Sometimes Plots Holes Don’t Matter

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Do not misunderstand me, the majority of the times if there is an element of your plot that given a few seconds of thought unravels the entire affair, it should be fixed well before the work is finished,

By the way by ‘plot hole’ I do not mean an inaccuracy that plays to genre convention even if it is factually in error. When Tony Star emerges from the cave where he had been held captive wearing his Mark I, built from scraps, every rifle and machinegun there would have had more than enough power to penetrate the metal. That’s not why we are at that movie, we’re there for superhero fun and that allows an amount of ignoring physics.

No, when I talk plot holes I am talking about illogic within the bounds of the accepted genre or conventions of the piece. However, if the characters and emotions of the piece grab your readers or audience by the throat then none of that would matter.

A wonderful example is the beloved classic film Casablanca.

Some of its plot holes and error are quite well know. Transit papers signed by Charles de Gaulle, who was in England and fighting the Nazis from there, would not only be worthless in Vichy France, but they’d also get you arrested. For refugees Ilsa and Victor are amazing dapper and well-fed enjoying their champagne cocktails, but this film is a romance and in romances we want beautiful people live beautiful lives.

The plot hole that really undermines the story if you think about it for two second and that no one cares about because the characters have seized our hearts so thoroughly centers on Ugarte the murder and thief that stole the transit papers and handed them to Rick to hide before Ugarte’s arrest. Prompting two problems in the plot.

1) Why in the world would Ugarte hand them to anyone? He expects to sell them very soon for a vast amount of money. How was this to work? Make the deal with victor, get the handshake, and then run back to Rick to get the papers? This non-sensical action only takes place so that Rick ends up with the MacGuffin.

2) More seriously, the police know it was Ugarte who killed the couriers and stole the papers, they arrest him at Rick’s and haul him off to jail. The next morning, we learn that he died while in custody with the corrupt police dithering between shot while trying to escape or suicide as the official report. A night of torture that killed him and we’re expected to accept that the murdering thief never gave up Rick’s name as the man holding the papers? Ugarte did not come off as the ‘die to protect your sources’ type at all. Again, this is only to keep the plot alive. Rick arrested kills the narrative dead.

And yet of all the times I have watched people experience this classic for the first time no one has ever questioned these actions.

With lesser characters and lesser actors, they would have. Our entanglement with this people blinds our critical eye.

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Plot Authority and the Powerless Character

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Recently speculative fiction author Charlie Jane Anders posted an essay on tor.com about character agency in fiction, interrogating the wisdom that characters, principally protagonists, are required to have agency. Anders presented Arthur Dent from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as an example case but confessed difficulty in presenting more examples but remained certain that they existed.

This got me thinking on such examples and what agency means for a fictional character. First off when we speak of a character’s agency, I think primarily we are pondering ‘plot authorship.’ The influence the character can exert to shape, direct, or stop the story’s plot. Certainly, Arthur Dent has very little plot authorship, he bounces, nearly always without his intention or proactive action, from crisis to crisis. Dent is far from the first or even most famous character trapped by their circumstance.

Alice from Alice in Wonderland is another such character. While she initiated the plot by following the rabbit from there on, she is on a ride that is mostly beyond her control. Lemuel Gulliver from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is also a character swept by circumstance with limited plot authority. For a more recent example you could consider Sarah Conner from the film The Terminator. Sara in that film is simultaneously the protagonist, the point of view character, and the plot’s Macguffin. Until the final sequences of the story, she is pulled along by other characters, her life in their hands with very little input as to what happens to her.

Clearly, a protagonist does not require a great deal of plot authorship for a story to be meaningful, memorable, or lasting. That said it would appear, at least to me, that the absence of plot authorship is an element in certain types of characters or stories.

Arthur Dent is the ‘straight man’ in Hitchhiker’s farcical, fantastic comedy. He has no agency because he is there to heighten the absurdity to deliver the comedy. Give him too much ability to shape the events and the farce would turn into mediocre adventure.

Alice and Gulliver as reader surrogates, for one as a person to give voice to the reader’s questions as the wonder of the setting spills out and the other to be the subject of the satire and to perhaps see their own reality and its insanity from a new perspective.

Sarah Conner lacks plot authorship because the story, not the plot mind you, is about her gaining it. By the film’s finale she has gained the ability to shape and direct not only her life but the future as well, but to gain it she, and we the audience, must first be made aware of it absence.

Charlie Jane Anders is correct you can obsess too much over if this character or that character have agency, but the lack of agency is also a specific trait that, like everything else in the tale, much serve a purpose delivering the author’s desired effect.

