Consider just saying what the problem is
Have you ever noticed just how much of the drama in movies is generated by an unspoken rule that the characters aren’t allowed to communicate well? Instead of naming the problem, they’re forced to skirt around it until the plot makes it impossible to ignore. It’s the cheapest way to build effective drama, but if you don’t fully dissolve yourself in the movie logic, the whole time you want to scream, “can’t anyone just talk about what’s happening directly?!”
Take La La Land. A huge part of the drama of the movie could have been avoided if the Ryan Gosling character said to the Emma Stone character: “I feel pressure to get a steady gig that includes lots of time on the road because I sense you want me to grow up and get real about my career. Could we talk about whether that’s what you actually want, and get clearer about our priorities?” Instead, they never talk about it, and the relationship explodes as a result of their misaligned expectations.
Or: Good Will Hunting. The entire movie feels like it could’ve been skipped if literally any emotionally intelligent person said to Matt Damon’s character: “I feel like you have a tremendous amount of intellectual potential that you’re wasting here — why are you getting in fights rather than trying to do something interesting?”
Communication failures like these make for good storytelling where we, the audience, get to watch the characters stumble towards understanding. But you shouldn’t live like someone waiting for the screenwriter of your life to arrange a convenient resolution. Functional people don’t let things linger unspoken — they name what’s facing them out loud.
It sounds like such a simple thing. And yet, so many of us don’t do it. It’s my experience that movie logic is endemic in dysfunctional organizations, friendships, and marriages. People walk around in a haze of denial, simply assuming that their concerns will disappear. They wait until the problem can’t possibly be ignored anymore, instead of naming it well before it becomes critical. Maybe they don’t even realize at a conscious level that the dynamic in question is capable of being named; they just take it as a background fact about the universe that they can strain against but not change.
What does it look like when you break out of movie logic? I remember the first time I realized I could do this. I was at a bar during my first year of law school with a bunch of people from my class, including a woman with whom I had an awkward dynamic stemming from an unfortunate misunderstanding about a guy. This awkwardness had calcified in my emotional brain to “we don’t like each other, we have beef.” But on that particular evening I had a moment of clarity, and instead of trying to avoid her I walked up to her and said, “I feel like we got off on the wrong foot because of that stupid thing, and I’m sorry about that — I don’t have anything against you at all.” In an instant, the look of flat wariness she’d put on when she saw me walking over melted into relief, and she said “I’m so glad you said that, I’ve been feeling awful about it.” She went on to be my closest friend in law school.
Outcomes like this are common when you figure out how to break the fourth wall. Whether or not both of you were already conscious of the real, underlying issue, when it is spoken out loud, the result is usually relief, like a spell has been broken. Even if the content is uncomfortable, it feels good in the way cutting through layers of unreality always does.
Some other lines of dialogue that would make for bad movies, but good living:
“I’ve noticed that lately, every time we have plans to hang out one-on-one, you invite someone else to join us — is that intentional?”
“I always feel a little awkward around you, and I’m worried it comes across as me not liking you — I just wanted to say that’s not the case.”
“I’ve been feeling a low-level tension between us, like maybe we’re quietly annoyed at each other but trying to stay polite. Is that just me?”
“It sometimes seems like when I push back in meetings, it changes the energy in the room — like maybe you’re afraid to engage with me as directly as you do other people. Does that feel true?”
Reading these examples, you might have noticed that it’s rare to hear people talk like this. I think there are a couple of reasons for that.
One is that it’s easy to mistake silence for informed diplomacy. If your manager is stressing you out, and you are putting up with it, it’s easy to think that you’re just being a good employee, and everyone is aware of how good you’re being. But unless your manager is quite emotionally intelligent, they may have no idea that you’re unhappy, especially if you’re engaging in people-pleasing behavior to try and cover it up.
Another reason is that it can feel like by naming an issue, you are making it into a big deal. But problems are real, and exert a toll on you, whether you name them or not. Naming the issue means you can interact with it.
Finally — often, the people who are most eager to name issues kind of suck. They are critical, judgmental people who lob opinions about how others should live without skill. Think of the person you’ve just met who confidently offers unsolicited advice about whatever they imagine your problem is.
But the answer to this is not to maintain the conspiracy of silence. The answer is to get skillful at naming issues.
Tip 1: Take yourself outside the movie
Before you even name an issue, it can help to ask: Actually, is this really the important issue to name? Or is my feeling about the issue a manifestation of something deeper that would be even more powerful to tackle?
For example, let’s say you want to tell a friend that you were bothered by the way they were bragging about how lavish and expensive their wedding was. Is that really the root issue? Or is the real issue an underlying dynamic of competitiveness stoked by both parties, where the relationship is worse off because both of you fill every conversation with social status claims?
To locate the possibility of going deeper, it can be helpful to take the movie metaphor literally — if you were an audience member watching the movie, what would you be screaming at yourself to say? What would a reader of this screenplay say the real, big unnamed issue is?
