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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
> 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.
“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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
> 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.
I had a colleague who I sensed was giving me the cold shoulder. Just kind of cutting off attempts at friendly conversation, whereas before our relationship had been fine.
As the author suggests, instead of just letting it fester, I caught him at an opportune moment and asked him if I had done anything to upset him (I suspected maybe a not-tactful-enough code review may have been the culprit.) He just denied that anything was wrong, other than that he wasn't sure how to relate to me because our circumstances are so different (I'm quite a bit older than him and have a family, although it hadn't been a problem before.)
Unfortunately this interaction just made our relationship even more awkward, and it never recovered. He ended up leaving the company about six months later.
In summation, simply getting things out in the open is not necessarily the cure-all the author suggests it is.
It's important to realize that other people may have something going on in their life that affects their mood and maybe their desire to be friends. If it is someone you know at work they may not be comfortable talking to you about the problem. I think you should always be friendly, but if someone isn't friendly back don't just assume its because of you.
Clearing the air has gone well for me before, but it usually goes poorly.
And a lot of the time the air is foggy because I prefer it that way. I know my supervisor doesn't like me. I don't see it as a problem to solve, for now I want the "movie logic" because it's more comfortable than candor.
Yep. Communication is a two way street. You can find the right words to say and say them all you want but if the receiver doesn't receive the words the way you mean them then it's all for naught.
Further, you cannot control how the receiver receives your words.
As the author said: "Our sense that something is weird is often accurate, but our stories about precisely what the weirdness represents are often way, way off." It might have been better to start off with the general impression you had.
I mean, if they'd been open to addressing the real problem, it could've worked. Otherwise the remaining solution would be to never try and to never know. Now you know there's nothing you could've done and the ball was solely in his court.
You can't fix everything, but you can set things up so there's an opportunity for change.
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...
I think it's even simpler: very few people actually have communication skills. Being able to formulate thoughts and communicate clearly is itself a difficult skill, and in the era of generating instantaneous ChatGPT articles and online-first social lives, no one is developing said skill - nor do they realize they're terrible at it. Or at least, they don't want admit it.
Part of the reason movie logic seems illogical ("just say this and the problem is solved!") yet realistic is because we are looking externally at someone else's problems, and not our own. There was a good HN comment yesterday making this exact point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945216
The good news is: if you manage to develop communication skills, you'll be a step ahead of everyone else, especially as people become more reliant on AI chatbots to formulate their thoughts.
That comment is on a post by this same author, whose beat is that you can decide to make changes in your life whenever you want to. So definitely a lot of connection between the two ideas
> 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?”
Maybe I'm missing something but that's literally what everyone in the movie is telling Will. HIs best friend, his mentor, his girlfriend, his therapist. They all literally say this in some form during the movie. His character growth is believing it himself.
Yeah, not only are people doing this, but this is possibly one of the most common problems int he real world with real people. The blog post may have some helpful suggestions, but these descriptions seem to signal a really large "human people understanding" blind spot. The author's circle of friends may all be high EQ, well adjusted people, but this just isn't representative of the real world. (Which its fine to ignore, but don't pretend thats not the case!)
they probably missed that little bit of the movie with the psychologist giving Will treatment to try to keep him from wasting his potential. Easy mistake to make.
(also the graph theory examples in the beginning are really simple. Good Will Hunting is not really great as a math movie. I preferred 'Proof' with Paltrow, Hopkins, etc)
The phenomenon described in movies has a name called “Idiot Plot” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_plot) an older term which Roger Ebert popularized. Feels missing from blogpost.
But people still love movies where everyone is an idiot, like Jurrasic Park or Interstellar. I wonder if it then translates in their real life decisions.
I haven't seen Interstellar, but to be fair to Jurassic Park, there's literally a character who tells everyone else that the park is a terrible idea, even if his "scientific" basis for it isn't very coherent. (He might still be an idiot in other ways; I haven't seen it in a while, but I think it's an overstatement to say it's about everyone being an idiot rather than some specific people with enough money to find enough other idiots to execute their vision).
Reminds me of the Oceangate disaster as proof that things at least that dumb can happen in real live involving substantial amounts of money. Including everyone who is actually an expert in the field telling them that this is idiotic and usually quitting.
I think the main crux is whether or not characters are believable idiots. I loved the first jurrasic park because while yes people are idiots, they are idiots for reasons people in real life are idiots too. It's well-motivated idiocy.
I loathe the latest jurrasic park. There's no way a band of experienced mercenaries are that incompetent.
Not sure how good of an example good will hunting is or if the author has seen that film - at least half of the movie and basically every supporting character is constantly telling him he can do better. It's one of the central themes!
There are also only certain ways each character can tell him those things without him shooting them down and shutting them out. Chuckie is a lot more free to talk to him about where he’s coming from and a lot more free to be blunt than his new math mentor. If we over-apply logic to human relationships and human experience without consideration for the depth and breadth of those in people’s lives, then we’re not actually being that logical in the end.
> 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?!”
> It’s my experience that movie logic is endemic in dysfunctional organizations, friendships, and marriages.
This is why it's not the "cheapest" way to build drama -- as the author quickly admits, it's how most people actually are. We watch drama precisely because it teaches us how we can improve. We see a character who needs to grow, and either they don't and is a cautionary tale (and shows us what might happen to us if we don't), or they do (and shows us how we might improve our own lives if we learn the same lesson).
Nothing about this post is wrong, exactly, but the problem of "walking around in a haze of denial" isn't something that you're going to fix with a blog post. This is a huge part of therapy -- talking about the issues you're facing, so your therapist can start to put together the patterns of what you're in denial about, and surface them to you so you can actually address them. But the whole point is, you generally can't do this yourself, because you're not seeing the patterns to begin with. You're so used to them, they're invisible. You can't do it by yourself, almost by definition. How can you fix the things your brain is hiding from you it just not seeing to begin with?
So this post is on the right track, but the idea of trying to distill it down into three "tips" is about as simplistic as "Step 2: Draw the rest of the f***ing owl". They're not wrong, but learning to apply them properly can take years of work.
This article should be included in every Professional Development program. This is excellent advice.
I live in an area of the midwest United States where nearly _everybody_ is kind, but severely conflict averse... To the point where it becomes difficult to gauge true intentions. Lack of clarity on everybody's priorities make work far more difficult than it needs to be because everyone here are people pleasers who don't know how to say "no" or "I don't like that".
I tell my managers "no". I tell them why: this process doesn't scale with the team, the security policy forbids it, this is the fifth project you've given top priority to this week, etc.
They say, don't worry, just do it. I'm at a point where saying no doesn't matter, so I have to consider if I should even bother.
In software companies priorities mean nothing, they're there to check a checkmark that "we also have prioritization". Anything they want to have will be "top priority" even if they have 50 "top priority" deliverables this release.
What actually prioritizes things is actual friction: from stuff actually taking time to make, to things falling apart and needing time to repair, to employees unionizing and refusing endless overtime.
And anything else (scalability, policy, etc) is also irrelevant, when it comes to "the customer/CEO/higher manager wants this". People are not actually hired to make the product better, or to follow policies. They work to do what the company higher ups want them to do - the rest is up to them to try to fit under those contraints.
> it was nearly impossible to get them to say where they wanted to go out to eat.
Some people just don't care, like me, and can find something to eat just about anywhere. I also dislike choosing where to eat, so my rule is that the pickiest eater gets to choose, and I'm never the pickiest in a group.
