You’re almost correct – when he meets Jane he can read English, but not speak it 9there was no one to teach him how to speak English). He, in fact, learns tio speak French before English. Tarzon, like Frankenstein’s Creation, is one of the Great Autodidacts.
The Remarkable Coincidences come long before this – Tarzan loses both his parents, but doesn’t get killed himself, at just about the same time his Ape foster-mom Kala loses her baby. And the two find each other. Pretty unlikely set of circumstances, but when you consisder that on the continent of Africa the human babny who gets adopted by apes is white, the odds go outrageous – in Kipling’s Jungle Book, after all, Mowgli is Indian. You’d think it’d be more likely that an adiopted kid would be a native, rather than an unlikely visitor.
But it wasn’t written that way, which is why the whole scene plays out rather awkwardly and unnaturally. The outcome that is finally reached in THG is absurd enough that is not merely a series of unbelievable coincidences, but also a mighty effort by the author to break her own rules multiple times.
That one’s always bothered me, too. I wrote a Teemings column about it, because it’s a trope that’s been re–used. It shows up in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines at almost exactly the same time – but at least *they[/.i] actually had an almanac.
I’d throw the whole idea out as blatantly unlikely – except that the eclipse gambit was actually used (successfully!) twice in history – once by Columbus and once by “The Prophet” Tenkskwatawa. They both had almanacs, too. .
I tend to think of it as the penultimate contrivance story, because it’s barely more fleshed out than a pure hypothetical dilemma on par with “if you had to choose” games or brainstorming thought scenarios. No engineer would allow ever allow a complicated craft that human lives depended on to be used either with such a minuscule tolerance for error, or such reckless launch safety checks.
It’s almost on par with the man chained to a railroad switch story.
At least Breaking Strain’s dilemma involved an accident and some actual interpersonal conflict.
[spoiler]The games are meant to keep the regions in line, but they also need to keep the citizens of the capitol entertained. There are always twists and surprises to keep the interest of the capitol. The whole point of the first two rule changes was that they were fake. They never intended to let them both live.
The game masters are like the producers of any other reality show in most ways. They use editing and changes to the rules and conditions to build a story line to keep viewers invested. Once the love story angle became popular, it made for a more tragic ending to build up their hope and allow them to commit and then pull the rug out from under them and make them choose who would live and who would die.
The final rule change was also not contrived as it was forced on them by the actions of the protagonist. The government needs a victor. The joint suicide pact force them to decide between no victor (and therefor no victory tour) or allowing two victors. Either way would be dangerous for the government because it showed they could be thwarted.
[/spoiler]
Well, not his late mother (that’d be difficult even for Dickens :D) but his Aunt. I suppose you could claim that Monks was behind both those crimes being chosen for Oliver, but being Dickens it was just his usual contrivances.
[spoiler]I don’t buy it. There’s a line in the book about how there has never been a rule change in the history of the games. And yet there are three in this one! If you’re going to let the game creators capriciously change the rules at a moment’s notice, then set it up that way from the beginning. Having this game that has set rules that everybody knows, which never, ever change, and then throwing in some rule changes at the very end just to shake things up a little bit feels completely contrived and ridiculous, to the point that it pulled me right out of the story, i.e., “Oh, the author wasn’t sure how to move the plot forward, so she’s introduced this extra element. Sigh.”
I could go on a lot further with my dislike for The Hunger Games and how disappointing I felt it to be, but that would range pretty far afield of this particular thread topic. :)[/spoiler]
Most of these examples are not contrivances, which, strict speaking, is using a whole bunch of unlikely events, not just a coincidence or two. It is fiction where the mechanism of the story shows through, not one that uses coincidences (which are the heart and soul of much great fiction; read Shakespeare some time).
In my example of The Proposal, there was so much laboring to produce the result. You had to have a bathroom that didn’t have a place for extra towels. You had to have someone taking a shower without having a towel ready when she came out. You had to have someone strip naked – but not in the room, on a porch outside. You had to have the yappy dog so that Sandra Bullock would be delayed in getting the towel long enough for Reynolds to strip down. You had to have Reynolds wearing earbuds so he doesn’t notice Bullock is taking a shower. You have to have them running across the room for no particular reason and not looking where they were going.
That’s a contrivance. Not just a coincidence. Not just an odd reaction or two. But a series of them that work to show that the writers were working so hard to get a final result that the entire narrative structure falls apart and you can see nothing but the mechanisms being used.
A good writer could have achieved the same result by simply having Bullock step out of the shower, find no towel, then dart out of the bathroom to get one, and finding Reynolds standing there having removed his clothes. It wouldn’t have been any funnier, but it would have been far less contrived.