Tip 2: If you feel you can’t name the problem, say that
Let’s say you want to name a problem in one of your relationships, but you’re worried that presenting the problem would start an argument. Congratulations. You have now found the problem to name. You are allowed to say the following: “There’s an issue I see in our relationship, and I want to address it so our relationship is stronger. But I’m nervous about naming it, because I’m worried that it could start an argument, and I really don’t want you to feel attacked.”
This is advice that is applicable annoyingly often, to any meta-problem that makes a conversation difficult. You can always address the secondary problem. Many relationship advice conversations I have with friends go like this.
Friend: “I want to talk about [issue] with my partner, but when I get into the issue, I get flustered about it and stop making sense.”
Me: “Okay, what if you say that: I want to talk about this issue but it makes me flustered, and I stop making sense.”
Friend: “... Oh, why didn’t I think of that?”
The reason that they don’t think of it, I suspect, is that one way to avoid difficult conversations is to come up with a secondary problem that offers an excuse for avoiding the conflict, and then assume it’s impassable.
Tip 3: Name things before you’re sure of what they are
Sometimes, it’s hard to name a problem because you don’t fully understand it yet. But that’s completely okay — in many settings, you don’t even have to fully understand your feelings, or what is wrong, before you name a conflict. It can be powerful to say: “Something felt off about that meeting, like maybe something important wasn’t being said.” Or: “I think there’s something weird happening in this conversation, but I don’t know what it is.”
Human beings are near-telepathic in our ability to sense when an interpersonal dynamic is off — when someone is emotionally uncomfortable, or engaging in concealment. We all know the itchy feeling when nobody in an interaction is really being sincere. Pretty amazing how psychic we are, right?
Yes, we are psychic, but we are also stupid. Our sense that something is weird is often accurate, but our stories about precisely what the weirdness represents are often way, way off. So, in order to move from an interesting intuition to an accurate story about reality, it helps to enlist other people in the discussion by naming the intuition.
I’ve historically been hesitant to present my intuitions, because it feels sloppy. But having on more than one occasion overcome a “funny feeling” about a good-on-paper candidate to bad results, I’m now eager to make statements like: “It might not mean anything, but I can’t shake a weird feeling about that person. Do you get that same thing?”
This requires a little social discernment, of course. If you are a junior employee in a new workplace, it might not be tactically prudent to approach the CEO with the statement, “hey, couldn’t help but notice that the vibes are off.” But if you work closely with someone, err on the side of transparency.
You might ask — ultimately, what is so wrong with movie logic? Maybe you don’t have to address everything now. Sometimes a solution will present itself. And, I agree. It’s not fatal to, on occasion, engage in a little bit of hopeful silence, to see whether the problem you’re having with someone else is just a mood that might shift.
But over time, hopeful silence has corrosive effects. If you don’t name the real problems in your life, you eventually become alienated from your inner compass. You stop paying attention to your life on an experiential level, because you want to live in a pretend world of self-consolation. You lose the ability to see your life honestly.
Sometimes, I notice this when working with people who have spent time in organizations with poor feedback cultures. They have been taught that it’s so bad to name problems that they focus on resolving acute issues while keeping the peace, all the while navigating an invisible psychological obstacle course. Over time, they become trapped in people-pleasing, and this can blind them to real issues in the substance of their work. When people are like this, it’s difficult to get them to improve, because they see it as psychologically damaging to recognize their own limitations.
This is a skill I’m still working to get better at. It’s truly rare that someone reaches the ceiling — having no resistance to naming issues, and being maximally skillful about doing it. I’m not there yet. But I’m on my way, and it feels good to be moving in that direction. The better I get at it, the less I’m threatened by conflict, and the more it seems like an opportunity to clarify what’s really going on, to grow closer to myself and others. I don’t want to be the character in the movie who’s hopelessly buffeted by intrigue and too scared to investigate it dispassionately. I want to be like the director, who thoroughly understands the drama of each character, and finds the scene all the more interesting as a result.
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Comments
By ekjhgkejhgk 2025-11-1718:319 reply I completely agree with the point, and I've made the same point myself.
However, I think "good will hunting" is a bad example.
> “I feel like you have a tremendous amount of intellectual potential that you’re wasting here — why are you getting in fights rather than trying to do something interesting?”
There is a scene where they have this conversation without words. Robin Williams is asking him without spelling it out and Matt Damon understands what the question is and dances around it. They both know what they're talking about even if they don't put it into words. In the case of this specific movie the problem isn't communication, it's just that the main character is incapable of dealing with things inside him that he doesn't understand (aka "emotionally immature"). (well, that was my interpretation anyway).
