That’s interesting. And as I think about it, I do hear and see people say “that’s bad writing” as code for “that would never happen in real life, and this is why.” In particular, I see this from people who are experts in a field, or work in a field, which is depicted in a TV show or movie. When an author takes a creative liberty in how something works, it takes them out of the immersion.
The other aspect is that some people – including, unfortunately, my lovely bride – get snapped out of immersion any time a choice, a situation, or a reaction in a piece of fiction doesn’t make sense to them, or feels “unrealistic” to them. I keep having to gently remind my wife, “it’s not a documentary.”
I think of alphabet procedural shows like CSI NCIS FBI L&O: having the DNA results take hours instead of weeks doesn’t take me out of the story. Having two people typing on the same keyboard at the same time does. It’s like writers never looked at their own keyboard right in front of them!
What’s kind of funny about that reaction is real life doesn’t unfold that way either.
If you (any you) are watching some people interact, you’re probably developing a prediction of what’s going to happen next. And sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re wrong. The customer will or won’t persuade the clerk to accept the return. The clerk will or won’t persuade the customer to take the almost-right item. The bickering couple will escalate or settle down. etc.
How does somebody react when their IRL predictions don’t pan out? Pull a Karen and demand to speak to the Manager i.e. God about His lousy scriptwriting?
Probably not the best example. Bear in mind that R. Lee Ermey actually WAS a seasoned DI. Having been through Navy boot camp, which is significantly tamer than Marine boot camp, I think that reaction is the most likely and realistic. DIs are very used to recruits responding to overwhelming aggression by freezing up.
We’ve got a Marine in my writers group who can’t tolerate a military (by which I mean a fantasy, alternate-Earth military) that operates in any way other than the US military. It’s very annoying. He’s great at showing you the proper way to kill people, though.
My husband is a clinical behavioral psychologist. He’s never been properly represented but he doesn’t get too worked up about it. We’ve been watching Shrinking in which the therapists ostensibly practice “CBT” that bears no resemblance whatsoever to CBT. It’s like writers figured out that the winds of therapeutic interventions have shifted, but they haven’t bothered figuring out how they’ve shifted or even a basic understanding of what CBT entails. The result is “CBT” therapists talking about shadow selves and shit. He finds it funny but he also loves the show.
As for me, I will suspend my disbelief left and right if I’m digging something. Truly things like plot holes do not cross my mind, nor do I much care about them. So there’s an example of how what many people would consider “bad writing” rarely even factors into my analysis. I’m usually looking at overall structure, individual scene structure, dialogue, and how effectively the theme was executed. You know, what did it mean?
I had a film teacher who had minored in herpetology. It ruined Raiders of the Lost Ark for him, because he could instantly tell that none of the snakes in the Well of Souls were native to North Africa.
But he at least acknowledged that it was a “him” problem, not really a flaw in the movie.
Lol that reminds me of a movie I saw about prehistoric killer snakes taking over an Antarctic prison. The protagonist had a PhD in “advanced sciences” and he wrote his dissertation on a species of prehistoric snake that had no evidence of its existence. I was thinking, “must be a short dissertation.”
The movie at least tried to justify that by explaining that all modern advances in computer science were based off tech they found in the crashed alien scout ship.
On screen above the MGM lion roar is written ARS GRATIA ARTIS, “art for the sake of art”. Not a word in there about documentaries. Only people who learn history from Hollywood get bent out of shape about inaccurate portrayals, and to them I would suggest learning more about our past some other way.
And when the big crowds turn out to “welcome” the aliens, why do all the handmade signs look like they were professionally painted by a Hollywood film crew’s art department?
Who says Hartman is a reasonable person? There was nothing about Hartman’s behavior towards Pyle that seemed out of character for him. I heard an interview where Ermey spoke about his personal experience as a drill instructor, and he mentioned the enormous pressure they were under to get recruits prepared for Vietnam. I suppose we could bring some other things up. We only see Hartman but there would have been other drill instructors interacting with Joker and company as well.
I do frequently hear the criticism of “Nobody would ever behave like that in real life.” I can only look around at current events and laugh. Aside from that, I think one of the problem is that characters aren’t aware of what genre of movie they’re in. It’s not stupid to investigate a strange noise you hear at night. It’s what most of us do when we hear a strange noise at night. Sometimes incompetent people are in charge and sometimes competent people make mistakes.
Yeah, Hartman displaying any sort of care for the mental health of one of his cadets is what would have been wildly out of character. Even today, “He’s just doing it for attention,” and “He just needs something to toughen him up,” are way too common reactions to someone exhibiting mental distress. A marine corps DI in the 1960s doing anything other than trying to bully him into compliance would be wildly unrealistic.
Part of me is convinced the double team on the type writer was the result of writers having complete contempt for the show and/or their audience.
In Night at the Museum, Ben Stiller’s love interest said she had written 5,000 pages about Sacajawea but she needed more before it was ready for publication. Girl, if 5,000 pages isn’t enough nothing will be enough.
I imagine us laypersons don’t always know enough to see something is an error.
Some of those unrealistic TV and movie clichés are the result of screenwriters falling back on the advice to “write what you know” - when all they know is screenwriting. (Ever notice how many plots involve a character having to “nail that big presentation at work”?)
My personal Bête noire of bad writing is a film that is apparently very popular among people who have environmentalist sympathies, and sometimes I wonder whether some people think that I am being ‘anti-woke’ or ‘anti-environmentalist’ when I criticise it. But that really is not true.
Silent Running.
Bad science fiction, bad astronomy, bad ecology, bad worldbuilding, bad spacecraft design, bad psychology, bad robotics.
It was slowly devised (I hesitate to say ‘written’) by Douglas Trumbull as a way to use some left-over special effects from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the environmentalist vision was tacked on to it relatively near the end of the production process. Originally Trumbull wanted to make a space pirate movie. The music is annoying as well, but some people might like it.
My degree (many, many decades ago) was in environmental science, and I am committed to a wide range of environmentalist causes. I just hate this film because it is bad.
There’s a reverse version of this phenomenon, which I call “bad poetry by deaf children,” where we are obligated to pretend a work is well-made because it is by someone from a marginalized sector of society. I remember Mario Van Peebles gushing about the greatness of New Jack City, proudly claiming it was “as good as The Godfather,” and wondering if there could have been a different New Jack City than the one I paid to see in the theaters.
I think every reader is qualified to proclaim writing good or bad, and every film-goer–even one who never took Cinema as an Artform in college–gets to weigh in on whether or not they liked the movie they just watched. I knew an improv comedy performer who complained once that audiences weren’t “educated” enough to properly judge his work. Maybe, but that isn’t the standard.