anfscu-blog on tumblr did a great series of posts on movie tropes. Here are all the posts:
Rescue as Aphrodisiac
The Myth: If you rescue a woman, she will fall in love (or at least go to bed) with you
The Perpetrators: Speed, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Under Siege, Commando, Snakes on a Plane, Romancing the Stone, every James Bond movie, Spiderman, Transformers, Cobra, The Bourne Identity, The Terminator
There are many ways for a man to attract a woman. He could issue a botanical statement of purpose, filling her room up entirely with roses (Twins, Days of Thunder.) He could stare at her like a cagey stalker and then look away when she notices (Pretty in Pink, The Secret of My Success, The Karate Kid.) The most efficient way for a man to seduce the object of his affection, though, seems to be saving her life. A good old fashioned rescue is nature’s Spanish Fly.
It’s not just restricted to typical heroics either. The power of a rescue is so effective that it works even when the woman in question doesn’t know she needs to be rescued. Was Pretty Woman aware she needed Richard Gere to roll up beneath her balcony in a very large limousine? No. In the bizarre 1987 film, Overboard, did Goldie Hawn realize she was slowly dying inside, despite living a life of ridiculous luxury aboard a never-ending yacht cruise? No, she did not. She had to learn that lesson the hard way: with Kurt Russell kidnapping her so that she could raise his four sons in a dirty, backwoods shack as part of a sadistic revenge plot. As you do.
Hell, rescue is such a strong aphrodisiac that it can even bring divorced or separated couples back together (e.g. Die Hard, Jurassic Park 3, Twister.) Apparently, traditional Couples Therapy should be sought out only if they can’t find some kind of a hostage crisis to get caught up in. Nothing reignites that old spark like a hostage situation and a body count.
The only problem with the rescue scenario is that some people routinely save lives all the time without getting fallen in love with. Yes, statistically speaking, firemen have less trouble getting laid than the average male person, but that’s just because they are ensconced in heroism all day. If every woman they saved subsequently fell in love then I would not be typing this right now because my building would have burned down. Do loan officers score dates when they rescue a woman from financial ruin? Do nutritionists get handjobs when they rescue a woman from gluten? Probably not. When you rescue someone, you do get to feel hunky-dory about yourself, just don’t expect to get any action out of the deal.
Winning One Game Begins a Streak
The Myth: When sports teams with a losing record win one game, they go on to win the next several games in a row
The Perpetrators: Major League, Eddie, Bull Durham, Rebound, The Rookie, Glory Road, Rookie of the Year, The Mighty Ducks, The Waterboy, Hardball, Wildcats, Mr. 3000, Ladybugs, Juwanna Mann, Semi-Pro, Slap Shot, Kicking and Screaming, Bad News Bears
The field of professional sports has seen plenty of spectacular win streaks throughout history. The Miami Dolphins went undefeated in 1972. Lance Armstrong won seven consecutive Tour de France titles. And Takeru Kobayashi won the Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest for an unprecedented six years running. These things happen. Well, that’s only partly true. While these things do happen, they don’t just happen. Win streaks are the result of high-caliber athletes working at peak performance with near-constant training and superhuman focus. What they are not the result of is pluck and stick-to-itiveness from the scrappy underdogs everyone counted out.
Whether it’s a ragtag* group of little league kids or a well-intentioned but crap-lousy WNBA franchise, underdog teams in sports movies invariably end up riding miracle win streaks all the way to the Big Game. The first time the viewer sees the team in action serves as a showcase of jackassery—every spastic player bringing his or her own unique flaws together, forming into sort of a Voltron of athletic incompetence. If it’s a comedy, the team embraces their stench of failure like a kidnapping victim with Stockholm syndrome. If it’s a drama, the players are quietly resigned to their lot. Either way, everything turns around very soon and very abruptly, following the first unlikely win.
What makes no sense is that if the team was so bad in the first place, and it was such an amazing feat for them to win that first game, how are they now able to handily dispatch opponents, game after game? Through inspiration alone? Bribes? Kismet? We never get to see the building blocks of the strategy that fuels this sudden momentum; just a montage sequence and some helpful newspaper clippings that chart the team’s shocking success.