I’d go as far as to say that Good Will Hunting is a pretty good example of writers getting it right. The equivocation and miscommunication isn't a plot device to conjure up conflict from thin air. That sort of avoidant behaviour is a classic malaptive coping mechanism in highly intelligent victim of abuse. Communication with Will fails not because people aren’t willing to speak plainly to him, but because he’s too emotionally bruised and battered to handle that communication, and he’s _way_ too clever for his own good, so he runs circles around the people trying to have those conversations with him. Sean’s successes come from being patient and not letting Will bait him.
By ekjhgkejhgk 2025-11-1812:251 reply Yup, good point.
I have a line that I haven't used in a long time which I crafted for a different scenario but applies here. Which is that: Very intelligent people are very good at rationally defending positions that they've arrived at for unrational reasons.
By ekjhgkejhgk 2025-11-1817:331 reply Thank you, I like it a lot too.
I was trying to understand why I stopped using it. I think it's because it's not really actionable. The best you can do with it is understand what might contribute to a certain situation/behavior. If you tell it to a person to whom it applies, they'll just keep creating new arguments to support their position. And it's not a good way of arguing anyway. It's not a real argument, it's closer to an ad hominem. It's not persuasive to the person to whom it applies, though it might be persuasive when told to a third person.
By BizarroLand 2025-11-1821:38 It goes hand in hand with the saying that "you can't reason yourself out of a position you didn't reason yourself into".
Most people don't reason themselves into maladaptiveness, and it takes substantial effort to not only identify the cycle but also to break it.
By RaftPeople 2025-11-1719:36 > the main character is incapable of dealing with things inside him that he doesn't understand
Exactly.
To get to the point where he can really believe that the abuse was "not his fault" requires time and effort. If the therapist had just told him that day 1 it would not have had the same effect.
By mattmanser 2025-11-1721:042 reply Ben Affleck's character says it to him too directly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g_1FjDHjBM
Maybe the author's not watched the movie in a while, as it's a direct contradiction of his blog post. The entire movie is about a bunch of people desperately trying to communicate to Will he can live a much fuller life if he drops his pride or attitude or fear of failure or whatever you want to call it.
By listenallyall 2025-11-1722:241 reply True, however this speech finally comes in the last 15 minutes of the film, in response to Will saying something profoundly stupid, that he'd rather stick around and work construction than actually use his enormous talent.
It's also notable that this talk comes after (or near the end) of his sessions with therapist Sean and working with the professor - so he has come to terms with his past abuse (not claiming he is "healed" but he certainly is in a better place), learned a bit about structure from the professor, started interviewing, and now the final hurdle holding Will back is the intense loyalty to his friends. Chuckie not only gives him permission to leave them behind but tells him how stupid and disappointing Will would be if he didn't. He even tells him how to leave - just go, no warning, no message, no planning.
It's obvious this is something Chuckie has thought for years, but only verbalizes at the very end when Will needs (and is able to act upon) that final push.
Personally, I don't get why he has to leave. They are in Boston, obviously there's colleges and stuff, why can't he just do smart people things and hang out with his friends too. I feel like the whole "you must leave everything behind" is more movie logic than anything else.
By listenallyall 2025-11-1923:03 Yea, well once Skylar moved to California his fate was to go chase her. You could call that movie logic, you wouldn't be wrong, but it's a lot better ending than "hey guys I got a job at <boston based tech co>, now let's go chase broads"
By stavros 2025-11-1721:23 I agree with your comment, I just wanted to passingly point out that the author is female.
EDIT: Damn this movie is so great.
By heresie-dabord 2025-11-1719:31 > I think "good will hunting" is a bad example.
Communication is important. But good, honest discussion is possible if people really want it. It's like bargaining/negotiation: if you really want to be at the table, you will stay at the table and try to understand the other people.
Which bring us to the single most pernicious type of "movie logic" in real life: when we see people as enemies before trying to understand them.
By ATMLOTTOBEER 2025-11-1719:25 I came to make this exact comment. While I agree with the author in general I think it’s not nearly so cut and dry that you should always say directly what you mean in order to communicate clearly.
As someone growing up with undiagnosed ADHD I have heard a version of
> “I feel like you have a tremendous amount of intellectual potential that you’re wasting here — why are you getting in fights rather than trying to do something interesting?”
for all my life and it has really hurt me. It just caused me to have this internalized guilt for having "wasted" my life. Even though it isn't really (completely) my fault.
And it really is a lie to begin with. What allows me to do crazy amounts of work in a short time is my hyper focus and that thing is not reliable. Its like seeing someone sprint and thinking they would be amazing running a marathon. Nope.
Plus intelligence is super overrated. I don't believe that having above average intelligence improves your life in any meaningful way. In fact people resent those that are more intelligent than they are so you are better of hiding it. And most work is working with other people and then you need to wait for other people to catch up with you anyway.
I would gladly trade my intelligence for being prettier or having more money. Or anything really.
By aleph_minus_one 2025-11-1723:561 reply > Plus intelligence is super overrated. I don't believe that having above average intelligence improves your life in any meaningful way.
