June 13, 1999: all you want is something good

I'm probably stretching the term "plot hole" in my review of the Phantom Menace, but I think it's fair to want a single term that means "a place where the plot goes unconvincingly"--either because it's internally inconsistent, because it relies grossly on luck, or because characters are totally unrealistically motivated.

I'm just going to keep calling all of these things "plot holes", since I lack an appropriate term.

One of the things I've been doing to learn about screenwriting is downloading lots of screenplays--mostly to movies I've seen--and reading through them. Very useful to see how things are put together, to see what it left to the director and what's not.

Very useful, also, to follow the plot much more clearly than in a movie. You don't miss any lines of dialogue. Sometimes things are just much more obvious in screenplay form. sex, lies, and videotape worked for me a lot better as a screenplay. Partly this might be because it would have worked better had I seen it a second time. Partly it might be because of the actual performances in the film bringing down the material. Partly it's because it's always clear from the moment you meet them who the characters are and how they relate to each other. It's supposed to be obvious from the voice-overs that John is Ann's husband, but it's spelled out in the screenplay (she mentions John, and he's referred to in the screenplay as John even though nobody calls him by name). Sure, in the movie you figure that's who he is, but you have to spend a while thinking I think that's who it is, which rather breaks the suspension of disbelief.

Mainly, though, I've noticed how easy it is to find plot holes. Pretty much every screenplay I've downloaded, there's a plot hole or some sort of flaw. Here's a bunch of examples; note that these are screenplays that don't necessarily represent the final product; the scenes may have been changed or cut:

• Chinatown: The climactic moment in the first act when the real Mrs. Mulway is revealed is weakened by the fact that she doesn't have a legal leg to stand on with her threats, but everybody acts like she does. Maybe there's a difference with modern laws, I dunno.
• sex, lies, and videotape: also slightly weakened by a flawed legal argument when John asks Cynthia whether she got Graham to sign something to say he wouldn't redistribute--Cynthia would have had to sign something for him to legally redistribute. It would be OK if it were just a mistake on the character's part... but John is a lawyer.
• 48 Hours: In the initial breakout, instead of slipping a gun to Gantz, had there simply been three or four bad guys at once, they could easily have done things the direct way. So the drama of the gun sneakery is a little bogus. Obviously fictionally there's nobody else they could trust, i.e. this is all justifiable--but the trivial ease with which a few people could have pulled it off makes the escape less dramatic overall. (At least in the universe of movies where we're used to gangs of people and the ease of picking up extra bad guys--I think 48 hours is trying to be set in a more realistic world.)
• Godzilla: This is an early script (hunt around on Wordplay in the archive section), not very related to the final movie (which I never even saw), and the authors are very defensive about the fact that the movie was crap but this screenplay wasn't. However, this screenplay has the absolute worst examples of relying on coincidence for drama. I don't mean simple things like the good guys only uncovering the alien creature just at the moment it awakens (which is forgiveable); I mean the fact that they have two giant creatures fighting each other and basically ignoring humanity, so to create dramatic tension, they have to throw the humans in the way of the fight, which is mostly done by chance:
  • Aaron on the Golden Gate Bridge
  • Tina in New York
  • The gryphon and Godzilla just happen to land next to the group when they're being intimidated by Pike
  • The monsters just happen to cave in the tunnel where the group of humans are trying to get through
  • to be honest, at this point I stopped reading, although I think there must have been at least one more to have triggered my annoyance
  There were plenty of other little annoying coincidences besides the monster-human interactions:
  • The sub crashing into the ship--check out the "big sky" theory of defense against AA batteries. It's just improbable.
  • I think there was another chance occurence but I don't recall it now.
  • Personal opinion: I don't care for the Aaron archetype--his "new agey" beliefs turn out to be valid, with scientific basis due to alien influences long ago, and the fact that they were true seems to justify his believing them for no good reason. (Check out the notion of knowledge as "justified true belief" in philosophy.) Essentially, he got lucky.