dalekboy | Suspension of disbelief

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Suspension of disbelief

Films and tv shows usually rely on suspension of disbelief.

To me, if one is going to maintain the suspension of disbelief, you have to obey all the ordinary everyday rules that people know and understand. One can believe an massive alien invasion with giant biomechanoid floating death cannons, so long as the world rules beyond that are consistent. But if a human character, in avoiding one of these cannons, jumps off a ten storey building without any sort of aid, or interruptions to their fall, and land unharmed and run off - that's the deal breaker. One knows that's not possible, and suddenly one is left questioning that moment, and by default, the rest of the film.

I mentioned in a post yesterday that I hate it in films and tv when medics use the defibrillator paddles on a woman to try and restart her heart, and they are using them through material - bras, tank tops, etc. - rather than on bare skin. It pulls me right out of the moment, because I know it's not right.

I also mentioned hating when people can just break passwords when they have no information on the person, which has become really common in shows. Any computer whizz can break any password, within a relatively short time.

Another one I hate is when someone who is driving spends time looking at the their passenger rather than paying attention to the road. Quick glances are fine, but when they're maintaining eye contact for whole big chunks of conversation it annoys me. If you regularly did it in real life there's no way you wouldn't crash.

king_espresso mentioned that he hates when people don't wear ear protection on board military helicopters, which is a great one. Well, except now I'll be looking for it and getting annoyed by it.

kaths brought up the way people type madly on computer keyboards to do things that the rest of us would do with a mouse. We're in the internet age, everyone uses computers, we know they don't work this way.

kaths also mentioned the way they can zoom in on a small section of a photo, blow up that section, sharpen/clean it up, and suddenly have a incredibly clear and detailed picture. It's the equivalent of being able to blow up my icon for this post to read all the book titles.

So what about you? What regularly used, unrealistic film and tv conceits pull you out of the moment?

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the way they can zoom in on a small section of a photo, blow up that section, sharpen/clean it up, and suddenly have a incredibly clear and detailed picture

This one drives me nuts. I'm pretty sure I've even seen one or two instances where they manage to digitally alter the angle of the shot.

People who are constantly using their mobile phone, but never seem to recharge it.

Also, people never go to the toilet in movies.

I mentioned in a post yesterday that I hate it in films and tv when medics use the defibrillator paddles on a woman to try and restart her heart, and they are using them through material - bras, tank tops, etc. - rather than on bare skin. It pulls me right out of the moment, because I know it's not right.

Oh yes ..just reread your post, l have just redone my First Aid Course and one of the first things you get told is about removing clothing or jewellry, ESPECIALLY items such as underwire bras.

A few of my unfavorite things -
Outrunning explosions, the ONLY time this is OK is if your in the Millennium Falcon (though i suppose a movie with the Flash in it would
also be ok). A quick Google will tell you that even the lowest energy explosion is going to be tens of meters per second, even an olympic sprinter isn't going to outrun one of those without, say a 100m head start.

I also hate the zoom in, presto clear image, thats some pretty advanced software that can guess what information is missing.

Exploding cars, unless they have been shot with some incendiary weapon or bazooka type thingey.

Barbarians other Fantasy characters with Californian accents and tan lines.

I read an interesting essay once by John Sutherland about old stories that break what would now be considered ordinary everyday rules, but which got away with it because at the time they were esoteric. His big example was swimming in Victorian fiction: back then, hardly anyone went swimming for fun, so in the novels of the period you get things like convicts swimming from ship to shore still wearing their big heavy leg irons, or swimmers being able to see clearly underwater, because neither the authors nor the readers knew any better.

And of course it's still going on in modern fiction, just in different contexts. Sutherland's example for that was skydiving sequences in action movies, which are apparently prone to doing ludicrous things that nobody in the audience will notice unless they've had a falling-out-of-an-aeroplane experience themselves.

My least favorite computer-impossibility moment is in INDEPENDENCE DAY, when Jeff Goldblum's character manages to hack into the alien ship's computer. As a friend of mine said when we first saw it, "Yeah, that's gonna happen. We can't even get Windows and MacOS to talk to each other!"

However, in the non-computer realm, one thing a friend pointed out that I'd never noticed is that hardly anyone ever pays for a taxi. They just get to their destination and leap out. Or, they throw a bill over to the front seat - you know any taxi drivers who wouldn't insist on seeing what the bill was before they peeled away? Or who would wait for you to finish your conversation on the footpath before you get into the taxi?

Another one that really bugs me is women's makeup - women rarely go to sleep with perfect makeup on, and if they did, they'd look like a combination of a raccoon and a clown in the morning, not with miraculous perfect makeup when they wake up.