If you are deeply into some scientific fields (in particular mathematics, but also related areas like physics and possibly computer science (the latter in the sense of the scientific discipline, not in the sense what the work in industry is)) having a massive IQ immensely improves your life. That is why in my opinion some highly smart people feel so attracted to these fields.
On the other hand, in most other areas of society, a "slightly above average" IQ is optimal (think 120-130). Sufficient to be able to dominate most people (sorry for this dark description), but not so high that you feel isolated and don't get understood.
I'm not sure. IQ is not really about how well or how deep can you think. Just how fast. All IQ tests are timed. A person with slightly above average IQ but a great ability to sustain motivation and good set of mental tools acquired through upbringing and education will run circles around any very high IQ person in any domain that doesn't have strict time pressure.
That opinion is just wrong. Anyone how knows just the basics in the field of psychometrics can see that.
By scotty79 2025-11-203:45 How is it wrong exactly?
By amanaplanacanal 2025-11-1812:49 The ability to sustain motivation might just be a matter of diagnosis and medication.
By bethekidyouwant 2025-11-180:512 reply “In fact people resent those that are more intelligent..” I’ve never seen this. Unless someone is picking another apart, but thats just generally mean.
By vguiy66y 2025-11-184:55 Envy, fear, contempt, ... there's a whole bunch of negative emotion directed toward the smarter ones. Or if it isn't hateful, they try to manipulate them into doing their work for them. Very little just plain ol' accepance of them.
If you're lucky you'll get the sapiophiles.
Maybe you haven't been around people who aren't intelligent. Or maybe you aren't. But when there is a divide in intelligence it is rarely good.
By s5300 2025-11-181:28 [dead]
By CobrastanJorji 2025-11-1719:461 reply Doesn't the conversation also happen WITH words? Like Chuckie tells him quite directly in one of the best scenes in the film: "I mean, you're sittin' on a winnin' lottery ticket. And you're too much of a pussy to cash it in, and that's bullshit. 'Cause I'd do fuckin' anything to have what you got. So would any of these fuckin' guys. It'd be an insult to us if you're still here in 20 years. Hangin' around here is a fuckin' waste of your time."
By cestith 2025-11-1721:41 Chuckie is the one who can say that so plainly to his face, too. A math professor he’s only getting to know saying plainly that his life to this point is inferior, that he should leave all his friends and compatriots behind, and that he’s wasting his time with the people he loves is going to come off as condescending and arrogant.
Showing him his potential and telling him he can do great things is awesome. Crapping all over him for not having the background of the average student would just push him away.
By YetAnotherNick 2025-11-180:361 reply > dances around it
Aren't you just confirming the author's point. You can dance around only certain ways with words. Either he could have said they don't liked the lifestyle and he likes to fight. Or he could have at least given some reason or argument against the question. Incapable in dealing with things inside him doesn't mean incapable of answering a simple question.
By ekjhgkejhgk 2025-11-187:32 I don't see it that way. The author was saying he was never told it. He WAS told it, he just didn't acknowledge/pretended not understanding it, which is the step after.
By bazoom42 2025-11-189:45 In movies, the characters go through some experiences in order to learn something. You can’t just tell them the thing they have to learn.
While movies usually are not realistic, that part is often true.
The problem is being told those things (e.g. the examples in TFA from Lala Land, Good Will Hunting, etc) often accomplishes nothing. If anything, being told about such issues, even softly and subtly, will make people recoil, be offended, double down, or deny them.
It's only when push comes to shove, or when you get a bitter reality lesson, that you can understand them, or that you can accept and benefit from being told such advice.
By andrewflnr 2025-11-1716:25 Yeah, while it can be a cheap plot device, it's also largely an accurate depiction of what it takes for real humans to change.
Lots of teachers have told their students that they have lots of potential and shouldn't be getting fights. But if that student is getting in fights, it's not because no one ever told them it's dumb and this one line will be the great revelation they need, it's because they have deeper problems in their life.
By techblueberry 2025-11-1716:08 Yeah, I think the point this article is trying to make is somewhat interesting, and I do try to do this in my life, but the analogy their trying to make is actually I think the opposite of what they present. The point of Good Will Hunting is how hard what they’re trying to do is, that despite being confronted with “the problem” repeatedly Will needed some other life experience to snap him out of himself. And actually by the end of Good Will Hunting, I think what you realize is that everyone was wrong. That what Will was looking for was someone who could look past the surface conflict and love him for something deeper, and really simpler. I don’t think she needed him to be a genius the way his teacher tried to use him for that, and neither really did Robin Williams.
And in this I think movie logic is in some ways correct, that people often have to have experiences to make real change happen.
