Life imitating art - What common movie plot devices are mistakenly believed by most people?

[Irishman]

@buddha_david

If you have a gun trained on someone and they refuse to cooperate, simply pulling the hammer back will instantly make them compliant. (“Look, I can shoot you 0.02ms faster now!”)

That’s more an “I’m serious” than actually doing anything to make shooting easier or quicker.

Conversely, knocking someone on the head will instantly render them unconscious. They will suffer no ill effects, and will conveniently remain unconscious until you splash water in their face / give 'em smelling salts / bop 'em on the head again.

This. The noggin does not have an on/off switch. If you get hit hard enough to knock you unconscious, it’s hard enough to have sustained dain bramage afterwards.

Along those same lines, the new one seems to be a taser to the neck as a knockout/sedation technique.

@Derleth

Never shock a flatline.

Well, you can shock a flatline, it just isn’t going to do any good.

Defibrillators briefly stop hearts in the hopes that when the brief shock wears off, the cardiac muscle will remember how to pump blood again, as opposed to flailing around at random, which is called fibrillation, which is what it was doing, which is why you used a defibrillator on it.

This application of percussive maintenance works often enough to be helpful because the heart actually knows how to beat in and of itself; cardiac muscle just does that, which is why heart transplants work: You don’t need to reconnect nerves to convince the donor heart to beat correctly in the recipient. It will beat just fine under the influence of hormones without any direct connection to the brain.

There’s a region of the heart that is the natural pacemaker that signals heart muscle contractions in unison. When that region gets disturbed, the muscle contractions fall out of synch, and thus your heart fibrillates - shakes like jello instead of squeezing in unison. A hard blow to the chest (e.g. a baseball strike) can cause this. The defibrillator contracts all the heart muscle fibers together, then releases them, and the hope is the heart starts pulsing in synch again. That is also the basis for the old-timey CPR technique of hard blows to the chest to restart the heart - a poor-man’s defibrillator. Which, given the unlikeliness of that strike being very exact, is very poor indeed. Nevertheless, it still shows up in movies. Like “The Abyss”.

The biggest lie movies tell is probably the lie that CPR works most of the time. It works 20% of the time or less, and even when it works, it might not leave much in the way of usable brain.

@Chronos

Probably the biggest misconception about CPR is that it makes the subject recover: You see someone get zapped, or have a heart attack, or whatever, and falls over. The rescuer pounds on their chest for a few minutes, until suddenly the poor sod gasps loudly, wakes up, and gets up, ready for more ass-kicking. In reality, that recovery only comes with specialized equipment (if you’re lucky, at least a defibrillator, and possibly much more). The only purpose of the CPR is to keep the person alive until the defibrillator can get there, and it has to be continued nonstop until that time.

It’s also not consequence-free. Do it right, and you’re probably breaking ribs.

Yep, CPR is not a recovery technique. CPR is purely a stop gap to keep blood flowing to primarily the brain until more detailed medical help is available, such as a defibrillator or trained medical personnel with more complicated equipment.

Breaking ribs isn’t required to do it right, but fairly common occurrence.

@Horatio_Hellpop

I stand corrected.

Even that isn’t the standard trope. That took a sniper prone from a hundred feet away lining up on the gun, given plenty of time to determine repeat patterns of movement and discern when the target was holding the gun still, not pointed anywhere dangerous. The trope is that any gunslinger/cop/random gun “expert” can whip up their own pistol one-handed and hit the gun directly without hitting anything else.

Though it does show that if the gun does get shot, the flinch reaction to the unexpected strike is likely to cause the holder to drop the gun.

[Peanuthead]

@Jim_s_Son

POWs have a duty to escape. No they don't.  It's usually far riskier to be behind enemy lines and besides, many think they have done their bit and some "shirker" at home should do their bit.

According to the United States Military Code of Conduct:

*Article III

If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and to aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.
*

Whether this is practical or not is another matter.

[Lumpy]

@Irishman

That’s more an “I’m serious” than actually doing anything to make shooting easier or quicker.

If you’ve trained with a single/double action pistol, cocking will make the first shot the same trigger pull as the others, probably increasing your accuracy.

[Lumpy]

@Peanuthead

According to the United States Military Code of Conduct:

*Article III

If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and to aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.
*

Whether this is practical or not is another matter.

POW parole was an old tradition that was in place through at least the 19th century; when did that change and what was the rationale?

[Peanuthead]

@Lumpy

POW parole was an old tradition that was in place through at least the 19th century; when did that change and what was the rationale?

I don’t know, but it was in effect when I went in in 1968.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

@Lumpy

POW parole was an old tradition that was in place through at least the 19th century; when did that change and what was the rationale?

In the US Civil War, it was discontinued by the North because it was benefiting the South – they were short of soldiers while the North had plenty. Also, Northern soldiers were so mistreated in Southern POW camps that they often came back disabled and had to be invalided home, while Southern soldiers were comparatively well treated, and able to fight again.

[Haldurson]

People can be knocked unconscious and awaken without any other serious repercussions (such as, for example, a concussion, or traumatic brain injury). In fact, if you hit someone over the head sufficiently hard to knock them unconscious, and they don’t get medical treatment (for example, as in some movies, you hide them in a closet) they can die.

People can be safely and easily be rendered unconscious with chloroform without any significant health issues – theres a reason why hospitals use experienced anaesthesiologists, and don’t simply cover the patient’s mouth with chloroform.

That if you deprive someone of oxygen (through a sleeper hold) to knock them unconscious, that they will remain unconscious. In reality, as soon as the person is able to breathe again, they will ‘awake’, unless they’ve been deprived of oxygen for far too long.

