prime suspect before the confession is always one of Jessica’s “friends.”
It makes no sense if they person is actually guilty, but if she’s framing and blackmailing them in order to clear the name of one of her gang, it all becomes clear!
Or like being a monk in a John Woo film. The hard-boiled lead can mosey through a hail of bullets with no more than an artistic scratch, but one bullet can take out as many as three monks.
tricks the evil scumbag politician, etc. into an Engineered Public Confession? Once upon a time, this quaint idea seemed remotely possible,
Every Drumpf speech?
I don’t care about a “stupid” trope if it doesn’t take me out of the story. Maybe Drumpf is too on point in explicating R-Fuckery for people to catch on until so late in the game. He’s a villain, for sure… but without a protagonist that can rock that shit, this election cycle is no better than BvS.
Highlight the text you want to blur. Then click “Options” - that’s the little gear symbol at the right hand end of the tool bar in the Reply box. Click “Blur Spoiler” and you’re done.
And old school tags for tablet etc. users as the gear thingy can be a bit tricksy -
[spoiler] Spoileriffic! [/spoiler]
Especially the trope where character A has been keeping a critical secret (has a kid, is a Republican, is a different sex, is a space alien) from character B, and is about to tell B but then B interrupts his/her confession with the additional information that s/he hates liars/kids/Republicans/aliens.
Or the phone call, where a person who has vital information that could get them killed because they are the only one who knows it declines to just say the information over the phone, and instead arranges a face to face meeting.
Weirdly, the soon to be murder victim thinks the phones are tapped, but only for purposes of over hearing them say the damning material were they to do so, but not for purposes of over hearing them say where they will be in a few hours where they can be easily murdered in private…
Ending, of course, when Willie is told that the microphone is on, to which he says “I know it’s on!”
Re: BvS. We’ve actually had a discussion about this around my house. We concluded that Lex Luthor would actually be preferable to Trump.
I hate to dampen everybody’s grouch session — actually I doubt it will, he said sotto voce — but a lot of these are down to the facts that TV and movie dramas are as stagey as any stage play and real_ism_ isn’t real_ity_.
As was observed above, soldiers lose their bucket helmets in dramas so that one can watch the very expensive star actor do that thing they went to acting school to learn how to do in the way they were trained to do it by making their face muscles simulate expressions commonly associated with the emotions the movie makers want their audience to vicariously experience. Hiding their faces inside a helmet de-humanises them, puts a barrier between them and the audience. Since few actors are trained to act with masks or get much chance to practice it in their work, very few have any idea how to do it, and very few film-makers know how to bring out character without doing the face thing.
Computers beep, keyboards rattle, swords go shing (even when drawn from leather or lined scabbards), guns rattle like loose collections of metal components flying in close formation, spaceships roar, so that the audience will keep their attention on the screen and not be distracted by the guy crunching his popcorn three rows behind them or their neighbour singing in the kitchen or what-have-you. They do it so the audience knows what’s happening, just like the helpful actor in the stage play puts his hand to cover his mouth from the other characters and turns his head to tell the audience what’s going on. It isn’t like real_ity_ (real_ism_ is a bunch of tropes that the audience agrees represent reality, and as such varies with the audience, and should never be confused with reality, but often is), it’s theatrical device, used to tell the story, which is the point of the exercise.
The laser travels slower than light, slower than tracer bullets even, so that the audience can plainly see where the laser blast is coming from and where it is going so that they’ll understand why the bulkhead behind the hero suddenly exploded in flashy pyrotechnics. Gun bullets are allowed to be invisible because we all know about guns and how they work (or think we do), while blasters need some visual explanation — or so the movie-makers think.
The general wears his dress uniform in the field, with all his decorations and brass and scrambled egg, so that the audience knows that he’s a general as soon as he appears without having to waste any dialog introducing him. It’s not right, in fact it’s a dumb idea through and through, if the screen was a window on reality, but it’s not, it’s a window on story. These things are all things that are there to help tell the story, and they are every bit as contrived as the granny by the fire saying, “Once upon a time…” or the sound effects guy banging a metal sheet offstage to make a sound almost completely unlike thunder, or Scooby-Doo and Shaggy running by the same loop of scenery for a half-minute conversation while they discuss what’s making them run away.
It’s all contrived, none of it is real. Whether it’s realistic is up to whatever accommodation the audience makes with the storytellers.
How many movies really fall into this one? Sure, there’s Garden State and Elizabethtown (which as far as I can tell are exactly the same movie), and their recent remake Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, but whenever I’ve pressed someone for another example the one produced suggests that the person either didn’t see or didn’t understand the movie in question. When the woman is the main character, the movie is about her development, and the man is mainly a foil for her (cf Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, or even Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s) then the term becomes pretty meaningless.