If you clearly state what you want you end up taking responsibility for that. Say you want to go to X which is a 40 minute drive away and when you get there it is full. Then you will here "Well, you wanted to go here!" and it will be your fault.
I think this is pretty terrible advice actually. Verbal confrontations like this are a huge dice roll and have a tendency to make not-perfect-but-tolerable relationships totally fall apart. Its one thing to bring these kinds of things up with your partner, but not with a colleague or acquaintance.
Imagine your colleague or someone in your friend-group who you think you get a long with great says "I always feel awkward around you" or "I sense some low-level tension between us" or "I feel like we're annoyed at each-other but trying to stay polite". That can make things very uncomfortable between the two of you. Most times the best course of action is to just continue to be polite because the awkwardness, annoyance, tension, etc. is only experienced by you. Bringing it up to the other person is going to make them feel really uncomfortable, or worse, and can make the relationship potentially unrecoverable.
I'm also in a Midwestern city and see similar things. I once saw a project manager at a Fortune 500 that literally fabricated statistics about an ongoing project I was on to please management.
I've found that not being afraid to say no or opine on things has been very effective in my career.
Sometimes it is not conflict aversion as much as, and maybe i am speaking for myself here, being unsure if the opinion/judgement you have and are about to express is valid or if this is a real bad misread. Maybe conflict aversion is a form of short-sighted kindness
I’ve often been the only person in the room willing to confront things directly. (I don’t like doing it but unresolved issues just get worse.)
What a person says about people who are not there is telling.
When it’s not outright malicious, it’s usually fear. It’s something they don’t want to happen that stops them from saying it. (Depending on the situation it may be entirely justified.)
Kindness does exist. There’s plenty of times you don’t want to upset somebody else for their sake.
There’s nothing wrong with conflict avoidance being the default. It only becomes a problem when it stops you from conflict where it’s necessary.
I think what you're describing is a form of conflict aversion, where the (tiny) conflict is what would clear up your read, or the group's attitude on something, for going forward. Short sighted kindness is a nice way to put it
What’s interesting about this, is there are actually game theoretic repercussions to what the author is expressing. By making implicit knowledge explicit it changes entire game trees. You no longer play the i think that he thinks that I think that he thinks… branch, and you are literally changing expected payouts as a result.
Once I learned this, it changed how I live. Similar to the article, I’m much more likely to say out loud the thing that people are only thinking. It removes so many potential problems that create prisoners dilemma type payout stuctures that it rarely seems useful not to make things explicit.
I think I've sort of come to this conclusion which gives myself more inner peace but I haven't exactly gotten better at communicating my thoughts, hence it feels like others often assume I'd "play" as most do, but in fact I'm not but just a bit weird and introverted. Any tips on this?
I feel like this translation is easier to misunderstand that it is to understand in many cases.
I think the effort is still good, but I also feel like people give up after a few tries. I know I do - after the third re-phrasing or re-framing you have to let things settle.
----
Once someone is "grown up", no one can raise them again.
Interesting to read, but this is where movies are more "real" than true life - people can't verbalize their true feelings and need to experience or work through them in some way non-verbally.
If you've seen any Kar-wai Wong movies, that's basically his whole filmography (In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express, etc.).
I think part of the reason I'm "conflict averse" is that airing things out very often doesn't turn out like... well, like the movies. Sometimes the issue I have with someone is just "weird" and socially unacceptable to air out, or maybe the person doesn't turn out to be as reasonable or understanding as I hope they are. Or maybe after enough of these, it just becomes overwhelming to the other person.
A decade or so ago, after an interview that didn't go that well, a candidate reached out asking for feedback. I gave him some algorithms and data structures advice and where to read what and stuff like that and he responded really positively then reached out to me months later to tell me he went and learned all the stuff and got a job at some now-famous startup (Airbnb? I don't remember). I was early in my career back then and was happy for him. Now, if I were to do that I'd be like "Damn, this guy is capable of taking the feedback and actioning on it. I should have somehow found a way to hire him!"
It's about "investment": People spend a lot of time, consciously on purpose or implicitly as a matter of consequence, on making up their plans & preferences.
They've been building up mental velocity to whatever they're going to do.
When you give them a contradictory opinion or advice, you're asking them to discard that investment and abruptly switch directions.
Instead of asking them to drive off their mental road and into the dirt or turn around, offer them something akin to a rail track that they can gradually/subtly switch onto.
I gave an advice to my friend who is doing a startup. I told him it probably won't work out. But we continue with our own line of thinking because the outcome totally depends on reality. Also, my friend can tack on lot of ifs later on (if only this and this and this had happened, I would be successful) to "prove" himself right. It might be possible that with no decisive outcome favoured by reality, we would both continue to be right in our heads.
I see this advice a lot in various forms. I think people are probably too conflict averse on average so there is some merit to it but there are limits. I feel like there are a lot of times in my life where just moving on or being diplomatic has been the right call.
The manager example is a good case study. There are a lot of examples here where there might be genuine repercussions for raising an issue with a manager. I wouldn't give this as blanket advice.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a simple rule about whether or not you should raise an issue and it needs to be decided case by case.
This is one of those things that, for some people, will be simple but not easy.
If you grew up with an emotionally erratic parent or caregiver, who might suddenly explode with anger at unpredictable times, that’s probably why you’re unwilling to bluntly address what should be simple issues. You were conditioned early on to think that anything that could possibly be conceived as critical would be met with anger and possibly violence. So you avoid exposing yourself to that risk.
What you have to learn, and what this post is indirectly trying to tell you, is that’s not normal, and most people won’t react like that.
The Good Will Hunting example is terrible, since it's clear that Will has been told this before the movie and was told this by at least 2 of the 5 therapists he saw before Sean...
> Communication failures like these make for good storytelling ...
No, they make for horrible story telling and make the movies feel fake and the conflicts contrived. It's bad lazy writing. Bad because it's fake. Lazy because the writer should have come up with an actually valid conflict.
I'm not saying I agree with the examples though. I didn't feel Good Will Hunting nor La-La Land were examples of this personally.
It depends. TFA's Good Will Hunting example is good storytelling, because the whole point is that Will was not ready to hear that direct conversation. In fact, Ben Affleck's character basically says that to him at the end of the movie, when he has finally grown up enough to hear it.
Bad examples include almost every episode of Friends, where all the drama is based on a stupid, unnecessary lie.
This can work on a feedback loop as well -- popular media is where young people learn how communication works. If they all watch the same "movie logic" scenarios, those scenarios are the only examples they have of how to behave.
So while Hollywood writers may have just needed a mechanism to make the plot interesting, that pattern can become reality as well.
It's a bit like people talking reading ChatGPT crap, will start talking and writing like ChatGPT.
Fully behind his argument, but boy did he pick a bad example with Good Will Hunting:
> “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?”
Nobody said that because that was his whole problem, that he _couldn't_ go there. That was his entire character!
Sometimes problems are real. That guy will never be my friend because he wants my position. That other guy is scared because he thinks my work is a threat to his silo, and he's right: the management is after him.
No frank conversation is going to change those situations.
There was an anime called Marmalade Boy where I believe every plot involved people being unable to communicate. It had the central romance that was a "will they or won't they" plot... They liked each other but were usually incapable of talking about it. Then the subplots involved their friends who were constantly scheming to break them up. Which the central couple was also incapable of discussing or confronting. It gets worse when they mistakenly believe at the end of the series that they were siblings. Did they ask for clarification? Nope, not until maximum drama was extracted from each misunderstanding.
