…that you just couldn’t get away with in real life.
Not like jumping out of a car moving at 60 mph and rolling to the ground unscathed. I mean more mundane conventions that occur often on the screen, such as:
Someone answers the phone on their job by saying simply, “Yeah?” Usually it’s a detective or some business person, who presumably is too busy to say “Hello?” or “Dectective Busy here…” Or they just say their last name.
I’ve tried both of these on my job, and it perturbs people too much. I just couldn’t get away with it. Another phone convention is people hanging up without saying “Bye” or “Talk to you later.”
A woman, usually, who furtively looks someone over in public by putting on mascara and using the reflection in the little mirror. I’ve never tried this one, but it just seems too obvious to me. You couldn’t get away with it in real life. (Anyone out there ever tried it?)
Tossing someone something completely without warning (usually a set of keys), and they always catch it. (Okay, in The Graduate, they go into the fish tank, but that’s just one of the little things that make it so distinct.) I think that if you did this to most people in real life, they’d miss the catch, and be annoyed that you’d even tried it. You just couldn’t get away with it.
Any other examples? Again, I’m not talking about fantastic action-hero things–just ordinary conventions you see again and again on the screen, but that, in real life, you just couldn’t get away with it.
I have always been amazed at the amount of breakfast food wasted in TV shows and movies. I can’t count the number of times you see Mrs. Cleaver or Keaton preparing some huge spread, then Wally/Beaver/Alex bound down the stairs, sit down for two seconds, take a bite of toast and then say “Gotta go Mom, late for___” and all that cooking for naught.
Hit the wrong button…to continue, I don’t know about other households, but as a kid if my mother has spent an hour making blintzes or whatever, we weren’t going anywhere until we had seconds…
Shaving in movies and TV. If a character is shaving he’ll of course be interrupted (why else have the character shaving), most likely he’ll be halfway done when the interruption occurs. The character will then wipe away the remaining shaving cream and go deal with the iterruption… half shaven… or partly shaven… which means that over the course of a few hours he’ll look more and more ridiculous. By the end of the day, if he hasn’t had the chance to finish shaving… he’ll Mr. Half-Beard.
That thing about reversing the polarity on the tachyon flow in the transporter emitter arrays? You just can’t get away with it in real life. I tried it and completely fried the arrays. And have you ever tried getting hold of a Mark 7 emitter array in the beta quadrant? Split-critch panties are cheap as dirt, but emitter arrays are almost unobtainable.
And you can’t just emit a beam of tetrion particles. I mean, think for a minute about how unstable tetrion particles are. A beam would last only a few nanoseconds unless you emit them into subspace. Yet people in movies and TV use tetrion particle beams to scan for cloaked ships in NORMAL SPACE all the time. Yeah, like that’s really going to work.
I’m amazed at the speed of restaurant service in TV and movies. Unless of course it’s part of the plot that it be slow. I’d pay very good money to get my orders as fast as they do.
Perhaps the most unreal convention common to all action adventure movies is that the protagonist can commit multiple felonies in the course of finding/ capturing/ killing the bad guys, and the authorities just let it go because it was in a good cause. Here’s just a partial list of what an action hero is typically guilty of:
breaking and entering
theft, simple
assault and battery
illegal possession of a firearm
illegally discharging a firearm in public
grand theft auto
vandalism
destruction of public property
reckless endangerment
refusal to obey a police order
resisting arrest
fleeing the scene of a felony
manslaughter
…find a parking space right in the middle of a big city, at rush hour, right in front of where I’m going.
…turn on the radio and there’s a pertinent news story about me just starting. For that matter, having a friend call me on the phone before the story is starting, whereupon I turn on the radio and the story is just starting.
…afford a well-furnished 4000 square foot apartment on a grubby salary.
…go for 24 hours without some telemarketer calling me trying to sell me something.
In any of the various Law & Order shows, people who the police are asking questions to will invaribably walk around/keep doing whatever activity they are doing. Somehow I can’t imagine the police let me get away with such behaviour.
A couple will have sex with the woman on top of the sheets but under the blanket so when she gets up and takes the blanket with her the man’s still covered by the sheet (or is this just a hetero thing?).
High schools never seem to have a dress code, at least for female students. Nor do they have uniforms unless it’s a prep school in which case the girls will wear plaid mini-skirts.
After a long shootout, things are always quiet. No people screaming or running, no police sirens or ambulances. I found Mr. and Mrs. Smith to be particularly egregious. Huge, long, noisy fights, and no responders- go outside and it’s a peaceful sunny day.
That and the pretense that sex in the pool/bathtub is great. Or even actually works. In reality, ouch.
How about all those sitcoms where the neighbors just walk into the main family’s house uninvited? I’m fairly sure that the people in my neighborhood do not leave their front doors unlocked, and I’m damn sure that they’d be quite upset if I just walked in like I owned the place.
Hey, I was just thinking about this one! How come women can hop stright into bed with a guy without hitting the bathroom first? Especially if she’s been drinking? Dunno about you, but I always need a pit stop before things, uh, progress.
But how else are they going to get you to establish your character? If you don’t walk around chiseling at a lump of stone, for instance, no one will ever know that you’re a sculptor!