Sometimes the reason for the win streak is less vague—the team gets a ringer. Be it a man dressed in really transparent drag–an alarmingly frequent occurence–or a clinically psychotic water boy; as soon as the team gets one phenom onboard, their fortunes instantly turn around. On a basketball team where a LeBron can simply dominate, this plan might work—but in soccer or baseball? This trick becomes especially difficult between the point when every player gets mad at the ringer for being a ball hog, and the point when the coach benches the ringer so his or her useless teammates can somehow win it on their own.
What we’re meant to infer is that all it took was a confidence boost for these goofballs to suddenly match up to the already super-confident and highly skilled rival. If that’s the case, such victory seems less the result of discipline and drive, and more like a divine affirmation of the team’s innate goodness. Do all losing teams inherently deserve to win, simply by merit of being less likely to do so? If the kids who suck at sports believe that, they have no incentive to learn how not to suck. A certain percentage of kids are just going to suck at sports, but they should at least suck on their own gangly, butterfingered, completely uncoordinated terms and not because they believe that sucking is no impediment to success as long as you believe in yourself and just have fun out there.
Can we all agree that “ragtag” is just a stupid, terrible word, and that it should be cast far away, beyond the reach of even irony?
Backstabbers Love Bragging
The Myth: People only do only the most cursory inspection before revealing their ongoing intentions to backstab a person—a person who is in the same area at that very moment
The Perpetrators: Loser, 13 Going on 30, Dinner with Schmucks, Whatever It Takes, She’s All That
It’s hard work totally screwing somebody over. For instance, when setting up a colleague to take a major fall so that you might rise up the corporate ladder in their stead, you shouldn’t just take a quick look down the hallway before pulling a cohort aside to discuss the fact that you’re a complete sack of shit who backstabs coworkers. No, you probably would go down the street to a Starbucks, buy some coffee, and then go somewhere else EVEN FURTHER AWAY so that there is absolutely no chance you’ll be overheard. In movies, though, this conversation, whose sole purpose is to confirm that a plan is indeed underway, takes place at the scene of the crime where the hero and her friends work, as if to eliminate any chance at all of getting away with it.
Picture what this must be like. You’ve consciously decided to dick somebody over and you’ve come to grips with that. There was probably a long mulling-over session in a bathtub to the strains of a Beethoven concerto. You evaluated the risk v. the reward, and the latter won out. Then, after going through all the tortuous moral justification and actually putting a plan in motion, you decide to either talk about the logistics out in the open or— even worse—brag about it? If you’re going to go through all that trouble, you might as well stick the landing! You don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by cluing others in to your misdeeds before they’re even done.
“Now that I’ve somehow fooled Laney Boggs into coming to the prom with me by pretending to be a nice person, I cannot wait to date-rape her at the hotel when this is all over,” announces the D-bag in She’s All That, to a random person in the bathroom for no reason. Sure, Laney Boggs was just nominated for prom queen, but probably nobody else at the prom would have a problem with this plan. It just makes sense!
The vanity-brag is nothing new. It’s why James Bond villains all wanted JB to know the full extent of their plan before killing him—a plot device brilliantly mocked in The Incredibles, wherein Jason Lee’s villain chides himself for “monologuing.” But here’s a thought: what about maybe waiting until after things have already gone according to plan and you’ve totally gotten away with it, and only then bragging? That’s why OJ Simpson put out his tauntingly titled confessional_, If IDid It_, 12 years after he killed his wife, instead of while the trial was still underway. If you’re going to be a total piece of garbage in life, you’ve got to commit to it, then admit to it—as Johnny Cochran might say.