Regarding apartment buildings, first of all, how can all the loser people in movies and TV shows afford such big apartments? And I really want to live in Alternate New York, where everyone leaves their doors unlocked so their neighbors can come bursting in :->

The talking-while-driving thing bugs the hell out of me. I avoid getting into any car my mother is driving because she does that and I keep having to remind her to WATCH THE FUCKING ROAD because she's about to drive us into a tree.

Another pet hate is how people just hang up the phone without saying goodbye. Not even 'thanks' or some kind of short 'I'm done now, gotta go' kind of noise. I know it's expedient for the plot, etc, but I keep thinking the person on the other end must be thinking 'what happened? I wasn't finished!" I also keep thinking "how rude!".

People on the phone who:

(a) don't leave enough time for the person on the other line to speak, and;

(b) never say any variation of "goodbye" or "seeya" when they hang up.

Basically everyone in Hollywood seems to be intolerably rude on the telephone.

Like toilet breaks, essential equipment maintenance (such as gun cleaning) also seems to rarely happen on-screen.

People falling out of planes to chase after someone and catching up when the first person is diving and not impeded in any way.

Complete misunderstanding of use of evidence - someone already said DNA coming back to quick from the lab (Perth has about an 18month backup). The other is using DNA to place you at the scene of a crime and thus incriminating you - DNA can only be used to exclude you. Other stuff too - like fingerprints - police using a cloth to touch something, that's surely to not leave your own prints? I'd assume you are wiping off the ones already there and no longer preserving the crime scene.

It just shat me to tears that they did such great research on Australian reef fish in Finding Nemo - and the birds are American species - when there are very similar Aussie species they could have drawn instead. *headdesk*

On a human level, I get very annoyed when they set a character up as being very intelligent, doing a job that they would have to get at least a reasonable education to do, and then make them do dumb things (such as aforementioned medical students and defibrillators). Dumb, or people who are merely ignorant of the field I can cope with, but without having a damn good reason for supposedly bright person to do ultra-dumb thing sets my teeth on edge. Even in the interests of comedy (which is why I can't watch most american sit-coms)

Just remembered. While I do like at watch the CSI type american series, I find it refreshing to watch the more UK based ones where the CSI equivalent folk wear clean over-suits to avoid contaminating the scene with their own trace.

There appear to be more restrictions in fast-food places on hygiene and non-contamination than there are in some US forensic shows.

One that always annoys me is any time they show a horse on the screen, the foley artists put in the sound effect of a horse neighing. Horses just don't neigh that much, and you can see when they do: their nostrils flare, their sides heave, and half the time their mouths open too. It just seems a bit unnecessary.

People running upstairs to get away when they're being chased by something. It's stupid, you're going to run out of stairs!

Films that show a motorcycle being chased and caught by a big, heavy 4wd. I can cope when they do it in the Matrix Reloaded as it is an agent chasing them, the agent could be effecting the matrix to slow them down & speed himself up - but in Mission Impossible they do the same thing with a racing motorcycle and a Landrover. The bike should have been over the horizon and far away, not having the landrover touching its back wheel.

There are lots of other things that annoy me. I yell at the tv a lot. I try not to yell in the cinema. But either way, you can see I'm not necessarily a fun person to watch tv/a movie with.

Semi-seriously (and maybe I've mentioned this to you before), but I think there should be a law forcing movies and TV to show CPR being done correctly.

kaths brought up the way people type madly on computer keyboards to do things that the rest of us would do with a mouse. We're in the internet age, everyone uses computers, we know they don't work this way.

Speak for yourself. I still make a lot of use of the command line, because there are some things that are far more efficient that way. In my first job, I'd do certain things through the CLI, and get them done far more quickly than my colleagues could do them with the GUI, even with the ridiculously excessively verbose commands the system forced me to use.

It does depend on the circumstance, though. And having said all that - somebody tapping on the keyboard, and not touching the space bar for hours? I think not.

My degree is in chemistry - it doesn't show up very often in film and TV, but when it does, it's usually wrong.

I vaguely recall an episode of the X-Files, where Scully, a medical doctor with physics training, takes a fairly simple NMR spectrum from a scientist, shows it to Mulder, saying in serious scientific tones, "This is a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrograph."

Mulder, a psychologist, says something like, "But this chemical is ten years beyond our technology!"

And I thought, it shows hydrogen atoms relative to each other on a carbon framework. How the hell do you work that out?

Then they showed the molecule on a computer screen, because you can do that, in TV-land, go straight from a printed spectrum to a 3D computer program.

