OMG, that was so contrived! (Open Spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

What are some of the most contrived scenarios in fiction? What made them contrived? How could they have been less so?

I’m going to leave the use of spoiler boxes up to the poster, but if you decide not to use them, please state the title first, hit Enter for a couple of lines, then the contrived scene - like this:

“Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton version)
I thought it was contrived when…”

So people can easily skip the post if desired.

I’m going ahead and spoiler-boxing my Six Feet Under issue – not because of spoilers, but because I don’t want it to dominate the OP.

[spoiler]So I’m watching Six Feet Over from start to finish as my lovely wife bought me the entire series for Christmas. I have been quite riveted by the show, already up to season 4, finding the writing to be excellent overall, situations and plot believable, great acting, etc.

But in the latest episode, S 4.5’s That’s My Dog, the writers came up with a scenario so contrived I’m puzzled as to why they didn’t ball up the script, round-file it, and start over. For those of you who watched the show, you know what I mean: the carjacking scene.

In the early afternoon, David runs to grab a body. On his way back he picks up a hitchhiker, young male, who claims to have run out of gas on his way to visit his sick, dying grandmother. All the guy needs to do is go to the next gas station, buy a gas can and a couple of gallons of gas, and run back to the car, so David picks him up and goes to the nearest gas station.

This occurs in Los Angeles, by the way. This is important for understanding how contrived this scenario played out.

They get to the nearest gas station. Guy goes in while David is buying gas for the van, comes back out and claims the ATM doesn’t work. Not to get too long-winded here, but they go look for another ATM. When they find one, the guy carjacks David, making him take $400 from David’s bank account, then keeps him hostage as they go on a whirlwind crime spree that lasts most of the night: smoking crack, the guy kills a woman, all sorts of shit. At the end all this, the carjacker pours a bunch of gas on a crying David, then runs away without setting him on fire (which is good, because Michael C. Hall is the second-billed actor on the show and it would’ve been hard to imagine 6FU without him.)

Doesn’t sound contrived (well, not too much) on the face of it, really. But here’s what it took for the writers to do this:

  1. They looked for 3 hours for an ATM in Los Angeles just so it could get dark.
  2. David had to be so overcome with the Gay Lust that he didn’t see the obvious warning signs that this guy wasn’t right (for example, the daydream was about David and the guy hooking up).
  3. After the carjacking, the guy gets out of the van, leaving David in there with the keys. David gets out of the van as well.
  4. David gets tied up in the back of the van, escapes by opening the back door so that the guy gets stunned for 30 seconds (gets smacked by the flung-opened door.) David: doesn’t go for the gun, doesn’t make sure the guy is knocked out, doesn’t go apeshit all over his ass, doesn’t do anything but run behind a dumpster 10 feet away and fumbles for his cell phone. Of course, the guy tackles David and continues the crime spree.
  5. He goes and buys crack, smokes it while sitting in the passengers seat of the van. Takes a powerful hit, is out of it for 30 seconds. David does nothing - doesn’t run away, doesn’t shove the guy’s head through the door window, doesn’t grab the gun, just looks at him.
  6. As he’s having gas poured on him, he does nothing. He’s being told, quite clearly, that he’s about to die, but does nothing other than what the carjacker tells him to do. No attempt to go out fighting, just sitting there with his life flashing before his eyes (literally!)

I found the entire sequence of events so contrived, so melodramatic, that it actually makes me worry about the rest of the show – did this one just jump the shark?

I knew we were in trouble when they had to take hours to find an ATM in Los Angeles, but they kept on piling contrivance (let’s not drive off!) after contrivance (now that we’ve escaped, let’s hide behind this dumpster 10 feet away from where the carjacker is) after contrivance (let’s not beat the shit out of the drug-addled idiot), that it was embarrassing to watch.

OK, I get that they’re trying to draw parallels between David and Keith and I get that they want to show the consequences of bad choices, but could they not have done a better job?[/spoiler]

I’m sure we can come up with worse examples, but given the overall high quality of the writing in this show, that one came as a shocker to me.

