If you want a great list of movie cliches, go out to your bookstore and pick up “Roger Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary.” It’s over a hundred pages of these common storytelling shortcuts. For example: Whenever someone is alone in a dark, creepy place, investigating a noise, it will turn out to be a cat. Then they breathe a sigh of relief, and immediately get killed. …Or, whenever the hero is sneaking around in a building via the air duct, he will always go right over the bad guys’ conference room, so he can hear the details of their plan.
Roger Ebert accepts submissions, too, so if you get the book, you’ll find a few from me. I’ve sent him quite a few, and he’s used some of them. As a bonus, here are a couple of the ones he didn’t use: “Beat the House: Any film character who visits Las Vegas either wins big or loses everything; nobody ever comes out even. On a related topic, no movie characters ever go to Reno; they always go to Vegas.” And another one: “Speak-no-Geek: The person who responds to a scientist’s explanation by saying, ‘Again, please, this time in English.’”
To be fair, though, a lot of these cliches are simply storytelling shortcuts. Screenwriter William Goldman talks about this in his new book, Which Lie Did I Tell? If you go see an Mel Gibson action movie, do you want him to figure out the plot and then go whip some ass, or do you want to watch for fifteen minutes while he slowly circles the block, hoping to catch someone’s parking space? Similarly, the bread sticking out of the grocery bag is a bit of visual shorthand; you immediately know it’s a bag of groceries, as opposed to seeing somebody with an unmarked brown bag and not knowing what’s in it. Ditto in comic strips: A tiny building with a moon carved in the door is an outhouse, even if most of them didn’t really look like that.
I’ve said this before, but I think most cliches are crutches, and can simply be avoided. For example, instead of the hero parking in front of the downtown office building, just show the hero drive up, show the building, and cut inside as he walks through the foyer a few minutes later. You get the idea, and you don’t have to violate probability by letting the hero get an extremely unlikely parking space. Or just have him take a cab, so parking is moot.
Seen in this light, you can recognize the shorthand nature of most storytelling shortcuts. For example: Guns never run out of bullets, unless it’s important to the plot. Similarly, movie athletes also never get injured, unless, again, the injury is the point of the story.
For me, the fun part isn’t pointing out the cliches. The fun part is thinking about why the cliche is a cliche, and coming up with clever, creative ways of imparting the same information just as quickly and efficiently without resorting to the cliche.