Maybe this is about deep truths vs shallow truths. “Hey it seems like there’s beef between us, is a shallow truth (for a relationship without years of history, if it’s father/son after 30 years of beefing, same applies?) Just addressing it is fine. “Hey, I think you’re not achieving your life purpose” is a deep truth. You can’t just tell someone what their purpose is.
By dominicrose 2025-11-1716:36 Well you are only responsible for your side of a 2-person relationship, no matter what kind of relationship it is. If the other person doesn't react in the best way, at least you tried and maybe that was the best thing to do based on the information that you had.
I guess most people think that it takes two persons to end a relationship but that's not true. It only takes one. If you're not that person, then maybe it's enough to know that it wasn't you because you tried.
Being stuck or being at the end is pretty much the same thing if you never get unstuck.
most of her examples are incredibly patronizing and prying. these are tactless overbearing comments, and they can -if ever - only come from a place where there's already a mutual admiration or respectful bond.
By mlsu 2025-11-1720:05 I agree. Good movie characters are good because they act like real people.
This really interesting, and I first observed this with the movie the Matrix. Not so much that the conflict couldn't be resolved. (although the Oracle's entire character is based on this idea) But instead, if I were really on the Nebuchadnezzar I would have wanted to have hours-long conversations with Neo about the nature and limitations of his powers. The crew is faced with a deistic and perhaps apocalyptic super hero on their crew. They might be witnessing the end times!
And NO ONE digs into this for more details? When I was younger this frustrated me, but as I got older I realized this was a reflection of normal human psychology. People avoid interesting topics all the time. "Why did you cheat on your husband?" "How come you're depressed all the time?" "What do you do when no one is watching?" "Do you like your job?" etc ... all of these questions have pretty direct answers, but it seems like people will do almost anything to avoid speaking about uncomfortable topics directly.
It's still not something I fully understand, but it's something I've at least made some peace with. It's human nature, for better or (usually) for worse.
It's because if you explain what's going on, you stop the action. And viewers/readers don't like that.
In fiction it's called an info dump. As an aspiring science fiction author, virtually every beta reader I've had has told me they don't like them. I want my fiction to make sense, but you have to be subtle about it. To avoid readers complaining, you have to figure out how to explain things to the reader without it being obvious that you're explaining things to the reader, or stopping the action to do it.
Movies are such a streamlined medium that usually this gets cut entirely. At least in books you can have appendices and such for readers who care.
By lelanthran 2025-11-1721:23 > In fiction it's called an info dump. As an aspiring science fiction author, virtually every beta reader I've had has told me they don't like them. I want my fiction to make sense, but you have to be subtle about it. To avoid readers complaining, you have to figure out how to explain things to the reader without it being obvious that you're explaining things to the reader, or stopping the action to do it.
The whole "The audience wants to know, but they don't want to hear it" problem.
Usually solved by having characters do something that shows their character. If it's from the past, have a flashback, don't have a narration.
Like real life, people hate sermons.
By DoomDestroyer 2025-11-1716:446 reply I would argue that it is the opposite. People expect an info dump and everything explained to them. I remember watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier (I think it was the last movie I watched in theatre) and pretty much everything was explained to the audience. Guy Richie has character intro screens like Street Fighter in his movies.
Even in movies where everything is explained e.g. in Blade where they will have a scene where someone explains how a weapon works, I've noticed in a recent viewing of the movie that people forgot the explanations of the gadgets he has. In Blade they have a James Bond / Q like conversation between the characters to say "this weapons does X against vampires" and sets the weapon for later on in the movie and people forgot about it.
I watched "The Mothman Prophecies" and quite a lot of the movie was up to interpretation and there was many small things in the film that you might overlook e.g. there is a scene in a mirror where the reflection in the mirror is out of sync with his movements, suggesting something supernatural is occurring and he hasn't realised it yet. While I love the movie, there is very few movies like that.
If you watch movies before the 90s. A huge number of movies will have characters communicate efficiently and often realistically.
By actionfromafar 2025-11-1716:563 reply Current movies have Reed-Solomon error correction (repetition of concepts, names and explanations) built in so the stream receiver (human watching movie while still holding smartphone in hand) can recover from missed data (scenes).
It's interesting, because old comic books have this as well. For decades (I'm not sure if they still do it) every issue of Wolverine would have some silly bit where Wolverine is talking to himself to remind the reader that the has an adamantium skeleton, razor-sharp claws, enhanced animal senses and an advanced healing factor which can heal from almost any wound. Every single issue, nearly without fail.
It's silly to the reader (and especially to an adult reader) but it's also obvious why this was present: the comic was meant for kids, and also Marvel never know when they might be getting a brand new reader who is totally unfamiliar with the character.
By DoomDestroyer 2025-11-1815:34 > It's silly to the reader (and especially to an adult reader) but it's also obvious why this was present: the comic was meant for kids, and also Marvel never know when they might be getting a brand new reader who is totally unfamiliar with the character.
The same was present in any serials such as Conan.