I like this post, ofc we could all benefit from direct, and vulnerable, conversations. But one thing I never understood, even through Brené Brown, is that this direct and vulnerable communication style leads to its own set of baggage, its own unspoken agreements about what something meant.
> “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?”
I'm sure in many cultures, and in many friend groups, this would go over fine. If I said this to someone, they would go into shock. They're unspoken thought would be "wow if he's saying that to me, I must annoy the shit out of him". Maybe not! Maybe that's my own unspoken understanding! But I do think this leaves a "scar" even a small one. "Direct" conversations are not without their own damaging effects. I think part of my social contract is to "deal" with things silently. Maybe in other cultures that's not the case.
If someone said that to me, I would be happy to have that conversation, but I would be on pins and needles around that person, and possibly overthinking how "annoying" I'm being, and I would have at least a small amount of resentment for the person saying it – "I have lots of friends I don't annoy, what's wrong with this person"
Just to be pretentious, this also reminds me of a conversation in Infinite Jest, where the canadian and the american spy argue about whether its right to teach their young what right and wrong is, or whether its right to discover it. The example is eating candy.
I think in the US, if you tell a kid not to eat candy, they will eat candy as soon as their guardian isn't watching. I'm not sure that's true elsewhere, for a myriad of reasons. By extension, if you tell me I'm annoying you, I might go through the motions of "repairing" the relationship, while I actually just distance myself. Ofc, that depends on who says it
One of the most effective ways to see this at play is watching most recorded Let's Plays of Return Of The Obra Dinn. The game uses a couple of very "game logic" contrivances to enable the writing to focus on very organic, real world logic. Most deductions the game requires of you are straightforward enough that you could explain them to a random passerby, and they'd find it perfectly reasonable.
It's absolutely mind-boggling how often people will say out loud what they (correctly) think the solution is, because it's a perfectly mundane day-to-day observation, then proceed to discard it because they expect the game to be engaging in trickery.
At perhaps its most extreme, the very first vignette you witness has a guy banging on the Captain's cabin door, shouting "Captain, open up, or we'll take more than those shells", and the guy inside the cabin answering "you bastards may take exactly what I give you!" before opening the door and shooting the door-banging guy in the chest. I've seen people literally be unwilling to commit to the idea that the guy inside the cabin was, indeed, the ship's Captain.
This advice sounds good on paper (or on Substack) but in reality any given verbal confrontation is a roll of the dice. I have tried what she's advocating many times over the years and on quite a few occasions the result was I was shut down and hard by the interlocutor. Other times, the interlocutor paid lip service to the point I brought up but slid right back into old/unhelpful patterns after we discussed it. Sometimes it created a much larger conflict than what had been brewing, and not one that ultimately got us to a better place (one time it almost caused a physical fight!). Often I regretted opening up the issue in the first place.
My lesson is: Sure, don't be totally non-communicative about your issues but pick your entries as well as you can and be willing to guess that some are not worth it. And also know you'll often be wrong in your guesses. You can't really win this game.
I can also say from personal experience this verbal confrontation like the author is suggesting can make innocuous situations devolve quickly. There was one guy in a friend group I had who I felt like I couldn't really connect with. He always seemed very awkward and only willing to engage in surface-level conversations with me compared to everybody else. I tried to (gently) ask him about it, basically like the author would suggest doing, and it turns out he did not feel like he was being awkward, surface-level, or failing to connect at all. He thought we had a real genuine, deep friendship. What I said really hurt him and there was a lot of hard feelings on his end. Needless to say we did not go back to being friends after that, and I ruined what could have been a good friendship if I had taken the time to reflect that maybe my interpretation of awkwardness or lack of connection was coming from me and not experienced by him.
It can really hurt relationships to bring up things like this if it isn't experienced by the other person, it might be all in your head.
I agree with this post, and suspect a lot of us will see the logic in approaching problems like this.
However, this approach isn’t universal and should be used with caution. A head-on approach isn’t effective with a person who is conflict-avoidant. Any of the given examples, no matter how gentle the delivery, will be seen as a personal attack and cause to pull away.
The famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan claimed that if everyone said exactly what needs be said, language wouldn't exist or something like that. I'd wager movies are a reflection of how our psyche works, including 'main character syndrome', omissions of causality for narrative coherency, etc.
I have had friends fail to communicate in astounding ways. Once, four of us were planning to go somewhere. A friend suggested somewhere else, I and my other friend agreed, but the fourth friend was not presnet. I told my first friend to tell the one person who was not present about the change in plans. He asks why... I tell him, well, the other guy isn't going to know we changed plans because he isn't here.
The thing I love most about the "why am I not just saying the boring, clumsy thing I'm actually thinking, instead of assuming everyone already understands it" rabbit hole is that once you actually commit to it, everything becomes simpler and easier. It takes away the pretense of religion, or anything supernatural, and it relieves you of ever having to feel "smart" because you're always one saying the dumbest things, it's just that no one else was daring to say them (which, ironically, doesn't make people think you're dumb, it just makes them introspect about why you would "just SAY that").
Of course, once you circle around to realizing that most human interaction is dependent upon insinuation and assumption (and how that often helps), and that most movies (media, in general) is made for people who haven't figured out how to be a person yet by people who haven't figured out the kind of person they really want to be yet, it lessens the overall takeaways from it. But things are a lot simpler!
> it relieves you of ever having to feel "smart" because you're always one saying the dumbest things, it's just that no one else was daring to say them
It’s actually had the opposite effect for me, of making everyone think I’m smarter.
It turns out that a lot of the time when nobody was mentioning the “obvious” solution or how we would avoid the “obvious” problem, it wasn’t because I was too dumb or inexperienced to know the implicit answer… but because actually nobody else in the room found those obvious. They’d not noticed at all.
You have to be careful with this, though. Nobody in management wants to hear why their process for collecting and/or analyzing “metrics” is flawed and renders the whole thing totally meaningless in ways that a slightly-bright high schooler who halfway paid attention is their science classes should be able to spot—in fact, the point was only to pretend to be “data driven”, not to do passable science (that’s way too expensive, companies are interested in doing it approximately never), in practically every case. All that stuff’s fake, and everyone’s just pretending it’s not, so pointing it out is gauche. Just nod along and don’t mention the blatant confounders that plausibly allow that the real trend line goes the other way. Or that to get a useful dataset they’ll need minimum two years of gathering data to even begin to draw conclusions… and we have not been collecting those data, so the timer starts now at best. Nobody cares, you’ve missed the point, which has nothing to do with actually learning things to guide decisions.
Isn't this called "name it to tame it?" When you engage higher level cognitive functions it reportedly helps you escape predominantly emotional responses.
> 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?”
This person did not watch Good Will Hunting. I'm not a fan of the film, I just know for a fact several characters do this at several times. That is, y'know, the plot.
I haven't read further enough to discern whether this is AI slop, but it doesn't look promising.
In fact, the entire movie's point is that simply HEARING others tell you those things doesn't do anything! The inner journey of the character getting to a place where he believes it himself -- or rather believes himself to be worthy of a greater path -- is THE crucial part.
So the example is exactly opposite the author's intent.
That said, I liked the article and agree with its point. In fact, I'd guess that effective leaders all have learned techniques and ability to remain calm/comfortable in having these blunt conversations that cut to the chase (but still value and hear people).
Ultimately I think it’s not really about going to far in one way or the other. I tend to be very blunt in my dealings with people to a fault. I wouldn’t say I’m mean, but like, in order for blunt truths to be effective I think they have to be somewhat rare, so I’m trying to adapt to be more strategic in my bluntness, but most of the time, let things go and maybe subtly steer rather than just calling things out all the time.