Snobs Vs. Slobs
The Myth: Zoning ordinances exists only for snobs to try (unsuccessfully) to remove slobs from some area
The Perpetrators: The House Bunny, PCU, Sydney White, Caddyshack 2, Revenge of the Nerds, Old School
Hollywood obviously doesn’t think very highly of the real estate business. Negotiating purchase of a compound in Pasadena is apparently such a hellish process that movie producers end up taking out their frustrations the only way they know how—onscreen. Who are these realtors in the movies who knowingly place a group of doofuses (doofi?) in a house with a glaring loophole in favor of the Masters of the Universe types nearby? Eviction-forcing technicalities seem like the kind of thing a realtor would have to disclose. If I were building my anything-goes, sloppy-parties frat house somewhere on campus—and FYI, if I were, it would be a disgusting palace of Bacchanalian delights—I’d be rather keen on finding out whether it were being built on my rival fraternity’s uptight, date-rapey property.
The realtor’s incompetence can only be assumed because every time a snobs vs. slobs scenario takes place in a movie, the snobs usually end up finding a zoning ordinance proving that the fun-loving bunch (the one causing all that racket) are in violation of some draconian code. The details are murky at best, but the point is made: God hates slobs. While it is true that the odds in a legal setting would be stacked against those with fewer connections, it is kind of silly that, with a little digging, it always turns out that the snobs are naturally in the right. This plot point is completely backwards, though. In real life, whether the snobs were justified would be a moot point because their legal firepower would surely win the day. In the movies, however, as if by divine provenance, the law is on their side, but then it turns out that it takes more than legal and political backing to beat a group armed with so much pluck.
If that were the case, though, and the scrappy underdogs turned out to be trespassing, why the hell are we rooting for them? If the snobs do actually have the law on their side, they kind of deserve the land, fair and square—even if they are a serious collection of assholes. Were it only the kind of world where we could decide which shitty technicalities should be observed and which should be ignored! If the slobs put half the effort into looking around for a new property to lease as they did in wrecking shenanigans on the snobs, then they would find a fiscally sound rental unit in no time. Fortunately for them, though, the snobs are prone to letting everything come down to a single bet on some stupid contest or whatever, so the slobs needn’t bother checking any listings.
Make a Scene When You Quit a Job
The Myth: If you’ve been treated unfairly at work, the best way to address the issue is by quitting your job in the most dramatic way possible and publicly humiliating your boss
The Perpetrators: Bridget Jones’ Diary, Working Girl, Office Space, Joe vs the Volcano, RV
During the summer of 2010, flight attendant Steven Slater quit his job in perhaps the most theatrical way anybody has ever done so: by denouncing a particularly unbearable passenger over the loudspeaker, grabbing a beer from the beverage cart, and sliding down the inflatable emergency exit ramp. Slater briefly became a national folk hero, a symbol of the mad-as-hell attitude prevalent in recession-era America. Oddly enough, though, his rage wasn’t directed at the establishment, but at the consumer base. The people who applauded his swan song were probably also irritating Starbucks customers in their own right. Slater has clearly seen a lot of in-flight movies—in his mind, he is no doubt living inside of one—but if he’d paid more attention, he would have noticed that when dramatically quitting a job, your grievances are supposed to go up the chain of command, not down.
When people in movies are treated like crap by their employer, only one response option seems to rise above the rest: quitting in the most public way imaginable, and also embarrassing the dickface boss. (“This’ll sure show him!”) Movie characters are always trying to teach someone else a lesson, as if everyone who’s a dickface is but one mere comeuppance away from changing their ways forever. But nobody ever learns anything and nobody ever changes their ways. Okay, you’ve exacted your revenge and it probably felt pretty rad and your hand was sore from so many high fives, but food still costs money and it’s nice to sleep in a bed at night.
In the long run, maybe shooting an email on over to HR might be more of an effective strategy for addressing the problem. Perhaps a private conversation is the way to go, confronting your employer behind closed doors. Nope, apparently the best thing to do here is burning this bridge and playing in the ashes—having ash-ball fights, making ash angels, and so forth. Image control never seems to be that big a concern. Forgot the fact that a dramatic exit is the kind of thing that might follow a person on future job interviews, who would want everyone to remember them first and foremost as someone who believes in vengeance?