There is a description of Conan and where he comes from, how black his hair is, how manly he, how he is the "noble savage "etc. every story.
Conan is definitely not for children. It verges on erotica in many of the stories e.g. in one story there is a older woman whipping a younger teenage girl while tied up and it is made known to the reader the teenage girl is "young" with the implication that she is probably 14 or 15.
Also every Conan story typically ends up with him using sheer overwhelming aggression to defeat super natural entities and then escape with the girl.
I with there was more "King Conan" stuff. But it is a property that Hollywood doesn't really understand.
By 3eb7988a1663 2025-11-182:05 There is something about super healing that writers feel obligated to re-iterate to the audience. In Heroes, the Cheerleader was taking ludicrous amounts of damage to give everyone a reminder that she could regenerate quickly.
By DoomDestroyer 2025-11-1815:24 It drives me insane. I don't mind if there is a reminder of what happened like a season ago, but often it is literally the episode before.
TV series really annoy me on this with the "Previously on.." 3 minute time killer at the start recapping the major points of the plot
> People expect an info dump and everything explained to them. I remember watching Captain America
People don't have an expectation of that. The number one rule of movie making used to be "Show, don't tell".
With the rise of streaming this changed. People "watch" movies while chatting on their phones, doing home chores etc. A lot of movies in the streaming era spell everything out because people no longer watch the screens.
By DoomDestroyer 2025-11-1815:15 > People don't have an expectation of that. The number one rule of movie making used to be "Show, don't tell"
I am aware that it is supposed to be like that however around the 90s/2000s this changed.
> With the rise of streaming this changed. People "watch" movies while chatting on their phones, doing home chores etc. A lot of movies in the streaming era spell everything out because people no longer watch the screens.
This was in a movie theatre and this was still in the era where it was considered rude to be speaking on chatting on the phone in the cinema.
By ep103 2025-11-1720:08 This is my wife starting up a 20 minute conversation the moment the first actor shows up on the screen xD
Don't worry, I love her anyway. But yes, we're restarting the movie because no, I don't have any idea what happened either, you were talking. ahahaha
> Even in movies where everything is explained e.g. in Blade where they will have a scene where someone explains how a weapon works, I've noticed in a recent viewing of the movie that people forgot the explanations of the gadgets he has. In Blade they have a James Bond / Q like conversation between the characters to say "this weapons does X against vampires" and sets the weapon for later on in the movie and people forgot about it.
That’s because you’re seeing the rule of cool in action. The explanation itself makes the item interesting enough that the (2 seconds) setup gets the audience excited up watch a grenade blow a vampire’s head off.
By DoomDestroyer 2025-11-1815:231 reply The gadgets were often used several scenes later, or much later and integrated with the other action with Blade.
By scott_w 2025-11-2011:31 I mean... yeah, that's exactly what happened and that's how filmmaking works?
If you go back and watch the first two seasons of HBO's Westworld, you will see Anthony Hopkins' character repeatedly doing exposition dumps out of his mouth. The difference is in how he does it, that he is in such complete command of his craft that he can work out exactly what the screenwriters intended without drawing any attention to it.
And Trekkies will remember the time Larry Niven wrote a screenplay for TAS and gave all the exposition dumps to Leonard Nimoy. See how nicely he handles it?
That's very interesting, would you happen to have any example videos of Hopkins in the show?
By RichardCA 2025-11-1819:09 Once you develop an awareness of how SF screenplay writers do this, you can't unsee it.
Babylon 5 was particularly egregious, I was never a fan but I was puzzled that JMS had to do rely on it so heavily. It was like he created the character of Delenn just to be an exposition dumper and Mira Furlan faithfully did what was asked of her. Screenwriters also call this diegesis if the writer goes all the way and uses dialog to explicitly feed the narrative to the audience.
My favorite is Con Air (1997). As they're marching the prisoners onto the plane, a warden explains to a colleague who everyone is so we know just what a dangerous crowd the protag is in with/up against.
"That's So-and-so. Drug and weapons charges. Took out a squad of cops before he was finally arrested."
"That's Such-and-such. They call him The Butcher. He eats his victims after he murders them."
"That's the ringleader. Runs the whole drug trade along the entire west coast. Anybody crossing him has a death wish."
Then Nicolas Cage's character, the hero, comes out. He gives a toss of his luxurious hair (must've been smuggling Pantene in his "prison pocket"), everything goes slo-mo, and I swear to you, a beam of holy light falls on him like he's Simba from The Lion King.
"Who's that?"
"Oh, him? He's nobody."
By DoomDestroyer 2025-11-1815:221 reply > Then Nicolas Cage's character, the hero, comes out. He gives a toss of his luxurious hair (must've been smuggling Pantene in his "prison pocket"), everything goes slo-mo, and I swear to you, a beam of holy light falls on him like he's Simba from The Lion King.