FWIW I don’t get the “AI slop” spidey-sense when reading this, despite the liberal use of em dashes. I thought it was well written and makes some interesting points.
Even if it's not, it's still total garbage. It reads like the Critical Drinker screaming "if only these people put their emotions and flaws to one side and behaved like completely rational beings with perfect information!"
What the author ignores is speaking from the point of view of the omniscient observer these things seem obvious. But the characters, even if they were purely rational happiness optimizers, lack all the information the movie viewer has.
Its certainly quaint and lucky to be able to solve problems that easily I suppose.
I have 4 people in my immediate social orbit. Two of them have serious behavioral disorders - one has been in inpatient psychiatry (twice), the other has never sought any treatment and in fact denies she has any problems. Another has somewhat less severe behavioral disorders but much more serious physical problems. The last one is simply very old and has health problems.
What is to be gained by "talking about the real problems" with this group? Pretty much nothing, because none of them can or will do anything about it. And the few times myself or someone else has brought up some problem directly, lets just say it didn't go well.
As a meta comment I have yet to see a take from this author that didn't seem to have some pretty clear bubblethink behind it. Not great to be edging into an epistemology domain I associate with Bryan Caplan - like a person whose opinions you pretty much always want to invert to get at closer to the real truth.
A better example might be The Acolyte, though it isn't a movie. The entire plot is based on a lack of communication. Not to mention being a pretty bad show all around.
Too true. Andor was pretty great and definitely deserved more attention. I think the fan base has just been disappointed one too many times to take a chance.
This article is about movies skimping out on the communication skills of their characters as a narrative device-- it's a lot like the fact that many pre-cellphone movies would have been over in 60 seconds if only the characters had a cellphone. We live in a world with cellphones now, so they're usually expected in movies. We still don't live in a world where people know how to communicate.
Movie logic-- or more generally "narrative bias"-- taints people's thinking in ways far beyond failures to communicate. I've encountered a lot of people who fall for scams or believe conspiracy theories for reasons that ultimately amount to "if life were a story, this is what would happen".
A related problem, which was mentioned somewhere on HN about a year ago, is that too many movies have a "chosen one" mindset. The entire Marvel Overextended Universe runs on this. They're all Chosen Ones.
Real life does not work that way. Read biographies of famous people.
Most of them involve grinding upward.
(Trump is the counterexample. From zero to President. Nobody did that before.
Every other president in the last century had some major public office first.
This may be part of his appeal. He fits the model Hollywood teaches people to expect.)
I'm getting slight "Is this your first day on Planet Earth?" vibes from this. They are pointing out something real and true and valid. And yet - they seem to think that just saying stuff out loud will fix things.
I mean - yeah. Sometimes it might - but usually there's layers of scar tissue and pain and misunderstanding in the way.
In fact - if there's one myth movies perpetuate, it's that of the "epiphany". Two characters finally name the thing, talk it though and there's permanent change.
Permanent change is rare - more so permanent change precipitated by a single conversation.
>In fact - if there's one myth movies perpetuate, it's that of the "epiphany". Two characters finally name the thing, talk it though and there's permanent change.
>Permanent change is rare - more so permanent change precipitated by a single conversation.
My mom loooooovves talking about problems. She uses talking as a replacement for doing. She thinks if she's address the issue through words she's solved it and doesn't have to change her awful behavior. She's "addressed" it in her mind so it's no longer a problem.
> 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.
That's the core of most of real world issues be it at work or relationships of any type. I can also personally attest most of issues of any type in my megacorp are caused by bad communication. How many times you see a barely functional marriage where unspoken things hang around and one party is afraid to tell them to the other side, and subtle hints are ignored. How many folks from older generations had a good talk about their true sexual preferences for example. Some nationalities have issues speaking frankly, ie British circle around issues with too much politeness. Good luck getting any Indian (in India) telling you "no" or "I don't know" (spent so much time wandering in wrong directions in good ol' times before smart phones).
Remove this issue and psychologists lose 95% of their work. Perfectly clear communication is an exception in this world.
I'd say movies gradually found this topic since many people will find themselves in those movies and identify with struggles of protagonists. Then logically frequent ending resolving many if not all issues allows people to have a little dream of resolving stuff they struggle with (subconsciously or consciously) in their lives.
There is another way to think about things, which is that people shouldn't have to talk so much unless say they're a part of a family. For people communication outside their family, there should be tighter contractual obligations that define interactions and expectations.
To say it differently, define the smart contract that details the expected behavior! Everything else is then supposed to be mechanical. If one doesn't want to abide by the contract, one doesn't then get the associated payments or privileges!
> 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?!”
People in real-world situations aren't exactly good at recognizing what's really happening, much less talking about it directly. Humans spend a lot of energy on self-deception, as well as lying to each other to reinforce everyone's respective delusions.
> 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?!”
Yup it's insane. At the end of a very long series of three movies I told my father: "OK so this all basically happened because the person who sent the letter considered the (snail) mail service to be flawless and didn't bother to make sure the recipient got the letter in the first place".
Doesn't matter which (french) movies: some dumb plot where relatives don't know they're relatives because the only person who knew didn't bother to make sure the letter explaining they were relatives arrived.
Not naming the movies otherwise we'll get nitpicking.
TFA is right: it happens all the time in movie plots and really doesn't help with the suspension of disbelief.
Pretty sure if someone went to the author and told her how to fix her life's problems, she won't react the way she expects Ryan Gosling or Matt Damon to.
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.
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.
Damn, that is a good line.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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"
I agree with your comment, I just wanted to passingly point out that the author is female.
EDIT: Damn this movie is so great.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
How is it wrong exactly?
The ability to sustain motivation might just be a matter of diagnosis and medication.
“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.
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.
[dead]
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes especially the one asking a colleague if their are scared of them...
Just evidences a lack of emotional intelligence on the part of the author, ironically.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc
Most/all streaming providers allow you to skip the recap.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
The gadgets were often used several scenes later, or much later and integrated with the other action with Blade.
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?
https://youtu.be/B65HEhBR-1s
That's very interesting, would you happen to have any example videos of Hopkins in the show?
https://youtu.be/fs9Wyuub3jY
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.
https://youtu.be/VhD0hbGEDSU
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."
> 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.
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!
you weren't kidding one bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqKCkk8qWxs
You should see the rest of the movie. Nic Cage essentially proves the existence of God by punching guys in the face.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm9eKCPGHb0
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That doesn’t answer why we don’t do it in real life, for people like parent commmenter who actually are interested in it
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
“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.
I had a colleague who I sensed was giving me the cold shoulder. Just kind of cutting off attempts at friendly conversation, whereas before our relationship had been fine.
As the author suggests, instead of just letting it fester, I caught him at an opportune moment and asked him if I had done anything to upset him (I suspected maybe a not-tactful-enough code review may have been the culprit.) He just denied that anything was wrong, other than that he wasn't sure how to relate to me because our circumstances are so different (I'm quite a bit older than him and have a family, although it hadn't been a problem before.)
Unfortunately this interaction just made our relationship even more awkward, and it never recovered. He ended up leaving the company about six months later.
In summation, simply getting things out in the open is not necessarily the cure-all the author suggests it is.
I had something similar happen at a prior job.
1: Befriend one of the front-end developers 3: The dev stops talking to me, becomes a lot less happy overall 4: The dev quits
In my case, what I didn't know about for a while was 2: The guy got put on a PIP for dubious reasons and got absolutely demoralized.