Soon after the Steven Slater incident, a video made the rounds online depicting a similar situation. In it, a young woman quits her job with a snarky powerpoint presentation aimed at her higher-ups. This video paired all the boiling-point rage of Slater’s leap of faith with all cutesiness of a movie character sticking it to her slave-driving boss. The video was captivating in a voyeuristic way—look at this poor girl killing her career forever—but it lacked the boldness of jumping out of a plane. Steven Slater was such an exaggerated caricature that no self-respecting writer would bother to invent him, for fear of being ridiculous. When the powerpoint video turned out to be a hoax, though, it was no surprise because its star was so perfectly an office comedy character she couldn’t actually exist.
Oddly Specific Guesses
The Myth: When people make uninformed guesses with great specificity, they are often proven correct
The Perpetrators: Wild Hogs, Singles, A Life Less Ordinary, The Hudsucker Proxy, Weird Science, My Blue Heaven
On a lark, I once paid a visit to a psychic with my girlfriend. In due course, the psychic informed me that I was a very successful financial analyst, and that I would soon make a smart investment which would leave me well off forever. When reading the fortune of my girlfriend (who turned out to be a month away from breaking up with me), the psychic predicted that we would be moving in together very soon. The point of all this is that even those of us who consider ourselves gifted with clairvoyance cannot help but make wildly inaccurate guesses at times. That is why it’s kind of silly that when people in the movies make these oddly specific guesses, they’re often dead on.
Movie characters have the tendency to unleash random, unlikely hypotheses about the subject of any conversation, and end up hitting a bingo. Par exemplar, there’s an ongoing joke in A Life Less Ordinary about the novel Ewan McGregor’s character is writing—as he starts describing his alt-history thriller, wherein Marilyn Monroe and JFK have secretly borne a baby together, whoever is listening always correctly guesses that the child grows up to solve a big mystery. It’s funny because of how not-obvious that twist is? Who knows? This trait would just be irritating if the person guessing was wrong, but the fact that they’re usually right gives viewers the papal blessing to go around making bold presumptions about other people’s stuff.
In real life, nine times out of ten you are going to be way off the mark with whatever oddball guess. When the girl you’re seeing describes her former boyfriend’s sensitive nature, it kind of makes you sound like a dick if you guess that the boyfriend had a ponytail. Whether or not the old boyfriend did in fact have a ponytail for some reason, it only makes you seem smug for hazarding a guess in the first place. “Congratulations on your sociological pattern-recognition skills, Master,” Campbell Scott in Singles must be expecting Kyra Sedgwick to say. “Let’s please go into the other room and make sex now.”
People are bad enough as listeners already–the last thing they need to see as an audience is specious reasoning made into an old standby. Why should people play Sherlock Holmes in conversations and deduct elaborate theories out of little details? (I know the ponytail thing isn’t an elaborate theory, but please bear with me here.) Sometimes when a person is talking to you, it’s best to just zip up and listen. Unless you’ve stolen Doc’s time machine and picked up a copy of the 2015 Gray’s Sports Almanac before going back to 1985, keep those predictions to yourself. In fact, even then you should keep ‘em to yourself. Space-time continuum and all.
How Crowds of Drunk People Work
The Myth: If you create any kind of loud spectacle in a bar, crowds will instantly form around to cheer you on and possibly join in
The Perpetrators: Yes Man, 27 Dresses, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Twins, Top Gun
While it’s true that drunken bar-goers can be a bit more accepting of spontaneity than your average dead sober financial advisor, these people have standards. They don’t openly submit to watching just anyone make a spectacle of themselves. They need to be romanced. They need to be tantalized. If they’re going to be roused from the discussion of Rilke’s minor works they are no doubt involved in, it has to be for something good. That’s why it doesn’t make sense that in movies, crowds seem to form in bars and restaurants the moment that anyone gets drunk and decides the time for, say, goofy card tricks has arrived. Let’s give credit where credit’s due: drunk people are way more selective than that.
