Yeah, I admit that trope is so old and outdated that it’s not only no longer a thing, it’s gotten lampooned in shows in recent years. And RE: Breaking Bad, one of the things I liked about the show so much was how it would often set up a situation that looked like it was going to be a hoary old trope, then take a hard left turn.
Another old trope that used to be very common but has been retired in the age of more modern storytelling is the morality tale of the bad guy who sees the error of his ways and turns good; but he’s killed people so he’s too irredeemable to have a full-fledged happy ending…his only recourse is to die an honorable death at the end while helping out the good guys. The Darth Vader arc is probably a good classic example. hmm…is there a TVTropes.org trope for that? Answer-- of course there is! Redemption Equals Death
Come to think of it, despite just mentioning the trope-breaking nature of Breaking Bad’s storytelling, Walter White had kind of a traditional “Redemption Equals Death” ending.
(ETA: spoiler-blurred that last part for that one or two remaining SD readers who still haven’t seen BB but wants to)
If a woman complains that her husband has gotten boring, he will go overboard to prove he’s still exciting and then the woman will realize she loved him just as he was all along.
(which really sucks for the man because either his wife starts fantasizing about dangerous-type guys or he ends up hurting himself really badly)
Or, in a classic TV episode we caught the other night, someone off in the kitchen (Dick Van Dyke) who happens to hear the hypnotist’s magic key word…
…
Which reminds me of a idiotic (and dangerous) cliché: someone gets bonked on the head and gets an entirely new personality, or amnesia. Until they’re bonked again, of course.
(Dangerous, because as a kid I saw that done so many times, that I’m surprised I didn’t try some serious bonking)
I hate to come off as a killjoy, but… have people not actually watched TV or movies in the past four decades or so? Because some of these cliches are incredibly out of date. When was the last time you actually saw a scene in which someone drove through a big plate glass window that two people were carrying back and forth? I mean, that was lampshaded in Wayne’s World 2 some time in the mid-90s, so it was already crusty and overused by then.
Posts in this thread seem to fall in five general categories:
(1) As mentioned above, cliches that are ludicrously out of date and so well known that they are mocked far more often than used, these days
(2) People comically overstating the frequency of a very specific occurrence. “Anyone attempting to hypnotize someone will inadvertently hypnotize everyone else in the room too.”? Really? If you’d said to me “hey, what’s a cliche involving a stage hypnosis scene” I would have said “hypnotist dies before he can bring the subject back out of hypnosis”. But is that really a cliche? It happened in Office Space, and maybe I’m just remembering that? But I’ve literally never seen what you’re describing in any scene I can think of ever.
(3) People saying “you never see X” and then being given plenty of examples of shows or movies in which one sees X (people never call ambulances in TV or movies? really? in what universe do you watch TV or movies?)
(4) People complaining that things would never happen… and then being corrected by people to whom those things have actually happened
(5) People accurately pointing out what are clearly just storytelling shortcuts. Yes, we don’t tend to spend a lot of time watching people drive around looking for parking spaces. Or waiting at train stations. Or flipping around on the TV to find the proper news channel. Agreed. And it’s fun to catalog and list such things… but it’s a bit silly to get smug about.
I once knew a woman who had been hypnotized when she was a teenager and couldn’t be brought out of it until (so I was told by her mother) she was subjected to some physical manipulation (IIRC, her head was twisted the way some people try to cure a stiff neck).
She never fully recovered and died in hospital at around 40 after being subjected to more physical abuse by her nurses (this was in Russia). Toward the end, she was convinced my daughter, to whom she was very close, was the child she never had.
The big wing nut holding the wheels on was there as part of a race car inheritance/imitation. It was designed to enable very fast wheel changes with minimal tools.
The corollary to this scenario is the husband who is really a secret agent with an ordinary cover job, and his wife thinks he’s boring, longs for excitement in her life and maybe even considers leaving him or having an affair, until she finds out the truth about him when they get drawn into a dangerous adventure together, and their marriage is saved!