Don't forget the scene near the end where he says to Bubba (I think at least that is his name), "I will show you that God exists", and in almost every other movie it is left upto interpretation whether God is really protecting/guiding the hero.
However in Conair, Cyrus shoots at him at point blank range and I think every bullet misses and/or grazes him. As he is walking through the plane to finally confront Cyrus there is a number of events that should kill him e.g a propeller flies through the fuselage and narrowly misses him and kills Jonny 23. There is really no other way to interpret it other than Nicolas Cage is very literally demonstrating that God exists.
The movie is not subtle about anything. It was the last "All American" action movie, where the hero beats everyone by just punching them harder and believing in Jesus. I quite like it.
By bitwize 2025-11-1817:11 That's like when Ernest undergoes his own version of the Trial of the Blade, the Stone, and the Arrow in Ernest Goes to Camp!
By GeoAtreides 2025-11-1717:571 reply you weren't kidding one bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqKCkk8qWxs
By DoomDestroyer 2025-11-1823:25 You should see the rest of the movie. Nic Cage essentially proves the existence of God by punching guys in the face.
Maybe some people like that. I have no idea how common this is, but if everything makes sense, I find that kind of boring. I like to have at least a little bit of ambiguity or mystery to chew on.
By DoomDestroyer 2025-11-1815:28 I really enjoyed the Mothman Prophecies (only watched it recently) because you were really never sure if the Characters involved weren't suffering from some sort of mental illness, or if things were just an unfortunate series of events. It also has a bunch of trippy visual effects in there that don't appear to be CGI.
My friend and I had a completely different interpretations of what happened in the final act. Well worth watching the movie.
By everdrive 2025-11-1716:16 Yep, I totally get it, and my initial observation was made when I was maybe 17 or so. Sometimes these topics do get put into movies, such as the sequence in Shazam where they test his newly-found powers -- but even that was played more for laughs and was really just an entertaining way to acknowledge that much of the audience probably never heard of Shazam.
By ashtakeaway 2025-11-1716:241 reply If we succumbed to everyone's complaints we'd have a much more dumbed down version of everything. Consider if you had a concussion on the right temporal lobe and had hypergraphia as a symptom of the resultant temporal lobe epilepsy. I'd write everything I'd want to write regardless of who complains. Philip K. Dick was one such person.
By eslaught 2025-11-1716:32 It depends on what you care about. If you're writing purely for yourself, then by all means, go ahead and do so.
I've found there's a balance to be found in listening to others vs yourself. Usually, if multiple people give you the same feedback, there is some underlying symptom they are correctly diagnosing. But they may not have the correct diagnosis, or even be able to articulate the symptoms clearly. The real skill of an author/editor is in figuring out the true diagnosis and what to do about it.
In the communication example, this means rooting conflicts in the true personalities of the characters and/or their context, so that even if they sat down to have a deep chat, they still wouldn't agree. E.g., character A has an ulterior motive to see character B fail. Now you hint at that motive in a subtle way that telegraphs to readers that something is going on, without stopping the action for what would turn into a pedantic conversation. At least, that's what I'd do.
By closewith 2025-11-1716:56 No, you need to be able to potray humans well enough to convey their motivations, goals, emotions, etc without explaining it. Anybody can explain a character, but that's not interesting to read.
By magarnicle 2025-11-1723:22 The Matrix already has quite an info dump when he joins the real world that halts most of the momentum (on a re-watch, at least). I would not want even more of that.
By hammock 2025-11-1716:46 That doesn’t answer why we don’t do it in real life, for people like parent commmenter who actually are interested in it
By dragonwriter 2025-11-1721:24 > But instead, if I were really on the Nebuchadnezzar I would have wanted to have hours-long conversations with Neo about the nature and limitations of his powers.
Its a rather important part of the plot of the film that Neo neither understands, nor thinks he understands, not even believes in his powers until fairly late in the film where there are rather urgent pressing concerns that prevent casual hours-long conversations.
Morpheus believes and has at least a fuzzy understanding, and there is an important conversation the whole crew watches between him and Neo where he tried to communicate that understanding so that Neo will understand and believe, but (being an action movie), the conversation is set within a sparring session, not sitting around a conference table.
Answering questions fully and honestly means being vulnerable, and depending on a lot of societal norms, being vulnerable is frowned upon. Most people don't let themselves be vulnerable with anyone, or if they do, its only a few very close people that trust absolutely.
>and depending on a lot of societal norms,
I'm not sure I can accept that it's just social norms. It feels like a human universal. I really like honestly, and I often bend to social norms and avoid these kinds of topics. But for years, I falsely assumed that other people were like me: if we could just be past the initial fear everyone would be so happy to be able to speak so openly and honestly.
And unfortunately, this just is not the case. From what I can tell, for many, many people they just don't want to go there; they don't want to offer real answers to questions; they want the questions un-asked, or they want to answer with a socially-please lie, or a joke, or anything that changes the topic. I don't think we've been taught to be this way. I think we are this way.