It seems like the meer fact of someone behaving outlandishly is enough to draw a crowd in a bar, but that is simply not true. This is the attitude that makes the super-drunk girl at any party feel like a superstar. This is the attitude that leads to the worst impromptu karaoke you’ve ever had inflicted upon you. The crowd watching Katherine Heigl sing on top of the bar looks like they’re having the time of their lives. They can’t believe their luck! But crowds of dudes in a non-collegiate bar aren’t really going to have their minds blown by the prospect of this girl screaming a song at them. Not when she’s 100% clothed and accompanied by a man. All crowds, especially drunk ones, have short attention spans. They might ironically cheer your awful karaoke moment because yay, something’s happening, but they lose interest just as quickly.
People in bars do enjoy being privy to a spectacle, and everybody wants to see a jackass make a fool out of himself, but nobody goes to a bar hoping for such a performance. These things have to occur organically. The ridiculous things that crazy drunk characters in movies do to show precisely how crazy and drunk they are—particularly when it’s the straight-laced character finally loosening up—always reek of pre-packaged wackiness. And yet, people gather and cheer like trained seals because that’s what they’re there for. The result of movies portraying people in bars as an audience perpetually laying in wait for a performance is that people who’ve seen these movies will come of drinking age thinking that any ridiculous, drunken stunt they try to pull in a crowded bar will be readily embraced by all. Fortunately for the rest of us, the frequency with which bar fights occur in moves is probably more accurate, so these things have a way of evening out in the end.
Will the Star Player Play in The Big Game?
The Myth: Just before The Big Game, any player who is essential for a team’s victory is especially vulnerable to injury, sabotage, existential crisis, or being otherwise barred from participatingThe Perpetrators: Remember the Titans, Little Giants, The Replacements, Bend it Like Beckham, Rookie of the Year, Kingpin, Talladaga Nights, The Program, A League of Their Own, The Waterboy, Hardball, Necessary Roughness, The Wrestler, Bad News Bears, Ladybugs, Semi-Pro, Juwanna Mann
In the period immediately preceding The Big Game, most teams are plagued with anxiety, which is perfectly understandable. After all, team pride, history, and a plethora of sex-bets are all riding on the outcome of this—the defining moment of the season. In sports movies, though, nobody ever really seems worried about a thing that should be a source of great concern: will the star player actually be in the game? Considering how often this crisis comes to a head in movies, you’d think the entire team would be freaking out over it.
If real athletes don’t seem particularly concerned about losing their star player right before a big game, it’s because that is not a thing that constantly happens the way it does in movies. Quarterbacks never decide to take some moral stand right before the Super bowl. If they did, MVPs would be coddled even more than they already are in an effort to keep them from defecting (“Is there any part of today’s practice you found unsatisfactory, Mr. Manning?”) In a team so concerned about keeping one player happy, the other players would all start to feel like Dakota Fanning’s least talented younger sister. Nobody wants to feel like that.
Sometimes the threat comes from the other team (the evil team, naturally) seeking some kind of injunction against the star. That problem has an easy solution, though: always make sure the star is eligible and legit, because if he or she isn’t, then the other team should uncover that fact. That old adage about rules being made to be broken isn’t necessarily “true” per se. People go to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison all the time because most rules are meant to not be broken.
Excepting the case of major injury, though, whenever the star player winds up off the team just before the big game, this expulsion only lasts for about seven minutes of screentime. Inevitably, the MVP makes a miraculous comeback—at half time, probably while the grizzled coach reams out everyone else—to relieve the woefully inadequate replacement player and lead the gang to glory. Perhaps the frequency of this classic happy ending explains why nobody on the team seems to get too worried in the first place.
Stupid Fake Names
The Myth: If you have somebody asks what your recently cultivated alter ego’s name is, and then you stall for a minute before responding with a very goofy answer based on whatever happened to be lying around, the validity of this name will be accepted without question.
The Perpetrators: Hiding Out, The Associate, Mrs. Doubtfire
Sometimes, when the chips are down, you find yourself needing to create an alter ego. There are some goals you can’t achieve as yourself, so the only logical solution is to become someone else. It’s one of those problems that binds us all together because it could happen to literally anybody. It’s like that old saying, “When life gives you lemons, create a secret identity and make lemonade.” Of course once you’re ready to unleash your new persona out in public, perhaps to win back your family in the guise of a tranny housekeeper, you will need a new name. This is where things get tricky for some reason.