It's important to realize that other people may have something going on in their life that affects their mood and maybe their desire to be friends. If it is someone you know at work they may not be comfortable talking to you about the problem. I think you should always be friendly, but if someone isn't friendly back don't just assume its because of you.
Clearing the air has gone well for me before, but it usually goes poorly.
And a lot of the time the air is foggy because I prefer it that way. I know my supervisor doesn't like me. I don't see it as a problem to solve, for now I want the "movie logic" because it's more comfortable than candor.
Yep. Communication is a two way street. You can find the right words to say and say them all you want but if the receiver doesn't receive the words the way you mean them then it's all for naught.
Further, you cannot control how the receiver receives your words.
As the author said: "Our sense that something is weird is often accurate, but our stories about precisely what the weirdness represents are often way, way off." It might have been better to start off with the general impression you had.
I mean, if they'd been open to addressing the real problem, it could've worked. Otherwise the remaining solution would be to never try and to never know. Now you know there's nothing you could've done and the ball was solely in his court.
You can't fix everything, but you can set things up so there's an opportunity for change.
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...
I think it's even simpler: very few people actually have communication skills. Being able to formulate thoughts and communicate clearly is itself a difficult skill, and in the era of generating instantaneous ChatGPT articles and online-first social lives, no one is developing said skill - nor do they realize they're terrible at it. Or at least, they don't want admit it.
Part of the reason movie logic seems illogical ("just say this and the problem is solved!") yet realistic is because we are looking externally at someone else's problems, and not our own. There was a good HN comment yesterday making this exact point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945216
The good news is: if you manage to develop communication skills, you'll be a step ahead of everyone else, especially as people become more reliant on AI chatbots to formulate their thoughts.
That comment is on a post by this same author, whose beat is that you can decide to make changes in your life whenever you want to. So definitely a lot of connection between the two ideas
That's funny, good catch. I didn't even notice.
> 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?”
Maybe I'm missing something but that's literally what everyone in the movie is telling Will. HIs best friend, his mentor, his girlfriend, his therapist. They all literally say this in some form during the movie. His character growth is believing it himself.
Yeah, not only are people doing this, but this is possibly one of the most common problems int he real world with real people. The blog post may have some helpful suggestions, but these descriptions seem to signal a really large "human people understanding" blind spot. The author's circle of friends may all be high EQ, well adjusted people, but this just isn't representative of the real world. (Which its fine to ignore, but don't pretend thats not the case!)
they probably missed that little bit of the movie with the psychologist giving Will treatment to try to keep him from wasting his potential. Easy mistake to make.
You know, I've been wondering why the Rebels in Star Wars don't just shoot down that Death Star, if that thing is such a problem.
I try not to judge other cultures, but that seems like a strange name for a moon.
It’s not a moon. It’s a space station.
Moon Wars doesn't have the same ring to it.
if only the Eagles hadn't carried Sam and Frodo to Mt. Doom to throw away the ring that short story would have been a really epic series of books.
If only the CIA had given that guy in Sneakers a Winnebago then the movie could have been longer.
Ok buddy cinephile has gone cross platform!
INdeed. The entire point of Chuckie's "If you're still here in 20 years I'll kill you" was just that.
Yeah I’m pretty sure his girlfriend, best friend, and therapist all pretty much explicitly tell him that.
"It's not your fault"
(also the graph theory examples in the beginning are really simple. Good Will Hunting is not really great as a math movie. I preferred 'Proof' with Paltrow, Hopkins, etc)
The phenomenon described in movies has a name called “Idiot Plot” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_plot) an older term which Roger Ebert popularized. Feels missing from blogpost.
But people still love movies where everyone is an idiot, like Jurrasic Park or Interstellar. I wonder if it then translates in their real life decisions.
I haven't seen Interstellar, but to be fair to Jurassic Park, there's literally a character who tells everyone else that the park is a terrible idea, even if his "scientific" basis for it isn't very coherent. (He might still be an idiot in other ways; I haven't seen it in a while, but I think it's an overstatement to say it's about everyone being an idiot rather than some specific people with enough money to find enough other idiots to execute their vision).
Reminds me of the Oceangate disaster as proof that things at least that dumb can happen in real live involving substantial amounts of money. Including everyone who is actually an expert in the field telling them that this is idiotic and usually quitting.
I think the main crux is whether or not characters are believable idiots. I loved the first jurrasic park because while yes people are idiots, they are idiots for reasons people in real life are idiots too. It's well-motivated idiocy.
I loathe the latest jurrasic park. There's no way a band of experienced mercenaries are that incompetent.
Not sure how good of an example good will hunting is or if the author has seen that film - at least half of the movie and basically every supporting character is constantly telling him he can do better. It's one of the central themes!
There are also only certain ways each character can tell him those things without him shooting them down and shutting them out. Chuckie is a lot more free to talk to him about where he’s coming from and a lot more free to be blunt than his new math mentor. If we over-apply logic to human relationships and human experience without consideration for the depth and breadth of those in people’s lives, then we’re not actually being that logical in the end.
> 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?!”
> It’s my experience that movie logic is endemic in dysfunctional organizations, friendships, and marriages.
This is why it's not the "cheapest" way to build drama -- as the author quickly admits, it's how most people actually are. We watch drama precisely because it teaches us how we can improve. We see a character who needs to grow, and either they don't and is a cautionary tale (and shows us what might happen to us if we don't), or they do (and shows us how we might improve our own lives if we learn the same lesson).
Nothing about this post is wrong, exactly, but the problem of "walking around in a haze of denial" isn't something that you're going to fix with a blog post. This is a huge part of therapy -- talking about the issues you're facing, so your therapist can start to put together the patterns of what you're in denial about, and surface them to you so you can actually address them. But the whole point is, you generally can't do this yourself, because you're not seeing the patterns to begin with. You're so used to them, they're invisible. You can't do it by yourself, almost by definition. How can you fix the things your brain is hiding from you it just not seeing to begin with?
So this post is on the right track, but the idea of trying to distill it down into three "tips" is about as simplistic as "Step 2: Draw the rest of the f***ing owl". They're not wrong, but learning to apply them properly can take years of work.
This article should be included in every Professional Development program. This is excellent advice.
I live in an area of the midwest United States where nearly _everybody_ is kind, but severely conflict averse... To the point where it becomes difficult to gauge true intentions. Lack of clarity on everybody's priorities make work far more difficult than it needs to be because everyone here are people pleasers who don't know how to say "no" or "I don't like that".
I tell my managers "no". I tell them why: this process doesn't scale with the team, the security policy forbids it, this is the fifth project you've given top priority to this week, etc.
They say, don't worry, just do it. I'm at a point where saying no doesn't matter, so I have to consider if I should even bother.
In software companies priorities mean nothing, they're there to check a checkmark that "we also have prioritization". Anything they want to have will be "top priority" even if they have 50 "top priority" deliverables this release.
What actually prioritizes things is actual friction: from stuff actually taking time to make, to things falling apart and needing time to repair, to employees unionizing and refusing endless overtime.
And anything else (scalability, policy, etc) is also irrelevant, when it comes to "the customer/CEO/higher manager wants this". People are not actually hired to make the product better, or to follow policies. They work to do what the company higher ups want them to do - the rest is up to them to try to fit under those contraints.
Not just in software companies ime.
My mother's side of the family was from the Midwest.
Super polite, agreeable, but almost impossible to nail down with clear communication as to how they felt or what they wanted.