That memories from a traumatic experience are usually repressed – actually, memories from traumatic experiences are generally heightened, which is why trauma can be treated with drugs that loosen up the creation of long-term memory. On a related note, memory recovery through hypnosis can actually result in fabricated memories through unintentional suggestion via leading questions.

That eyewitness testimony is generally accurate (it isn’t). The human brain doesn’t work like a camera – we all experience an illusion that it does, but it really does not.

That Forensic Science is good science – while there may be certain aspects of forensics that are actually scientific, a lot of it has come under scrutiny due to discoveries that certain forensic principles are not actually based on good science. For example, partial fingerprints have been documented to result in false convictions. There have been cases where people have gone to jail for arson but were later cleared because the ‘science’ of arson investigators is actually pretty much more art than science. Ballistics has been hit hard (And you can even see the misuse of ballistics in older CSI episodes, where they’ve matched bullets to the box they came out of, which is something that really was done, but was something that really ought NOT to have done, since it also has resulted in false convictions).

That criminal Profilers actually help solve crimes. When cases were analyzed after the fact, it turned out that often profilers would simply give information that was common sense and that the police or FBI already knew, or that they would actually hinder the investigation by diverting investigations that might have born fruit to blind alleys. The actual profiles were too often overly vague (hence, useless except in retrospect, for purposes of taking credit the way a psychic would) or just wrong, based on false assumptions.

[iceiso]

I’m reminded of this funny comic.

Worrying

[Blue_Blistering_Barnacle]

@iceiso

I’m reminded of this funny comic.

xkcd: Worrying

Very funny!

My favorites were chest wounds, “we need to talk”, and especially nosebleeds.

[Blue_Blistering_Barnacle]

In medical dramas, most tumors need stat same-day surgery (unless the point of today’s show is that we have to talk things through and come to terms with them).

[Leo_Bloom]

@Siam_Sam

Setting a flame to one ceiling sprinkler in a building will set off all of them in a building. Ain’t true. Insurance companies would go berserk if that were true. Only the sprinkler(s) feeling any heat will set off.

We had a whole thread, or a major part of one, just on this.

[md2000]

@t-bonham@scc.net

In the US Civil War, it was discontinued by the North because it was benefiting the South – they were short of soldiers while the North had plenty. Also, Northern soldiers were so mistreated in Southern POW camps that they often came back disabled and had to be invalided home, while Southern soldiers were comparatively well treated, and able to fight again.

Army people in the Civil War actually lied about parole? Or did they re-enlist as their twin brother? Or the central database was down so they couldn’t be checked?

There’s been a spate of really bad forensic science stories; for example, a lot of fiber matching - especially hair matches - have been discredited as woo, even though a huge number of people were convicted over it. I heard the re-enactment of a court case over hair samples on CBC two decades ago regarding this - basically a circular cross-exam; “the hairs are identical?”
“No, similar.”
“So then there were differences? What were they?”
“There were none.”
“So they were identical?”
“No, similar…” And so on…

Famously, the Susan Nelles case in Toronto (aka the Children’s Hospital dead babies case) was based on the theory that someone gave sickly babies an overdose of digoxin. Since Ms. Nelles, unlike the other nurses, did not break down and cry under questioning but asked “should I get a lawyer?” she was charged. Fortunately, she got off. More than a decade later, it was shown the test was bogus and there was a false positive for digoxin from natural substances.

There was an expert for the Ontario prosecutor who got a large number of people convicted of shaken baby deaths when it later turned out the guy was pulling it out of his ass and most deaths were crib death.

Basically, many “experts” are like trained animals, they say what their master wants to hear.

[usedtobe]

Or, like real estate appraisers during the Great Junk Mortgage Balloon - the ones that get hired are the ones who give the desired answers.

[Ranger_Jeff]

After being shot in the shoulder, the hero will be back in action after a quick stop to get bandaged up.

They don’t do it as often anymore, but it used to be that if there was a maverick cop who didn’t go by the rules, his Lieutenant or Captain was always an IRATE black man.

[Honey]

@Nava

No hospitalized patient ever sleeps in any position other than the Sleeping Beauty, at least while there is a camera in the room. Unlike the L-shaped bedsheets, which most people realize aren’t real, people actually are surprised that someone wearing tubes will try to turn in his sleep. It’s a relatively common reason for bed restraints.

This is driving me nuts. What is an L-shaped bed sheet?

[Dewey_Finn]

In movies, when a (opposite-sex) couple are lying in bed, the bed sheet will only come up to the man’s waist, while it will cover the torso of the woman.

[Ludovic]

ETA: Scooped

[Slithy_Tove]

It’s a standard trope in mainstream cut-to-after-the-sex shots. His chest is exposed but her breasts are covered.

It comes right after the pre-sex scene, where they undress by slowly unbuttoning their shirts first, unlike real people who open their pants first.

[Dewey_Finn]

And when they get out of bed, the guy is still wearing boxer shorts, while the woman still has her bra and panties on.

[Honey]

@Dewey_Finn

In movies, when a (opposite-sex) couple are lying in bed, the bed sheet will only come up to the man’s waist, while it will cover the torso of the woman.

Thank you.

@Slithy_Tove

It’s a standard trope in mainstream cut-to-after-the-sex shots. His chest is exposed but her breasts are covered.

It comes right after the pre-sex scene, where they undress by slowly unbuttoning their shirts first, unlike real people who open their pants first.

Hmm. I always take off my shirt first.