Amazingly enough, when people in the movies find themselves in this situation, they never seem to realize until the moment they’re finally asked for a name that a fake name would probably be a good thing to have. “Maybe we’re entering a super-casual post-name era,” they must think. “Maybe we’ll all just be people, finally, and not our names.” This lack of planning-ahead skills doesn’t bode well at all for the other challenges that lay ahead.
Upon realizing that Smith is too conspicuous, and stumped for other options, this person then looks around the room in a panic for any printed string of letters in their eyeline, and says it out loud immediately. The results always sound like something nobody in a million years would ever name a human child, but the person on the receiving end always accepts it at face value. Which is ridiculous. Even if they’re ultimately fooled, shouldn’t they at least be a little more incredulous at first? “Maxwell Hauser? Are you serious? Your parents named you after a brand of coffee grounds? What a sad little life you must have!”
It’s bad enough that whoever is being told this preposterous name accepts it, but the fact that this name is never given in a straight forward manner is where we really start veering away from recognizable reality. The name is always delivered after a long pause and some sputtering uh’s, with a hopeful tone that has a question mark at the end of it. (“Uh, my name is Doubtfire, I guess?”) If people were that easily taken in by impostors with goofball names, the world would fall apart. I just hope that if anyone ever saw someone who looked a little like me acting befuddled for five minutes before announcing myself as Chet Boyardee or something, they’d know to go tell me to F off.
The Dumb Friend
The Myth: Most groups of young friends have one member who is borderline-retarded, but nobody should be too worried about it.
The Perpetrators: Mean Girls, Little Giants, Josie and the Pussycats, Can’t Buy Me Love, Legally Blonde
We’ve all had that friend who was kinda dumb; especially back in school, when friendships materialized sometimes based on nothing more than desk placement. These friends came in many varieties. Some just had that vacant-stare-into-the-middle-distance look, in which not a whole lot of gears appear to be grinding upstairs. Others were incurious about most things in general, and therefore unable to successfully participate in most conversation. Dumb friends are not bad people. Actually, they’re pretty great! What could be a clearer harbinger of your own superlative intelligence than having a ringer by your side to emphasize the contrast? No friend in real life, though, is ever quite as dumb as The Dumb Friend in movies.
Everything this person says is some hack comedian’s punchline—a bizarre misunderstanding of whatever was just said, an uncomprehending belch of misinformation about who is currently president of the United States or what species of animal shits in the woods. People like this do really exist, of course, but their condition is not, like, a hoot—it’s grounds for treatment. Nobody in the movies ever seems that concerned about The Dumb Friend, though. They never make efforts to confirm whether any given display of extreme unawareness is really a joke delivered totally deadpan or whether the friend actually did believe that knock-knock funny couldn’t be told without the aid of an invisible door. Instead, everybody treats the bumbling character like you would a really old dog that has lately begun pooing everywhere again: with patience and a begrudgingly loyal sense of fondness. Little incredulous pats on the back instead of, say, referrals to the professionals. “That’s just Tony being Tony,” they say. It’s not just Tony being Tony, though—Tony needs special care.
A generous way to look at The Dumb Friend’s continued presence in school-set movies is that it’s as much an indictment of Bush era educational policies as The Wire season 4. If schools really did just accept that certain students’ every expression is one of demonstrated ignorance, then our classrooms would be overrun with even more undiagnosed learning disabilities than the number listed in some authoritative study that I can’t be bothered to look up right now. Also, on the flip side, if people as slow as The Dumb Friend were as common in real life, then caregivers might accidentally confuse their diagnosed wards with their merely functionally retarded onscreen counterparts. They would hear their patient claim that her breasts can tell her when it’s raining outside, and think, “it looks as though Karen’s condition has been upgraded to ‘blonde’ and/or ‘quirky,’ and she is now cured,” when that is probably not true. Karen needs help and if her friends don’t recognize it, then they could probably benefit from some assistance as well.