During reunions with that family, it was nearly impossible to get them to say where they wanted to go out to eat.
> it was nearly impossible to get them to say where they wanted to go out to eat.
Some people just don't care, like me, and can find something to eat just about anywhere. I also dislike choosing where to eat, so my rule is that the pickiest eater gets to choose, and I'm never the pickiest in a group.
If you clearly state what you want you end up taking responsibility for that. Say you want to go to X which is a 40 minute drive away and when you get there it is full. Then you will here "Well, you wanted to go here!" and it will be your fault.
I think this is pretty terrible advice actually. Verbal confrontations like this are a huge dice roll and have a tendency to make not-perfect-but-tolerable relationships totally fall apart. Its one thing to bring these kinds of things up with your partner, but not with a colleague or acquaintance.
Imagine your colleague or someone in your friend-group who you think you get a long with great says "I always feel awkward around you" or "I sense some low-level tension between us" or "I feel like we're annoyed at each-other but trying to stay polite". That can make things very uncomfortable between the two of you. Most times the best course of action is to just continue to be polite because the awkwardness, annoyance, tension, etc. is only experienced by you. Bringing it up to the other person is going to make them feel really uncomfortable, or worse, and can make the relationship potentially unrecoverable.
I'm also in a Midwestern city and see similar things. I once saw a project manager at a Fortune 500 that literally fabricated statistics about an ongoing project I was on to please management.
I've found that not being afraid to say no or opine on things has been very effective in my career.
Sometimes it is not conflict aversion as much as, and maybe i am speaking for myself here, being unsure if the opinion/judgement you have and are about to express is valid or if this is a real bad misread. Maybe conflict aversion is a form of short-sighted kindness
I’ve often been the only person in the room willing to confront things directly. (I don’t like doing it but unresolved issues just get worse.)
What a person says about people who are not there is telling.
When it’s not outright malicious, it’s usually fear. It’s something they don’t want to happen that stops them from saying it. (Depending on the situation it may be entirely justified.)
Kindness does exist. There’s plenty of times you don’t want to upset somebody else for their sake.
There’s nothing wrong with conflict avoidance being the default. It only becomes a problem when it stops you from conflict where it’s necessary.
I think what you're describing is a form of conflict aversion, where the (tiny) conflict is what would clear up your read, or the group's attitude on something, for going forward. Short sighted kindness is a nice way to put it
What’s interesting about this, is there are actually game theoretic repercussions to what the author is expressing. By making implicit knowledge explicit it changes entire game trees. You no longer play the i think that he thinks that I think that he thinks… branch, and you are literally changing expected payouts as a result.
Once I learned this, it changed how I live. Similar to the article, I’m much more likely to say out loud the thing that people are only thinking. It removes so many potential problems that create prisoners dilemma type payout stuctures that it rarely seems useful not to make things explicit.
I think I've sort of come to this conclusion which gives myself more inner peace but I haven't exactly gotten better at communicating my thoughts, hence it feels like others often assume I'd "play" as most do, but in fact I'm not but just a bit weird and introverted. Any tips on this?
> By making implicit knowledge explicit ...
I feel like this translation is easier to misunderstand that it is to understand in many cases.
I think the effort is still good, but I also feel like people give up after a few tries. I know I do - after the third re-phrasing or re-framing you have to let things settle.
----
Once someone is "grown up", no one can raise them again.
Interesting to read, but this is where movies are more "real" than true life - people can't verbalize their true feelings and need to experience or work through them in some way non-verbally.
If you've seen any Kar-wai Wong movies, that's basically his whole filmography (In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express, etc.).
I think part of the reason I'm "conflict averse" is that airing things out very often doesn't turn out like... well, like the movies. Sometimes the issue I have with someone is just "weird" and socially unacceptable to air out, or maybe the person doesn't turn out to be as reasonable or understanding as I hope they are. Or maybe after enough of these, it just becomes overwhelming to the other person.
People always ask for feedback, but I haven't met anybody that can actually take it.
Most people just don't want to hear, don't want to know. And people know it, so people don't say what they think.
A decade or so ago, after an interview that didn't go that well, a candidate reached out asking for feedback. I gave him some algorithms and data structures advice and where to read what and stuff like that and he responded really positively then reached out to me months later to tell me he went and learned all the stuff and got a job at some now-famous startup (Airbnb? I don't remember). I was early in my career back then and was happy for him. Now, if I were to do that I'd be like "Damn, this guy is capable of taking the feedback and actioning on it. I should have somehow found a way to hire him!"
Haha, I hope he's doing well wherever he is :)
It's about "investment": People spend a lot of time, consciously on purpose or implicitly as a matter of consequence, on making up their plans & preferences.
They've been building up mental velocity to whatever they're going to do.
When you give them a contradictory opinion or advice, you're asking them to discard that investment and abruptly switch directions.
Instead of asking them to drive off their mental road and into the dirt or turn around, offer them something akin to a rail track that they can gradually/subtly switch onto.
Figure out the right "prompt" for them :)
I gave an advice to my friend who is doing a startup. I told him it probably won't work out. But we continue with our own line of thinking because the outcome totally depends on reality. Also, my friend can tack on lot of ifs later on (if only this and this and this had happened, I would be successful) to "prove" himself right. It might be possible that with no decisive outcome favoured by reality, we would both continue to be right in our heads.
In situations like that, sometimes people just want to TRY, whether or not they succeed, even if they expect it to fail.
The act of trying is what matters to them.
Pursuing potential romantic partners or starting software projects are some prime examples :')
To put it a bit more succinctly - the sunk cost fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect
I see this advice a lot in various forms. I think people are probably too conflict averse on average so there is some merit to it but there are limits. I feel like there are a lot of times in my life where just moving on or being diplomatic has been the right call.
The manager example is a good case study. There are a lot of examples here where there might be genuine repercussions for raising an issue with a manager. I wouldn't give this as blanket advice.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a simple rule about whether or not you should raise an issue and it needs to be decided case by case.
This is one of those things that, for some people, will be simple but not easy.
If you grew up with an emotionally erratic parent or caregiver, who might suddenly explode with anger at unpredictable times, that’s probably why you’re unwilling to bluntly address what should be simple issues. You were conditioned early on to think that anything that could possibly be conceived as critical would be met with anger and possibly violence. So you avoid exposing yourself to that risk.
What you have to learn, and what this post is indirectly trying to tell you, is that’s not normal, and most people won’t react like that.
The Good Will Hunting example is terrible, since it's clear that Will has been told this before the movie and was told this by at least 2 of the 5 therapists he saw before Sean...
> Communication failures like these make for good storytelling ...
No, they make for horrible story telling and make the movies feel fake and the conflicts contrived. It's bad lazy writing. Bad because it's fake. Lazy because the writer should have come up with an actually valid conflict.
I'm not saying I agree with the examples though. I didn't feel Good Will Hunting nor La-La Land were examples of this personally.
It depends. TFA's Good Will Hunting example is good storytelling, because the whole point is that Will was not ready to hear that direct conversation. In fact, Ben Affleck's character basically says that to him at the end of the movie, when he has finally grown up enough to hear it.
Bad examples include almost every episode of Friends, where all the drama is based on a stupid, unnecessary lie.
This can work on a feedback loop as well -- popular media is where young people learn how communication works. If they all watch the same "movie logic" scenarios, those scenarios are the only examples they have of how to behave.
So while Hollywood writers may have just needed a mechanism to make the plot interesting, that pattern can become reality as well.
It's a bit like people talking reading ChatGPT crap, will start talking and writing like ChatGPT.