2

The second worst contrived thing I’ve ever seen was in the movie The Proposal. There is a scene where Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds bump into themselves while they both happen to be naked (this isn’t a spoiler, since it was shown in all the trailers). The contrivances were these:

  1. Reynolds does something that get him all sweaty.
  2. He decides to take a shower.
  3. He is listening to his Ipod, so he doesn’t hear a thing.
  4. He goes into the room he shares with Bullock, takes a towel, then goes onto the porch.
  5. He removes all his clothes, even his shoes and underwear.
  6. Meanwhile, Bullock is just finishing a shower.
  7. She realizes there aren’t any towels.
  8. She sees the towel cabinet that Reynolds left open.
  9. But her way is blocked by a yappy little dog.
  10. She finally gets past the dog and runs to the closet, not looking where she is going.
  11. At the same time, Reynolds enters the room and runs toward the shower, also not looking where he is going.
  12. They bump. Hilarity attempt to ensue, but fails.

The worst case, however, was in the novel The Curse of Clifton, by 19th century best-selling author Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth. In it the protagonist (an officer in the army) is marrying his girlfriend. He brings along his best friend to be his best man. His best friend falls in love with the bride’s best friend. The dialog (approximately) is as follows:

Boy: We should get married, too.
Girl: But we don’t have a license.
Boy. Oh, don’t worry about that. I have an extra one. I wasn’t sure how the bride and groom wanted to include their middle initial with their names, so I asked the clerk to give me a blank one – signed and everything – just in case I got it wrong. The only problem is that we need a minister.
Girl: Oh, that’s no problem. See that hut down there? It belongs to a minister. He was kicked out of his church, but he never was defrocked, so he still can perform marriages.

So the go down and get married. About ten minutes later, as they return, word arrives: the Indians are on the warpath and the two grooms have been recalled to fight.

Nine months later . . . you guessed it.

And the girl’s one-hour husband has been reported killed in action. She is then forced to the lowliest and most degrading occupation a girl of her time can be forced to do.

She becomes an actress.

3

That’s pretty bad.

Six Feet Under also had one in the last episode (or two), this one involving efforts to avoid male nudity.

At the house of some woman he just had sex with, Nate takes a shower. He gets out of the shower and decides to head back to bed for a nap. The following steps ensue:

  1. Nate leaves the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist.
  2. Nate gets into bed.
  3. Nate gets under the covers.
  4. Nate removes the towel, flinging it on the floor.
  5. Woman enters, tells Nate he’s gotta go.
  6. Nate stands up, wraps sheet around his waist, and talks to her.

The second (the Sheet Wrap of Shame) isn’t that big a deal as it is a common trope, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen before a situation where a character wears a wet bath towel to bed, only to remove it once they’re under the covers.

:confused:

4

That carjacking episode was the worst episode of anything that I’ve ever sat through. It soured me on the entire show.

5

Regarding Six Feet Under:

I dunno. I think hollywood has left us with unrealistic expectations about how good the average person is at escaping captivity, especially when they’re terrified of their captors. In our heads, we’d all take advantage as soon as our captors let their guard down and swing into action, in reality I suspect most of us would let fear and indecision get in the way.

The ATM thing is pretty contrived though.

6

Every single episode of GLEE, so much so that it would be easier to figure out a plot line that wasn’t contrived.