I said societal norms because I do think it depends culture to culture. Danes are famous for being incredible forthright and blunt while the Japanese are often seen as being circumspect.
In the US there is an incredible difference in what is allowed to be talked about in the midwest vs the west coast. I don't know about other regions as I have only lived in the two, but I would assume they differ as well.
Like many things different societies can be graded on a gradient.
By phantasmish 2025-11-1720:36 The opening chapters of A Passage to India include an Indian man thinking about how irritating it is that these uncultured Brits don’t understand a polite lie as a refusal, and always want to try to solve the “problem” to get around the refusal. How unrefined!
By roxolotl 2025-11-1717:34 East Coast and Midwest also differ. As someone from a WASPy east coast family with a partner from a working class Midwest family, a literal union steel mill family, I can attest to the challenges of navigating situations like this. I had a realization like this article through spending time with my partner and now I basically cannot interact with my family without changing modes of interaction.
By card_zero 2025-11-1716:26 Well, yeah. We don't have to field criticism all the time. It wouldn't do any good. That's why there's a concept of privacy.
By erikerikson 2025-11-1717:06 You're not alone in your preference
A share a similar frustration as you, that it seems “people” don’t care about / never question things, but for me it’s really about one big question:
Why the f*ck are we here? Why does ANYTHING exist? What IS this reality?
How “nobody” (very very few) people are trying to figure this out or are bothered by the question and open to talking about it blows my mind mind.
By SoftTalker 2025-11-1716:31 Your questions have been the focus of religion since the dawn of humanity. I don't see how you can think nobody tries to figure this out or considers the question.
By card_zero 2025-11-1716:32 Go ahead, begin. What do you say about it? I could find the Wikipedia page, and put a name on the question I guess, some philosopher must have written some discussion of the matter. I kind of doubt it went anywhere.
Oh, the article is just called "Why is there anything at all?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_is_there_anything_at_all%3...
By Dilettante_ 2025-11-1720:45 You are commiting category error. "Why are we here/why does anything exist" implicitly assumes an impetus, a do-er with motivations. And "what IS this reality" contains it's own answer(and the refusal to accept it): It is 'this reality'. It is IS-ness itself. It's like saying "Perfectly describe the entirety of Moby Dick, leaving out not a single word or punctuation", and refusing when someone hands you the book.
Buddhism, Yoga, the more esoteric parts of the Abrahamic religions and many more all have you covered with an extensive corpus if you want people who are asking the same questions you are.
By Joker_vD 2025-11-1716:16 Eh, that's actually pretty realistic. Remember that scene with Luke trying to lift X-Wing from the swamp? He applies the Force, the ship actually starts going up, and then he just straight up stops and says, "Nah, that's impossible, I give up". Totally baffling when you think about it, and yet totally realistic.
By aspenmayer 2025-11-1810:30 “The desert of the real” scene in The Matrix is a microcosm of an infodump that prefigures the film, just by virtue of being a reference in and of itself, and at once a callback to a prior scene which breaks the fourth wall, through subverting our own history and philosophical traditions by embedding them part and parcel in the Matrix itself as Neo knows it, before he’s even aware of its edges and contours:
In the earlier scene with Neo asleep on his desk at home (and still asleep in the Matrix) with everything strewn about, the book Simulacra and Simulation is briefly shown onscreen, which is the origin of the phrase that Morpheus speaks, perhaps because Morpheus knows that Neo would know the significance of it, or perhaps because, like the vase which Neo breaks after being warned to watch out for it, Morpheus wants the viewer to know that he knows what Neo does not: that he is the One, that the self-fulfilling prophecy must be proclaimed to become manifest.
I would suggest that each character on the Nebuchadnezzar has their own backstory and significance independently of Neo, and they don’t necessarily believe in Neo being “the One” until he’s tested and proved. Each of the ship’s crew acts as a foil or fan, a stumbling block or even antithesis to Neo. I think only Trinity is able to see him as a duality of man, one who could be the One when he thought he knew he wasn’t, with her perhaps being a kind of proto-believer in our self-doubting Thomas (Anderson) who himself wants to believe; that doubt causes Neo to have faith: that he might be the One, because he wants to be, for her sake and for all their sake, and that faith allows him to take up the mantle of the One, and to succeed others which came before him.
The visual medium is used to full effect in the film; Easter eggs follow white rabbits, after all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_the_Desert_of_the_R...
> The book's title comes from a quote delivered by the character Morpheus in the 1999 film The Matrix: "Welcome to the desert of the real". Both Žižek's title and the line from The Matrix refer to a phrase in Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. Part of this phrase appears in the following context of the book:
> > If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly [...] this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacrum [...] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.
> Early in The Matrix, Neo used a hollowed-out book with the title Simulacra and Simulation to hide an illegal data disc which appeared in an early scene of the film.