Fully behind his argument, but boy did he pick a bad example with Good Will Hunting:
> “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?”
Nobody said that because that was his whole problem, that he _couldn't_ go there. That was his entire character!
I agree, but...
Sometimes problems are real. That guy will never be my friend because he wants my position. That other guy is scared because he thinks my work is a threat to his silo, and he's right: the management is after him.
No frank conversation is going to change those situations.
There was an anime called Marmalade Boy where I believe every plot involved people being unable to communicate. It had the central romance that was a "will they or won't they" plot... They liked each other but were usually incapable of talking about it. Then the subplots involved their friends who were constantly scheming to break them up. Which the central couple was also incapable of discussing or confronting. It gets worse when they mistakenly believe at the end of the series that they were siblings. Did they ask for clarification? Nope, not until maximum drama was extracted from each misunderstanding.
I like this post, ofc we could all benefit from direct, and vulnerable, conversations. But one thing I never understood, even through Brené Brown, is that this direct and vulnerable communication style leads to its own set of baggage, its own unspoken agreements about what something meant.
> “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?”
I'm sure in many cultures, and in many friend groups, this would go over fine. If I said this to someone, they would go into shock. They're unspoken thought would be "wow if he's saying that to me, I must annoy the shit out of him". Maybe not! Maybe that's my own unspoken understanding! But I do think this leaves a "scar" even a small one. "Direct" conversations are not without their own damaging effects. I think part of my social contract is to "deal" with things silently. Maybe in other cultures that's not the case.
If someone said that to me, I would be happy to have that conversation, but I would be on pins and needles around that person, and possibly overthinking how "annoying" I'm being, and I would have at least a small amount of resentment for the person saying it – "I have lots of friends I don't annoy, what's wrong with this person"
Just to be pretentious, this also reminds me of a conversation in Infinite Jest, where the canadian and the american spy argue about whether its right to teach their young what right and wrong is, or whether its right to discover it. The example is eating candy.
I think in the US, if you tell a kid not to eat candy, they will eat candy as soon as their guardian isn't watching. I'm not sure that's true elsewhere, for a myriad of reasons. By extension, if you tell me I'm annoying you, I might go through the motions of "repairing" the relationship, while I actually just distance myself. Ofc, that depends on who says it
One of the most effective ways to see this at play is watching most recorded Let's Plays of Return Of The Obra Dinn. The game uses a couple of very "game logic" contrivances to enable the writing to focus on very organic, real world logic. Most deductions the game requires of you are straightforward enough that you could explain them to a random passerby, and they'd find it perfectly reasonable.
It's absolutely mind-boggling how often people will say out loud what they (correctly) think the solution is, because it's a perfectly mundane day-to-day observation, then proceed to discard it because they expect the game to be engaging in trickery.
At perhaps its most extreme, the very first vignette you witness has a guy banging on the Captain's cabin door, shouting "Captain, open up, or we'll take more than those shells", and the guy inside the cabin answering "you bastards may take exactly what I give you!" before opening the door and shooting the door-banging guy in the chest. I've seen people literally be unwilling to commit to the idea that the guy inside the cabin was, indeed, the ship's Captain.
This advice sounds good on paper (or on Substack) but in reality any given verbal confrontation is a roll of the dice. I have tried what she's advocating many times over the years and on quite a few occasions the result was I was shut down and hard by the interlocutor. Other times, the interlocutor paid lip service to the point I brought up but slid right back into old/unhelpful patterns after we discussed it. Sometimes it created a much larger conflict than what had been brewing, and not one that ultimately got us to a better place (one time it almost caused a physical fight!). Often I regretted opening up the issue in the first place.
My lesson is: Sure, don't be totally non-communicative about your issues but pick your entries as well as you can and be willing to guess that some are not worth it. And also know you'll often be wrong in your guesses. You can't really win this game.
I can also say from personal experience this verbal confrontation like the author is suggesting can make innocuous situations devolve quickly. There was one guy in a friend group I had who I felt like I couldn't really connect with. He always seemed very awkward and only willing to engage in surface-level conversations with me compared to everybody else. I tried to (gently) ask him about it, basically like the author would suggest doing, and it turns out he did not feel like he was being awkward, surface-level, or failing to connect at all. He thought we had a real genuine, deep friendship. What I said really hurt him and there was a lot of hard feelings on his end. Needless to say we did not go back to being friends after that, and I ruined what could have been a good friendship if I had taken the time to reflect that maybe my interpretation of awkwardness or lack of connection was coming from me and not experienced by him.
It can really hurt relationships to bring up things like this if it isn't experienced by the other person, it might be all in your head.
I think Roger Ebert had a quote about movies where the problem could be resolved if the audience could shout one sentence to the characters.
Ebert called this "Idiot Plot"
I agree with this post, and suspect a lot of us will see the logic in approaching problems like this.
However, this approach isn’t universal and should be used with caution. A head-on approach isn’t effective with a person who is conflict-avoidant. Any of the given examples, no matter how gentle the delivery, will be seen as a personal attack and cause to pull away.
The famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan claimed that if everyone said exactly what needs be said, language wouldn't exist or something like that. I'd wager movies are a reflection of how our psyche works, including 'main character syndrome', omissions of causality for narrative coherency, etc.
I'm not sure I understand that quote. Doesn't language exist because there isn't any other way to say some things? How else would one say most things?
Most things don't need to be said, like my comment. I could have just had a thought, and continued on with my day.
I like this quote; Language, according to Lacan, is a process of speaking whereby one's history is made real.
I have had friends fail to communicate in astounding ways. Once, four of us were planning to go somewhere. A friend suggested somewhere else, I and my other friend agreed, but the fourth friend was not presnet. I told my first friend to tell the one person who was not present about the change in plans. He asks why... I tell him, well, the other guy isn't going to know we changed plans because he isn't here.
Basic communication goes a long way.
The thing I love most about the "why am I not just saying the boring, clumsy thing I'm actually thinking, instead of assuming everyone already understands it" rabbit hole is that once you actually commit to it, everything becomes simpler and easier. It takes away the pretense of religion, or anything supernatural, and it relieves you of ever having to feel "smart" because you're always one saying the dumbest things, it's just that no one else was daring to say them (which, ironically, doesn't make people think you're dumb, it just makes them introspect about why you would "just SAY that").
Of course, once you circle around to realizing that most human interaction is dependent upon insinuation and assumption (and how that often helps), and that most movies (media, in general) is made for people who haven't figured out how to be a person yet by people who haven't figured out the kind of person they really want to be yet, it lessens the overall takeaways from it. But things are a lot simpler!
> it relieves you of ever having to feel "smart" because you're always one saying the dumbest things, it's just that no one else was daring to say them
It’s actually had the opposite effect for me, of making everyone think I’m smarter.
It turns out that a lot of the time when nobody was mentioning the “obvious” solution or how we would avoid the “obvious” problem, it wasn’t because I was too dumb or inexperienced to know the implicit answer… but because actually nobody else in the room found those obvious. They’d not noticed at all.
You have to be careful with this, though. Nobody in management wants to hear why their process for collecting and/or analyzing “metrics” is flawed and renders the whole thing totally meaningless in ways that a slightly-bright high schooler who halfway paid attention is their science classes should be able to spot—in fact, the point was only to pretend to be “data driven”, not to do passable science (that’s way too expensive, companies are interested in doing it approximately never), in practically every case. All that stuff’s fake, and everyone’s just pretending it’s not, so pointing it out is gauche. Just nod along and don’t mention the blatant confounders that plausibly allow that the real trend line goes the other way. Or that to get a useful dataset they’ll need minimum two years of gathering data to even begin to draw conclusions… and we have not been collecting those data, so the timer starts now at best. Nobody cares, you’ve missed the point, which has nothing to do with actually learning things to guide decisions.