Every episode of every reality show pretty much, but none more so perhaps than Pawn Stars. The guy walking in who claims “I’ve got a pistol here that might have belonged to General Custer or could be a prop from a communit college production of Annie Get Your Gun my daughter did back in '93, but either way I wanna sell it for $20,000” and Rick’s look of concern and “I have a friend who’s an expert in Custeriana and in Little Theatre productions, mind if I call him in and have him take a look?” is not only 100% staged but sometimes filmed AFTER the scene where the expert appraises it.
Most of the experts are legit, but they’re not buddies or business associates of Rick’s and in many cases he’s never met them. A few of them live in Las Vegas and Rick cold very well have a business relationship with them (the music and toy shop owners who’ve been on several times and the museum curator; ordinarily a curator might happen to be a qualified appraiser as well, but the two jobs not only aren’t the same but aren’t that related and in fact most museums have strict “WE DON"T APPRAISE” policies). More likely the ‘buddy of Rick’s’ is a guy who lives 1,800 miles away and was flown in by the show’s producers for this one item.
The show is 100% staged. I seriously doubt that they’ve ever really had a guy just walk in off the street with a blunderbuss or a trunk full of documents signed by John Quincy Adams and Rick just happens to know enough about it to cite a Wikipedia article extemporaneously. While it doesn’t bother me that they didn’t choose to do an actual “week in the life of a pawn shop” (which would probably be pretty boring- engagement rings, title pawns, TVs, etc.- in fact only maybe once in every 100 items does somebody actually pawn something on the show) I do wish they’d cut the pretense and have a straightforward "odd strange and curious merchandise gets appraised, no pretense that the guy just walked in off the street or need for Rick to do the ‘welllllllll’ face, take that time and work in a couple of other items.
Antiques Roadshow is not as bad on the kayfabe since they’re not actually buying the merchandise but it is pretty similar in the serendipity of expertise. If the appraiser is an expert in 17th century Massachusetts furnishings you can be pretty sure it’s because the producers chose him because they knew somebody was bring in a 17th century entertainment center or whatever on that episode.

7

The movie Home Alone.

I’d go into detail but it’s late and it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it.

8

“Contrived” is pretty common in literature, both big-L Literature and small l.

I’ve just done a lot of research on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein recently, and the work is hopelessly contrived – all in the interest of making her points and keeping the story moving. The biggest contrivances are near the start of things, where the Creature manages to find himself a safe nest in the stable of the refugeee family where he can learn language from them and learn to read. The next is that this unschooled creature can make his way across Europe (without a map!) to where his fcreator Frankenstein lives, and actually get there. And then, of course, the first person he meets (and almost immediately kills) is the younger brother of his Creator. BNut a novel that’s a travelogue about an artificial human being wandering around a continent trying to find his way home wouldn’t have been as interesting.
Ian Fkleming’s James Bond novels are vfull of contrivance and unbelievable coincidence, but then again, “luck” is the underlying theme of all those Bobnd books. The mere fact that he’s a successful gambler over the long haul is contrivance alone. But there’s no good reason, for instance in The Man with the Golden Gun, that a message for Scaramange should just happen to be easily visible to Bond at the Jamaica airport, or that he ought to run into the man in the house at Love Lane, or that Scaramanga just happens to need an assistant of his type. The novel is nothing more than one improbabiluity following another.

9

Jodi Picoult’s “My Sister’s Keeper”

I think it’s contrived because after going through a lengthy trial process so that the protagonist doesn’t have to donate her kidney to her dying sister (this after making other, painful donations, and her sister doesn’t even want the donation), the protagonist is killed in a car accident. But, now she can be a donor, can’t she? How convenient.

While we’re on that novel, the girls’ brother is an arsonist. Their father gives him a good talking-to, and ta-da! He becomes a heroic police officer.

10

So, let me get this straight. You don’t know who the killer is, but you do know he walks with a limp and is going to participate in a climb up the Eiger.

How is that possible?

11

I was going to post this as well… it not so much contrived that the Creature found a place of refuge, but then Shelly adds the following:

  1. His wife/woman companion… isn’t she some sort of Romanian or Turkish royalty that is on the lam?
  2. The monster learns to read… not from ABC readers or primers or anything, but from works by Petrarch and (looks this up) Constantin-François de Volney’s Ruins of Empires. You know, just like how I learned to read. :smiley:

I didn’t pick up on the travelling through Europe without a map thing (it’s been 20 years since I read the novel), but yeah, that’s pretty bad too.

12

I forget it’s title but there’s some story about a spaceship that is only given exactly enough fuel to just make it to its destination with no accounting for error such that the extra weight of a single girl stowaway is enough to doom everyone on board if she isn’t spaced.

Then there’s also the ending of The Pirate Movie but that was done for laughs.