‘True Lies’ being the gold standard of this trope-- I think Arnold’s cover job was as an accountant or something equally ‘normal’ and ‘boring’. His wife nearly had an affair. His daughter also hated him for being so pedestrian until she learned the truth, as well. It made me wonder-- what message does that give to people with real ‘ordinary’ jobs? What did real accountants think, watching that movie with their wives-- did it make them concerned that their wives and children secretly hate them and find them boring?
The “I grossly misinterpreted your point” conversation:
Person A: I need to talk to you.
Person B: I know what this is about. I realized what a fool I was since our last argument. I quit my job, sold all my possessions, demolished my house, and underwent a sex change just to show you I’m not tied down to material longings.
Person A: Actually, I just wanted to tell you your car has a flat tire.
The dead witness (especially prevalent in Midsommer)
Witness on the phone to detective; “I need to speak to you.”
Detective; “I’m a bit busy just now, I’ll pop round tomorrow.”
Witness; “Okay, see you in the morning.”
Next morning the witness has been run over by a train or drowned in their soup.
Even less like anything that would ever happen in real life is the heart-to-heart talk where Person B’s outburst makes Person A not want to bring up their serious subject… and they just drop it without any question from B. And if it’s in a group, no one notices this.
Person A: I need to talk to you.
Person B: I know what this is about. I realized what a fool I was since our last argument. I quit my job, sold all my possessions … because I’m obsessed with you and would stab anyone who tried to come between us!
Now, what did you want to say, sweetie?
Person A (who was about to break up with B): Oh, nothing really.
Person B: Okay, well then, let’s take a walk. I saw the cutest little cutlery shop…
When I was a teenager I used to play a bit of chess with my buddies here and there and wasn’t bad at it. I once played a game against a guy who was really into it - not a guy who played in tournaments or anything like that, let alone a ranked player, but a guy who read chess books and knew the names of various moves and such - and I won. After the game, he told me “I can see that you don’t really understand chess”. I asked what’s the point of understanding chess, if I had just won the game anyway, and a bystander said “the point of understanding chess is so that you can lose and know exactly why you lost”.
No, no I did not! Quite the cast in that- sounds like some cheesy fun. Maybe I’ll look it up, thanks.
But by ‘gold standard’ I didn’t really mean True Lies was the first of that trope, just a good example of it. I’m sure it’s been done several other times before TL and maybe even WWTL.
IME, this is very common IRL (as is the reverse, though probably not quite as common).
I know a lot of people who married when one spouse was overweight and the other not, but far more common than that is where one spouse gained weight over the years and the other did not.
The Wikipedia article doesn’t mention True Lies being a remake. I admit the plot is similar but do you have a cite for the creators of True Lies using that movie as an inspiration?
Edit: The True Lies article mentions it being a remake of this French film:
I saw the movie on TV back in the late '90s. I don’t have a cite for it being a remake, but there are scenes in it that are all but identical to ones in True Lies. My first reaction was “Jeez, I know I’ve seen this before but where?”
I also thought it was interesting that Jamie Lee Curtis (the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh) was cast as Schwarzenegger’s wife.
Like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (which was virtually a scene-by-scene remake of Bedtime Story), the script was heavily reworked to suit contemporary tastes, but it’s basically the same story.
It’s possible that the French movie I cited La Totale! was inspired by the movie you cited Who Was That Lady? . Or that True Lies was inspired by both. There is so many uncredited rip-offs and re-makes in the movie industry that is hard to keep track.
Plus James Cameron has a history of ripping off other creators without credit. (Harlan Ellison suing him over The Terminator for example.)
Not sure if this has already been discussed.
Let’s talk about two different things so ambiguously but yet so connected that each character thinks the other person is talking about the same thing.
Person A found out Person B’s wife is a pornstar.
Person B found a gold bar in their garden.
A: Well I found out your secret.
B: How did you find out?
A: Karen told me all about it.
B: She did? I can’t believe she did that.
A: I mean sure you guys wouldn’t tell everybody but I’m your best buddy.
B: Ok Ok just don’t spread it around.
A: I do have one question, does it bring in a lot of money?
B: About a million dollars
cue laughtrack