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Streaming Review: War-Gods of the Deep

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1965 American International’s release War-Gods of the Deep (UK title City in the Sea)attempted to capitalize on the commercial and critical success of the Roger Corman Poe movies starring Vincent Price by hiring Price to star in this film very loosely inspired by a Poe poem.

Ben (Tab Hunter), an American working on the English coast, after discovering a corpse on the beach, becomes convince something is afoot, something unnatural. When the object of his

AIP

affections, Jill (Susan Hart) vanishes in the night, Ben and an eccentric artist, Harold, (David Tomlinson), along with the artist’s pet chicken (My sweetie-wife’s favorite part of the movie), go searching for the woman. By happenstance and the force of a plot-driven story they end up in an underwater city ruled over by a tyrannical smuggler, (Vincent Price.)

War-Gods of the Deep was the final movie directed by the legendary Jacques Tourneur who gave us lasting classics such as the original Cat People, Night of the Demon, and the wonderful noir, Out of the Past. Sadly, this movie can’t match the quality of any single shot of any of those previous films. The script is a hodgepodge of ideas, scenes, and wildly incongruent elements. This story has, mystical caverns keeping people ageless for more than a century, reincarnated wives, gill-men living in the deep, and pseudo-ancient cults and practices. None of the actors, save Price, seem to have done anything more than memorize their lines and marks, giving lifeless, empty performances.

The editing of the film is terrible with long tedious underwater sequences that are supposed to contain tension and action but are, in reality, utterly confusing leaving the viewer unable to determine one character from another.

It’s 85-minute running time drags slower than nearly any other film I have watched including some Italian zombie flicks. There is little to nothing in this production that is worth recommending unless you are a Price completionist.

War-gods of the Deep is currently streaming on Amazon Prime in the US.

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More Zoo photos

Not much to say this morning that I haven’t already said, so here are 3 pictures from our trip to the San Diego Zoo on April 2nd.

First a Jaguar presenting the most dangerous position know to many a cat lover, on his back with a belly exposed for rubs.

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Sunday Night Noir: Criss Cross

 

Universal Pictures

 

Criss Cross is a 1949 film noir directed by Robert Siodmak about a gang of crooks attempting to pull off an armored car heist of nearly half a million dollars.

Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) has returned home to Los Angeles after drifting about the nation for two years disillusioned after the disintegration of his marriage to Anna (Yvonne De Carlo). Anna has remarried to a local crime goon Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea) Soon Steve and Anna have rekindled their affair despite the lethal threat of Slim. Partly as a cover for their affair and partly to dissuade Slim’s suspicions, Steve concocts a plot with slim to rob the armored car company his works for with an intention to betray Slim and abscond with both the loot and the lady.

The film is a moderately decent noir marred by an intrusive and superfluous voice-over that, like Double Indemnity’s, seems to be the character recounting the events to a third party but without an actual third party to receive it.

Siodmak’s direction is sure and deft with creative and imaginative employment of rear screen projections the craft large spaces giving the impression of exteriors while maintaining strick studio control for cinematographer’s Franz Planer’s lighting and camera work.

Noted noir composer Miklos Rozsa fashioned the score but did not quite match his best work with the music sometimes as intrusive as the voice over.

The cast is uniformly good, portraying the conflicted and ultimately weak nature of the characters as they are consumed by their unrequited needs. While Criss Cross bears all the visual stamps of the noir style, more important to me the tone and theme of the story are true to the heart of noir, a dark cynical impression of humanity. Steve is trapped by his infatuation with Anna. While Anna and Slim are compelled by their respective flaws. The ending, dark, disturbing, and doomed is equally tragic and inevitable, paying honestly to the corruption in the human heart.

Playing as part of a Siodmak collection Criss Cross is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

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Impressions The Mandalorian Season 3

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I have to confess that so far Season 3 of The Mandalorian a space fantasy series set a few years after the downfall of the Empire in Star Wars has been less compelling than the preceding two.

In season one we had a clear narrative line, Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) accepts a bounty to collect an asset and deliver it to remnants of Imperial Forces. The asset, an immature member of the same species of Yoda, wins his affections and the plot is about keeping the child safe.

Season two Din Djarin is tasked with returning the child to a Jedi who can complete its training while dealing with the powerful enemies still intent on collecting the child for their own schemes.

Both of these plots are clear and established early in each season with Din eventually sacrificing his commitment to his warrior religion to rescue the child.