Isn't this called "name it to tame it?" When you engage higher level cognitive functions it reportedly helps you escape predominantly emotional responses.
I'd like this to be a Reddit post, and people reply with their successes and failures using the method(s).
Might sound simple in theory, reality might get messy.
I feel this inner conflict of yours could be resolved by posting to Reddit and asking for anecdotes.
> 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?”
This person did not watch Good Will Hunting. I'm not a fan of the film, I just know for a fact several characters do this at several times. That is, y'know, the plot.
I haven't read further enough to discern whether this is AI slop, but it doesn't look promising.
In fact, the entire movie's point is that simply HEARING others tell you those things doesn't do anything! The inner journey of the character getting to a place where he believes it himself -- or rather believes himself to be worthy of a greater path -- is THE crucial part.
So the example is exactly opposite the author's intent.
That said, I liked the article and agree with its point. In fact, I'd guess that effective leaders all have learned techniques and ability to remain calm/comfortable in having these blunt conversations that cut to the chase (but still value and hear people).
Ultimately I think it’s not really about going to far in one way or the other. I tend to be very blunt in my dealings with people to a fault. I wouldn’t say I’m mean, but like, in order for blunt truths to be effective I think they have to be somewhat rare, so I’m trying to adapt to be more strategic in my bluntness, but most of the time, let things go and maybe subtly steer rather than just calling things out all the time.
FWIW I don’t get the “AI slop” spidey-sense when reading this, despite the liberal use of em dashes. I thought it was well written and makes some interesting points.
With the amount of em dash usage it probably could be AI slop.
Even if it's not, it's still total garbage. It reads like the Critical Drinker screaming "if only these people put their emotions and flaws to one side and behaved like completely rational beings with perfect information!"
I heard the Critical Drinker's voice while reading that.
What the author ignores is speaking from the point of view of the omniscient observer these things seem obvious. But the characters, even if they were purely rational happiness optimizers, lack all the information the movie viewer has.
Its certainly quaint and lucky to be able to solve problems that easily I suppose.
I have 4 people in my immediate social orbit. Two of them have serious behavioral disorders - one has been in inpatient psychiatry (twice), the other has never sought any treatment and in fact denies she has any problems. Another has somewhat less severe behavioral disorders but much more serious physical problems. The last one is simply very old and has health problems.
What is to be gained by "talking about the real problems" with this group? Pretty much nothing, because none of them can or will do anything about it. And the few times myself or someone else has brought up some problem directly, lets just say it didn't go well.
As a meta comment I have yet to see a take from this author that didn't seem to have some pretty clear bubblethink behind it. Not great to be edging into an epistemology domain I associate with Bryan Caplan - like a person whose opinions you pretty much always want to invert to get at closer to the real truth.
A better example might be The Acolyte, though it isn't a movie. The entire plot is based on a lack of communication. Not to mention being a pretty bad show all around.
The fact that we had Andor and that garbage utterly baffles me
Too true. Andor was pretty great and definitely deserved more attention. I think the fan base has just been disappointed one too many times to take a chance.
I think a more common thing is people treating movies as real. “Gattaca explained why this is bad”. “Torment Nexus blah blah”.
"It's complicated" is probably the line I hate the most in movies for this very reason. It's lazy writing made vocal.
This article is about movies skimping out on the communication skills of their characters as a narrative device-- it's a lot like the fact that many pre-cellphone movies would have been over in 60 seconds if only the characters had a cellphone. We live in a world with cellphones now, so they're usually expected in movies. We still don't live in a world where people know how to communicate.
Movie logic-- or more generally "narrative bias"-- taints people's thinking in ways far beyond failures to communicate. I've encountered a lot of people who fall for scams or believe conspiracy theories for reasons that ultimately amount to "if life were a story, this is what would happen".
A related problem, which was mentioned somewhere on HN about a year ago, is that too many movies have a "chosen one" mindset. The entire Marvel Overextended Universe runs on this. They're all Chosen Ones. Real life does not work that way. Read biographies of famous people. Most of them involve grinding upward.
(Trump is the counterexample. From zero to President. Nobody did that before. Every other president in the last century had some major public office first. This may be part of his appeal. He fits the model Hollywood teaches people to expect.)
I'm getting slight "Is this your first day on Planet Earth?" vibes from this. They are pointing out something real and true and valid. And yet - they seem to think that just saying stuff out loud will fix things.
I mean - yeah. Sometimes it might - but usually there's layers of scar tissue and pain and misunderstanding in the way.
In fact - if there's one myth movies perpetuate, it's that of the "epiphany". Two characters finally name the thing, talk it though and there's permanent change.
Permanent change is rare - more so permanent change precipitated by a single conversation.
>In fact - if there's one myth movies perpetuate, it's that of the "epiphany". Two characters finally name the thing, talk it though and there's permanent change.
>Permanent change is rare - more so permanent change precipitated by a single conversation.
My mom loooooovves talking about problems. She uses talking as a replacement for doing. She thinks if she's address the issue through words she's solved it and doesn't have to change her awful behavior. She's "addressed" it in her mind so it's no longer a problem.
She can't understand why nobody likes her.
> 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.
That's the core of most of real world issues be it at work or relationships of any type. I can also personally attest most of issues of any type in my megacorp are caused by bad communication. How many times you see a barely functional marriage where unspoken things hang around and one party is afraid to tell them to the other side, and subtle hints are ignored. How many folks from older generations had a good talk about their true sexual preferences for example. Some nationalities have issues speaking frankly, ie British circle around issues with too much politeness. Good luck getting any Indian (in India) telling you "no" or "I don't know" (spent so much time wandering in wrong directions in good ol' times before smart phones).
Remove this issue and psychologists lose 95% of their work. Perfectly clear communication is an exception in this world.
I'd say movies gradually found this topic since many people will find themselves in those movies and identify with struggles of protagonists. Then logically frequent ending resolving many if not all issues allows people to have a little dream of resolving stuff they struggle with (subconsciously or consciously) in their lives.
There is another way to think about things, which is that people shouldn't have to talk so much unless say they're a part of a family. For people communication outside their family, there should be tighter contractual obligations that define interactions and expectations.
To say it differently, define the smart contract that details the expected behavior! Everything else is then supposed to be mechanical. If one doesn't want to abide by the contract, one doesn't then get the associated payments or privileges!
> 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?!”
People in real-world situations aren't exactly good at recognizing what's really happening, much less talking about it directly. Humans spend a lot of energy on self-deception, as well as lying to each other to reinforce everyone's respective delusions.
> 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?!”
Yup it's insane. At the end of a very long series of three movies I told my father: "OK so this all basically happened because the person who sent the letter considered the (snail) mail service to be flawless and didn't bother to make sure the recipient got the letter in the first place".
Doesn't matter which (french) movies: some dumb plot where relatives don't know they're relatives because the only person who knew didn't bother to make sure the letter explaining they were relatives arrived.
Not naming the movies otherwise we'll get nitpicking.
TFA is right: it happens all the time in movie plots and really doesn't help with the suspension of disbelief.
Pretty sure if someone went to the author and told her how to fix her life's problems, she won't react the way she expects Ryan Gosling or Matt Damon to.