Your New Best Friend
The Myth: When you enroll in a new high school, you will immediately make a new best friend
The Perpetrators: Footloose, Never Been Kissed, Just One of the Guys, Mean Girls, Save the Last Dance, The Karate Kid, Clueless
It would be pretty boring to watch a movie where the new kid wandered around a high school campus alone for a few days or weeks before making any friends. How would they learn the caste system of this particular school without somebody else explaining it—observation and guesswork? Impossible! Fortunately, that is not a thing that ever happens in movies. There’s always a benevolent soul who sees the lonely newcomer and offers their services as a bestie.
While kids can be super-friendly and bonds do tend to form pretty quickly in high school, the speed with which new students in movies tend to meet their new best friends is downright Jackie Joyner Kersian. Sometimes it happens in the lunchroom (Save the Last Dance), sometimes during a hallway altercation turned homoerotic bonding experience (Footloose), but it’s always so quick, as though there really existed the mythic ‘welcoming committee’ of sarcastic lore. Because if there’s one thing all high school kids are awesome at, it’s embracing new ideas and new people?
It can be a horrifically awkward moment when the teacher announces “we have a new student joining us today” (or rather, as Drew Barrymore’s Ms. Pomeroy told the new girl in Donnie Darko, “have a seat next to the boy you think is cutest.”) After a new student is trotted out in front of class in real life, someone might be inclined to introduce themselves and chat with them right afterward. Assuming that this isn’t a person of the opposite sex, the reason for this chat is probably just to be nice and to be an ambassador for the school—not an official invitation to be taken under any wings or shown any ropes.
It’s just a part of the onboarding process—the perfunctory acknowledging of additonal personnel—and while perfectly pleasant, it’s probably kind of an empty gesture in most cases. If it’s not that, though, and it turns out that a person has seen you for all of three seconds and decided that you are witty and cool and unlikely to cut them off and switch subjects when they’re telling an anecdote, and so they want to be best friends, then be careful. Someone who is that eager to get close to a stranger might have a sad story for why that is.
Instant Education
The Myth: No matter how much you have to learn—and how short a time period you have to learn it in—a single, intense, last-minute studying session can teach you whatever it is you’re unprepared for.
The Perpetrators: Road Trip, Back to School, Frost/Nixon, Necessary Roughness, The Waterboy, Stripes
In the football movie, Necessary Roughness, Jason Bateman’s spoiled preppy has a big problem: he’ll be kicked off the team unless he passes his finals, and he hasn’t shown up for classes all year. Not to worry, though! The assistant coach, played by comedic powerhouse, Sinbad, has invented ‘mnemonic software’ that can help his young friend memorize a semester’s worth of material right away, effectively saving the day. (You are allowed to exhale now.) Similar close calls happen in movies all the time—usually without the mnemonic software—and the outcome is always the same.
Sinbad’s dues ex machina is ridiculous and befitting the kind of movie where 1991 Kathy Ireland hooks up with a 300-pound Samoan, but at least it’s some kind of explanation. Usually the scenario plays out with just some old fashioned mental elbow grease getting the job done, which is silly. Cramming is definitely a staple of the college experience and working life, but uploading untold gigs of knowledge-ram into your brainstem at the last minute doesn’t work unless you’re some kind of Memorizing Things champion (in which case, why were you having problems at all?) Everybody procrastinates from time to time, but this scenario advertises procrastination as an ethos. It takes Woody Allen’s advice that 90% of life is just showing up 100% literally. Don’t do anything, but then at the last second do everything = crisis averted!
If people could passably digest so much information so quickly, the consequences would be dire. The entire college experience would be boiled down to a series of Learning Annex seminars, and what kind of a world would that be? I don’t even want to know. If skill sets could just be rubbed in like the application of an ointment, curing a person of ignorance, then anyone could become an expert on anything and Noam Chomsky would no longer hold sway. Luckily we do not live in that world, and anyone who seriously tries to ingest several months’ worth of information overnight will inevitably get his or her ass handed to them on a pristine serving tray of impeccable craftsmanship. As they should.