My Personal Experiences with, and Opinions about, Annoying Plot Cliches
Ding! The first time I ever had unprotected sex, I got pregnant.
Ding! My BFF’s then-boyfriend smashed a pane of glass in a door in their apartment while they were having an argument in front of me, and I spent most of the day in the hospital with them while doctors debated whether they could save his hand.
But Spock gets to keep the Vulcan Nerve Pinch, right? Right?
Ding! I totally would have fallen down. My right wrist still doesn’t bend right, and I was only being chased by the dog.
One of the best things about the movie Speed: “Shoot the hostage” as a solution to a hypothetical (and later) real hostage situation.
Speaking of horror movies: Someone makes no attempt to ensure that the monster/villain is really dead, ensuring that there will be sequels or an end-of-movie “he’s still alive!” plot twist.
A nice turnaround on this is in the otherwise utterly forgettable “Monster Man”, about a bad guy who literally chases his victims around in a monster truck (that’s the least weird part of the movie too; it goes downhill from there). At the climax of the movie, the hero’s friend, who had been left for dead earlier, steals the monster truck and runs over the bad guy. Our hero jumps into the truck with the friend, puts the truck into reverse, and backs up over the bad guy’s body.
Then he drives forward again. Then reverses. Then the movie time-shifts 8 hours into the future, and they’re still doing it. His friend remarks “I think you got 'im!”
I seriously don’t know why anyone watches that show. Every single episode is exactly the same. It’s like they’re stuck on the same page of Plot Mad Libs, dropping new diseases and twists into the same paragraph over and over.
To be fair, that’s not an American movie, is it?
And, you gotta admit, it’s not like there ain’t precedent IRL.
And may contribute to the all-too-common phenomenon of terrible couples staying together when they have no reason to. (Or vice versa?)
There’s no requirement that something has to be impossible in real life to be a cliche.
Which is also a bit of an absurd cliche. You’d think that at least one of the people involved would later be fretting about pregnancy and/or diseases.
I remember reading in some scholarly work recently that anger in couples leads to sex more often than you’d think, because it creates such a state of physiological arousal that can switch into sexual arousal at the snap of a finger. Can’t remember for the life of me where I read it, though, so no cite.
Or somebody else’s house, as in the fascinating Castilian flick Fausto 2.0.
Our heroes (usually two of them) need to access a dead character’s computer to get some vital file that will save the day.
*Hero 1: * Oh no! It’s password protected! What do we do?
*Hero 2: * Um, try “password.” Monitor: ACCESS DENIED in big red letters.
*H1: *Maybe it’s his mother’s maiden name!
*Monitor: *ACCESS DENIED!! in even bigger red letters.
(H2 suddenly remembers a scene from the first act in which dead character waxes lovingly nostalgic about his childhood pet ferret.) H2: Wait! Try “Slinky”!
*Monitor: * ACCESS GRANTED! NICE GOING, GUYS!
*H1: * Wow, good thing there were no random numbers in there or anything!
“Hey, Ralph, what’s up?”
…
“Naw, just having a beer. You know I retire next week?”
…
“Yup, I put my papers in. 30 years on the force is enough for any man. Never had to fire my gun at all, can you believe it?”
…
“Oh, man, I’ve already got the perfect place. It’s this little beach house near Punta Gorda. I’ve already put a large down-payment on the boat and it will arrive in a month.”
…
“Yeah, Sally’s all buzzed 'cause she can spoil the grandkids 24/7.”
…
“Sorry, I gotta go. Dinner’s waiting.”
You just know that poor man is
… Going to fire his gun.
… NEVER going to live to retire.
Hell, he probably won’t even make dinner, getting shot in a convenience store robbery or something.
Ya know this could make for a funny twist on the cliche, maybe for an Austin Powers… guy clips a wire for a bomb, clock stops at 0:04… then the bomb still goes off.
“What happened? I cut the wire.” “Yeah. All you did was stop the readout. It’s still a bomb.”
This one might bother me more because it’s in my profession, but “I’m gonna call a press conference and announce to the world why you fired me/ your bookkeeping practices / how you stole this secret formula.” Then you walk out the door to a podium with 15 microphones.
Yeah, umm… try calling up CNN headquarters sometime and say you have shocking news about why the boss canned you. I’m guessing they’re not going to magically appear outside the front door waiting for you like it’s the State of the Union.
A character can walk into the room, turn on the TV or radio, and the news broadcast starts right at the beginning of the Big News Story. It’s never a commercial, or weather report.
Sometimes the newscaster says, “Repeating the Big News Story…” right when the character turns on the TV/radio.
Yes, but this thread isn’t about cliches that couldn’t happen, it’s about cliches that annoy. Whether or not it ever happens in real life, it is still an overused, trite and done-to-death gimmick that just makes people groan with exasperation whenever they see it. To be sure, there are plenty of real-life Sam & Dianes - couples masking their mutual attraction to each other with snarky one-liners - but I don’t want to see another TV show based on ‘will they or won’t they hook up?’
The worst offender I ever saw of the “guy jumps through glass window intact” meme was in a Bollywood movie (bear with me, it’s bad even for them.) Guy is on the opposite roof, on the boys’ dorm, threatening suicide, when he sees smoke coming out of the girls’ dorm windows. His girlfriend is in there. OH NOES! He somehow uses his belt to make a slider-thingy device to slide across the POWER CABLES across the plaza - about fifty feet up - to crash through a plate glass window. He gets up, and there’s like a broken piece of glass still on his arm. What does he do? BRUSHES IT OFF.
I just saw The Punisher last night. Sometimes they subverted cliches, as when the hero coldy_even casually_executed several wounded adversaries. It was great to see an action hero do something so sensible. Then they turned around and ruined it by having the hero kill the villain in an unbelievably elaborate way that he doesn’t even hang around to watch…though that could be said to be a subversion since he was a hero acting like a villain.
See it more so in books than TV/movies, as I don’t watch a lot of TV shows or movies anymore, but I’m sick and tired of investigative teams which always consist of one man and one woman, and before the story’s halfway doesn’t they’re in the sack with each other. I see it so often I’ve started skipping those parts.
Good one. I’m also tired of women being killed in showers, and of shower scenes that have no particular purpose except to show female skin, then don’t actually show anything interesting. If you’re going to pander, man up about it.