As near as I could tell, the compound was ethanol, or something similarly small and simple. Which was fair, because the NMR was clearly also of something small and simple.

The mistake wasn't so much the science - it was a sf show - so much as trying to create an aura of scientific realism, badly.

I'm very good at suspending disbelief, or at least accepting wacky things in the context of a film, but sometimes I get pushed way over the edge.

The first big thing that leaps to mind is The Mummy II with the dawn sunlight creeping across the ground as they outrun it and hope it won't reach the big crystal at the top of the pyramid. Basic geometry and physics please! Then again, if it was a Discworld film, it'd be more forgivable, because light is described as crawling over the land.

Oh, and cars on the ground outrunning the orbital laser closing in on them. Hmmm, another Geometry one.

There's scenes that make me wince in disbelief - Doc Oc in Spiderman 2 getting thrown about (he's still just a human with uber-arms), Iron Man slamming into the ground in suit #1, Indy (4) slamming into the ground in fridge #1, etc...

Then you take a film like Wanted, which I caught recently and thoroughly enjoyed, curving bullets and all. In my mind it was a silly action fantasy film, so bullets curving around things were just fine.

... tell you what really drives me crazy, though: when there's food and people never get around to eating it. The bloody Herbs and Stewed Rabbit! And that Admiral in Next Gen, where they made such a big deal of how she liked canapes, and then she never actually eats them! I always think: if you're not gonna eat it, give it to ME!

My biggest peeve that I can think of is there is a critical situation as in the Torchwood episode "They keep killing Suzie" Where they have a limited time to warn the woman in danger and instead of telling the woman while she has time to turn around and come back they call someone else to help them get out instead! (Trying not to make this too spoilery)

and another pet peeve which can be applied to tv shows in general is the "time limit" i.e. "you only have several minutes to the bomb exploding" scenario - it gets to the last countdown of a minute and a few minutes later after initially hesitating the protagonist has of course saved the day, just in the nick of time. What's even worse is usually during the course of this 60 seconds there's an argument between characters telling them to hurry up.

Or another variation is there is a dire situation where someone has been driving/travelling all night and if they don't get help by a certain time they will die... Help gives chase and they only take half as long to arrive and always with a couple of minutes to spare. Not that you want bad guys to win, and as Dr Who points out, time isn't a straight line, it's a wibbly wobbly ball, but still...

Oh! Volcanoes. Movies volcanoes are bound to emit both pyroclastic flows AND liquid lava flows. In real life it's either/or. You can have a safe, non-explosive Hawaiian type volcano with it's pretty glowing red lava, or you can have an Andesitic type volcano which creates a massive boom and great clouds of ash but very little in the way of lava flow.

You're not going to outrun a pyroclastic cloud. You're not even gonna beat it if you're driving.
Your car will not drive over lava unscathed.

Dante's Peak has a lot to answer for.

One of my biggest beefs with Star Trek was the security on the transporters. Anyone and everyone including children and total strangers unfamiliar with Starfleet technology could and would over ride it and lock out the command.

Another amusing thing -- when you see a panel of fancy equipment on TV, it is very often professional audio gear, no matter what it is supposed to be, which is funny if you recognise it. At least one audio magazine has a regular feature documenting the phenomenon. Basically, they need a shot of some fancy high tech looking gear with lights and knobs and things, and there is always this one guy involved in production with a big rack of gear that looks just like that, so they just borrow it for the shot....

A particular high point was Abby from NCIS using a pro-tools audio mixing controller to control the magic photo enhancing software.

I think the biggest one for me is inconsistent handling/development of a character, possibly the most egregious example of which is Xander in BtVS.

Almost every other character CONSISTENTLY grows in power, abilities, depth etc but Xander will be written back to S1 goofiness whenever convenient to the current episode.

(Possibly this is why so much BtVS fanfic seems to be Xander centred...)

I hate it when action occurs in water that either should be or clearly is filthy - and it's crystal clear when they cut to the underwater scenes. Like when people are wading through sewers waist deep in brown murk, but when they wrestle with the bad guy in said murk they have no trouble seeing the gun he kicks away to retrieve it at a dramatic moment. And said gun usually works despite said murk, too.

Also, not a regularly used annoyance thankfully, but I had to be physically restrained from standing up to lecture the screen at several points during The Ninth Gate, namely the parts where Depp's supposed 'rare book dealer' character shoves ancient books in his shoulder bag to transport them, smokes and drinks over them, and *cracks the spine* to make copies of Ye Olde Satanic Clues.

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