71–80 of 181 posts
"The Room", by Tommy Wiseau, is a movie where Chekhov's gun isn't applied. It contains lots of small happenings with no further relevance. It has lots of other issues, technically speaken. But together they make this film not only amateurish, but it also gives it a certain kind of realism. In real life stuff happens and still may have no further relevance to the "story" after all. In real life there is nobody enforci…
This principle kills surprises because a soon you see the rifle you know what will happen. A little bit of misleading is not a bad thing.
Salman Rushdie is an example of a master writer who will eat this cake and still have it. He often states preety early in the book something like "this was Y, X's wife, who will later kill him in his sleep, in his room, with a bread knife", and when the time of killing comes he will still manage to surprise you.
> Toadvine glanced at the man's forehead but the man's hat was pushed down almost to his eyes. The man smiled and forked the hat back slightly with his thumb. The print of the hatband lay on his forehead like a scar but there was no mark other. Only on the inside of his lower arm was there tattooed a number which Toadvine would see in a Chihuahua bathhouse and again when he would cut down the man's torso where it hung skewered by its heels from a treelimb in the wastes of Pimeria Alta in the fall of that year.
It's not really the gun on the wall, the bread knife, or the tattoo. It's the narrator revealing a kind of untrustworthy omniscience by spoiling future details of the story.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprise is overrated. Suspense is superior. The best explanation of the difference is given by Hitchcock in an interview with Truffaut. We see two characters talking for 45 seconds. Then a bomb goes off, that was under the table. The audience didn't know there was a bomb: big surprise; but the dialogue between the characters is completely irrelevant and eclipsed by the explosion. Now imagine the same scene, but befo…
You see a man putting a bag under a table. Two man arrive, sitting at the table, you wait for the bomb to explode because the bag must have a meaning. The meeting ends, the men stand up, one is killed by headshot. And your scene depends on the characters. Is one the main character? Highly unlikely he get killed. It's even worse if it's a TV series. Main character is strapped to a bomb? No problem. Guest star is strap…
At the beginning of the show. A few seasons in, lots of people developed plot armor.
I've seen this principle come up a few times but I don't think I fully understand it. For example, assuming a passage in a story where a protagonist enters person X's house and a particular room is described in much detail. The described detail does not necessarily advance the story but instead does "character building" hinting at the personality of person X. There literally could be a loaded gun hanging on the wall…
It makes somewhat more concrete sense when you take into account the startling brevity of some of Chekhov's own work. I don't think you have to agree with the notion as some universal literary principle to appreciate he was a consummate and successful adherent to his own advice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Marge finds out from her friend that nice guy Mike is actually an unstable liar, she starts to question whether the “nice” Jerry might have similar secrets
There's probably slightly more to this. When I was 10 years old my family moved from Chicago to a small town in Wisconsin. My dad commuted to the city four days a week and we still maintained many connections to Chicago. This town was about 90 minutes from Chicago (in the Midwest we don't measure travel in distance units, we use time). To this day I have friends in this town that literally haven't (ever) removed thei…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right but all those things play a role.
They play a role in a different sense: if you see a rifle it may be there because it's going to be fired or maybe because the character likes rifles. Could you imagine The Big Lebowski without bowling? And yet bowling has nothing to do with the story.
"The Room", by Tommy Wiseau, is a movie where Chekhov's gun isn't applied. It contains lots of small happenings with no further relevance. It has lots of other issues, technically speaken. But together they make this film not only amateurish, but it also gives it a certain kind of realism. In real life stuff happens and still may have no further relevance to the "story" after all. In real life there is nobody enforci…
It’s also celebrated as the worst film ever made.
Good luck applying this to the "Lost" series!
"The Room", by Tommy Wiseau, is a movie where Chekhov's gun isn't applied. It contains lots of small happenings with no further relevance. It has lots of other issues, technically speaken. But together they make this film not only amateurish, but it also gives it a certain kind of realism. In real life stuff happens and still may have no further relevance to the "story" after all. In real life there is nobody enforci…
> charming mistakes One character being played by three different actors (either that, or three characters being so similar I confused them as the same character despite being three different actors) is hardly charming IMO. Longer form stories, such as Game of Thrones (where Azor Ahai, and other such plotlines are literally killed off) are probably more entertaining. It sucks to see a fan theory turn out to not matte…
There is also the McGuffin which appears to matter, but exists entirely to elicit character action. For instance, in “Psycho” the plot line about the stolen money is dropped almost as soon as it is established, but it did its job by getting Marion on the run and into the motel.