13

I just read The Hunger Games, and while there was a lot, and I do mean a lot, of deus ex machina contrivance in it, the bit that annoyed me the most was:

[spoiler]Never in the history of the Games have they changed the rules mid-stream! Never! But they are changing them now to allow two winners! Except a handful of pages later, when oops, they change them back again! Just kidding, ha ha!

Also, there was a lot of buildup with this “foxfaced girl” and how clever and smart she was, and you’re led to expect that there is going to be some big confrontation. Like, this girl is so clever and smart that the protagonist of the book is going to have to deal with her at some point, and outwit her at her own game. Yeah, no, the foxfaced girl succumbs offscreen to accidentally eating some poison berries. Tra la la.[/spoiler]

14

This might be a whoosh, but it’s Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations. And the idea’s not original with him, as a look at the Wikipedia page shows. It was first used decades before Godwin was even born (again, with a girl having to be thrown out) in Robert Cromie’s A Plunge into Space.
And I don’t find this a contrivance – under the appropriate conditions, it’s a strong possibility. You might as well fault Arthur C. Clarke for not having enough oxygen aboard in his story Breaking Strain

15

Charles Dickens was a master of the contrived coincidence. For instance, in Oliver Twist, when Oliver goes out with the gang of thieves the first time, by sheer coincidence they end up robbing

the best friend of Oliver’s late father.

Then later, when he goes out with the gang of thieves for the second time, by sheer coincidence they end up robbing

Oliver’s late mother and her guardian

Yeah, right.

16

Yeah, I was going to say pretty much the entire Hunger Games series is contrived as hell. The first one you mentioned was, indeed, particularly infuriating. But you forgot to mention that…

They changed the rules YET AGAIN!!! after the final two pretended they are going to eat some poison berries. So it was:
Rule change!
Nope, just kidding!
Ok, just kidding about the just kidding. Rule change in effect!

17

But does that count as contrived? I mean, the author could have easily written the story as though rule changes happen all the time. I thought a contrivance was to twist the story in an implausable way to force an outcome. In this case, the author didn’t. The author could have twisted the story to reflect that rule changes like this are common, but he opted not to. Or I don’t know. I think I’m confused.

18

I’ve been blizting through A Song of Ice and Fire recently, and a few come to mind:

(Spoilers up through the first 1/3 of Book 4)

[spoiler]
Catelyn, after being convinced to leave King’s Landing, stops in at a roadside inn with her escorts on the way back to Winterfel. She is trying to keep a low profile so no one knows she is high-born. Then Tyrion walks in, the man she suspects of trying to get her son murdered…she knows he will recognize her, but she she wanted to find more evidence before arresting him, but is forced to announce to all who she is and to arrest him.
Really? They both happen to be in the same rinky-dink in on the same night? It takes weeks to months to travel, so what are the odds they both happened to stop in at the same time?

Stannis arriving just in the nick of time when The Wildings were about to undertake a massive attack on The Wall, which was also exactly when Jon was out there to meet with them.

And before that, Jon and his Wilding crew being at the same abandoned village as Bran, Hodor, and the Reeds on the same night?

There are some others, but I can’t think of them right now…still a great series, but I do get a little upset at the amazing coincidences that have to occur all the time.[/spoiler]

19

Tarzan.

He finds books, including ones with pictures, amongst his dead parents’ belongings. From this he learns he is different from the apes and therefore must not go running around naked and not to ahem, fool around with them either. By looking at children’s books with pictures of animals and other things, with their names underneath, he learns to read and also how to speak perfect English. When he meets Jane he is able to converse with her and the rest of the group with ease.

The TV show and heck, even the Greystoke movie was more realistic than this.

I read this long ago so if I am misremembering, please correct me.

20

Les Miserables. Jean Valjean keeps running into the same people over and over and over, and Marius keeps running into the same people over and over and over.

Jean has the strength of ten grinches plus two, can leap over the walls of nunneries, can invent a slight enhancement to the production of something or other and become the richest man in the land…

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. One of the best in the whole history of western culture, when the protagonist (Hank?) recalls the date, time and place of a solar eclipse from a thousand years before, and happens to be transported back to within an hour of that very crumb of timespace.

Ooh - good one!