It seems like in the past oh, couple years or so we’ve had a number of TV / movie trope or cliche threads, which is fine with me, I love a good trope thread. I think I even started one or two.
But how about examples where tropes are subverted? Comedies are good for this, since they play with expectations. The Simpsons did this all the time. One off the top of my head is when Homer and Bart, trying to run and hide from somebody, run into a costume store, and a few seconds later what looks like an old-timey organ grinder and his monkey come out. Then, cut to the inside of the store where Homer and Bart are hiding behind some costumes. “I think the coast is clear now!” The show “Community” was pretty much 100% subverting or playing creatively with different tropes and story genres.
In the dramatic realm, one thing I enjoyed about Breaking Bad was how the show often seemed to be setting up a tired old trope but then took an unexpected plot left turn. I can’t think of a specific example in BB off top of my head, but here’s one from Better Call Saul (will spoiler-block in case anyone’s new to BCS):
So Kim is working two lawyer jobs to pick up the slack when Jimmy’s law license is suspended, and she’s losing sleep and running herself ragged. It’s clear she’s headed for some kind of fall. She’s driving around, running lawyer-related errands, and the tension’s high, exacerbated by the fact that since Saul was not with Kim in BB, something eventually happens with her to make her go away. Does she simply leave Jimmy out of disgust when he goes full Saul Goodman, or does she die at some point?
So she visits an oil field owned by one of her clients, for some lawyer reason. She parks on a slight incline and doesn’t properly put her car into park when she gets out of it, and it starts rolling toward an oil Derrick. She runs after it, and we think, this can’t end well! But she manages to safely stop the car. Then she has another similar near-miss. Then, the camera is focused on her driving for an uncomfortably long time. This is when the cliche ‘when camera is focused on person driving for too long it means they’re about to get in an accident’ happens. And that’s exactly what happens- she falls asleep, goes off the road and rolls her car. But since there had been a series of near-miss fake outs before that, Vince Gilligan or whoever wrote that scene subverted the trope by playing it straight. It was kind of genius.
In Morons from Outer Space the aliens are escaping from a military base. One of them sneaks up behind a sentry and conks him on the head. The sentry falls to his knees, and screams “Ow! What did you do that for?”
That sort of reminds me, I can’t think where I saw it, but some movie or TV show where a bumbling would-be killer tries the ‘head twist neck snap’ maneuver on an intended victim, and finds out it’s actually really hard to do. And I think the intended victim was all like “ow, stop that!”
That one and “Support Your Local Gunfighter” were both really good. I watched part of one of those movies on TV just a month or two ago (the one with Suzanne Pleshette) and the comedy holds up really well.
Both of those “Support Your Local X” movies starring James Garner are free on Youtube right now for viewers in the U.S. Probably not in other countries but YMMV.
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) – A subversion of detective movies in general and the dreadful Mickey Spillane book it was based on. Breaking cinema tradition, P.I. Mike Hammer is a total sleazeball who specializes in divorce cases, gets information through violence or intimidation, solves nothing and endangers almost all of his associates.
Contempt (1963) – Godard directed movie based on the unexciting premise of subverting the ancient trope/audience expectation of seeing a gun and knowing it will at some point go off.
The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977) – Full of meta-commentary (“Do you wish to duel with or without dialogue?”), comic and surreal touches subverting the creaky tropes of both the 1924 novel and the 1939 film version.
This was either Simpsons or Family Guy, but there’s the typical cliche scene of somebody being forced to do something embarrassing, and said person says “I’m telling you, I wouldn’t do that in a million years!” Cut to next scene, said person is calming reading a book in a chair, looks at camera and says “I already told you, I wouldn’t do that in a million years”.
There’s a Marvel villain called The Mad Thinker. Everybody assumed the “mad” part meant insane, unrelentless,etc, but when asked…
The Mad Thinker then allies himself with the Puppet Master, planning to strike against the Fantastic Four yet again. Told that he preferred to be called “The Thinker”, The Puppet Master asked him why he had been called “The Mad Thinker” in the past. The reply was that he used to have “repressed anger issues”. When the Puppet Master asks him about his anger, he replies that “it isn’t repressed any more”.
In the Simpsons episode where Ned Flanders coaches a pee-wee football team, Lisa shows up to practice in uniform and pads:
LISA: That’s right - a girl wants to play football! How about that?
NED: Well, thats super-duper, Lisa. We’ve already got four girls on the team.
LISA: [let down] You do?
NED: Ah huh. But we’d love to have you onboard!