The curator never appraises the items as he never assigns them a monetary value. He simply authenticates them. As a museum professional myself, I would never authenticate something for a third party. If I was wrong, I might open my organization up to legal trouble we wouldn’t want. I sometimes get people coming in who want something authenticated/appraised but I never appraise something because it violates my professional ethics to do so. I will provide them with the names of people who do appraisals but I always give multiple names in order to avoid accusations of collusion or favoritism.
Yes, I get the point, but it would have made slightly more sense and felt less awkward if
the rule had been “two can survive” from the very beginning of the games and they only made the rule change at the end. The way it’s written, with those rule changes all happening in the span of literally a few pages, just feels like clumsy story telling.
I get that The Hunger Games is wildly popular, so I am well aware that my opinion is the minority.
I thought the point was that the government can do whatever the hell it wants so they’re going to put the romantic pair together only to force one to kill other at the end. The gamemakers planned it from the beginning, or at least once they both became popular in the game. It served to emphasize that the districts and their children are only pawns. That’s why their rebellion was so odious to the capitol.
At least once a week my wife yells from the shower for me to get her a towel because she forgot to grab one. We keep our towels in the hallway closet.
That kind of comedy works on the build up–the audience KNOWS what’s going to happen. It’s not shock, it’s reward for seeing the train coming. In the theater there were people going “OhnoOhnoOhno!” and getting the giggles.
Your solution is to have Ryan Reynolds just there naked..without explanation?
The ultimate metric, it would seem, is whether the non-likelihood of events pulls you out of the narrative - if the suspension bridge of disbelief snaps and drops you into the canyon.
I feel comfortable saying both the multiple unbelievable coincidences in Jan Valjean’s life, and the Connecticut Yankee’s recollection of, and need of, the time and place of a particular solar eclipse, are contrivances that weaken the narratives substantially.
Yay - in this thread I have discovered that someone else besides me is not in thrall to “The Hunger Games”. I struggled through it (despite it’s being written in the present tense, which I despise) only because I work in a high school library. I skimmed the sequels. Once again the mainstream flows along without me.
as for the OP - contrivances obviously work better in comedies than dramas. In dramas they will \ruin your suspension of disbelief.
It was a very unmemorable thriller to begin with, but all that I walked away with was thinking how everything that played out for the set up and resolution depended on a series of random variables and the actions of strangers, which were completely unpredictable, so the antagonists seemingly pulling the strings would have no back up plan if things did happen to occur just so.
It was like watching a bunch of Deus Ex Machinas stitched together in the guise of a taught mystery/thriller. Anyone can make a villain appear like a mastermind, if the story is so contrived that all his machinations depend on unlikely, unpredictable events and ridiculous scenarios. But your audience would have to be idiots to be impressed.
It was so vapid, I can’t even think of one example, now. Just the vague notion of what I described above.
ETA: Indeed, the top review sums it up nicely. Linky.
The first Back to the Future has something like this. At the beginning of the movie, Marty (Michael J. Fox) and his girlfriend are sitting on a bench, when they’re interrupted by someone soliciting funds to save the clock tower, which was hit by lightning in 1955.
Marty then goes back in time to 1955. He and Doc Brown know that lightning is going to strike the tower, and what day and time. They plan on using the electricity generated from the lightning strike to power the time machine’s flux capacitor, allowing Marty to return to 1985.
The problem is that, though the clock stopped at the time that the lightening hit, there’s no indication of what second the lightning strike happened, only the hour and minute. To further the drama, Doc Brown says that he’s calculated everything down to the second, including wind resistance. But when the alarm goes off to tell Marty to start accelerating, the car floods, and won’t start. Marty manages to get it started, and hits the wire running from the clock tower at the exact second that the power from the lightning bolt travels down the wire, generating the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity needed to power the flux capacitor.
Had it not been for that delay when the car stalled, Marty would have hit the wire too soon, and not returned to 1985.
Oh, and one other example:
I used to deliver pizzas, and NEVER had a hot chick answer the door in a nightie, invite me in, and engage in carnal relations with me.
Speaking of Jodie Foster movies, INSIDE MAN struck me as being contrived past the breaking point: she’s called in to play “fixer” during a bank robbery that’s turned into a hostage situation, and when hiring her Christopher Plummer makes clear that he’ll be equally delighted if his stuff is returned or simply destroyed – because, as he doesn’t want to spell out, that’s the only evidence that he collaborated with the Nazis.
Minus that one little detail, I’d probably have suspended disbelief: okay, I’d think, he wants it back, even if I don’t know the reason why; he tasked her with recovering it, that’s all I know, it’s all I need to know. But since the guy has no problem with it being destroyed – and will, in fact, pay through the nose for that privilege – then why the heck is it still in one piece when the movie starts?
It makes the whole plot go – and all we know is, the guy who could’ve destroyed it that morning (or last month, or back in the '90s) doesn’t actually want it back, to the point of “doesn’t want it to exist any more, thanks very much, and here’s a great deal of money if you’ll get rid of it.”