The third season, with Din Djarin and the Child reunited, has so far displayed no narrative cohesion. Feeling much more like an adventure role playing game, the season has wandered from battle to battle, event to event, with very little plot connecting the various elements. Each week stuff happens but without revealing a goal that the characters are pursuing. The season seems to be comprised of side quests while forgetting to give a central one for the side ones to branch off from.

The show is still quite well produced and directed but lack cohesion to give it narrative gravitas making it by far the weakest season so far.

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That Potential Harry Potter Series

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Deadline and other sources are reporting that Warner Brothers, a studio once known for its anti-fascist stances, is looking to move forward for a re-booting of the valuable Harry Potter IP as a series for its streaming service HBOMax. It is reported that WB CEO Zaslav has met with JKR in hopes of bringing this project to life and that JKR may even be producer on the series. JKR, in addition to the controversies surrounding her small-minded stance on trans issues, is notorious for demanding control over the property and would likely wield great influence over the series’ production.

It’s understandable that people became fans of the franchise either through the books or the films before JKR’s opinion became public poisoning, quite understandably, many against the author. With the proposed series all this is known ahead of time on this go around and raises ethical and moral concerns about financially supporting JKR as she continues with what many people feel are bigoted opinions.

I fully support those who protest and drag into the light the statements and attitudes of JKR, but I also think it would be wise and just to be prudent in who is targeted if this series continues to move forward.

For example, the young actors cast in the series I would not want to see hounded or harassed on social media. ‘We are not so smart when we are young,’ as one fictional character observed and it is already a very hard road to travel as a child actor there is little, very little, to be gained targeting them.

The writers of the ‘writers room’ are likely to be in the first stages of their careers, struggling with student debt, the high cost of living in LA, and the difficult task of landing any paying gig in Hollywood, refusing an assignment may not have been a viable option for them.

However, the show runner, as of yet unnamed, the person with creative control only checked by the studio and the dictatorial JKR is another matter. That person is likely to be an experience veteran of the business with the financial and career resources to walk away from the series. If they choose to get into bed with JKR, fully aware of the controversies she brings along, then they have made their decision and shouldn’t be surprised when it turns out to be far from popular.

I have read the books and seen the film adaptation and found them enjoyable but flawed. Others have done a fine job pointing out the antisemitic tropes and the ignorant racism in the text so I will not elaborate on that here just beware it is there. I have no need to purchase anything new from the franchise and I am quite happy leaving it behind, the proposed series holds no interest for me and hopefully not for you either.

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The Clown Car Has Crashed Into The Police Van

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For the first time in American History a grand jury has indicted a former president of the nation on criminal charges. The exact nature of those charges are still unknown as the disclosure will occur at the defendant’s arraignment and everything said about those charges, their strengths or weaknesses is mere speculation. But hey, there are clicks to harvest and commercial airtime to sell so the speculation is not going to stop.

Of course, all of this is so utterly predicable that the most fraudulent telephone psychic of the 80s or 90s would have foretold its coming. Trump, a man who idolized and admired the organized crimes goons of his city, who famously stiffed nearly everyone single person he ever owed money to, and who envisioned himself, despite his soft doughy nature, as a hard man of cruelty, was always at some point exceed his limited intellectual capacity and finally violate the law in a manner that he would not be able to bribe, buy, or dodge his way out of. That was a predictable as the law of gravity.

And yet, notwithstanding all that the Republican Party, lashed themselves to his fate and, depending on your point of view, either revealed their utter hypocrisy or shredded their final and weakly held principles as the party of ‘individual responsibility’ and devoted their time and treasure to this small, weak, and stupid man’s defense.

Having spent the previous decades chasing away anyone with a modicum of decency towards their fellow person while making every effort to enrichen the wealthy the elites and powerbrokers of the GOP transformed their once proud vehicle into a clown car and then handed the wheel over to the biggest clown of all.

Now devoid of principles save the authoritarian ‘my way!’ they GOP as shocked and terrified to discover that the clown car has ended up into the police station and there is little chance to escape the terrible, inevitable, and wholly foreseeable fallout of their self-destruction. They fervently pray that a conviction or a Big Mac will remove the orange clown from their care, but even if that were to come to pass it would change very little. The army of clowns that they had spent decades building, fooling themselves that it obeyed their commands, has taken control and will remain there for at least another decade.

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The Coming Election ‘Fraud’ No One is Talking About

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An oft repeated observation about Trump and his approach to elections is that he can never lose, he can only win or be cheated.

We saw this in the run up to the 2016 election where he voiced, repeatedly, his willingness to dispute the results if he did not win. Again in 2020 when he launched a coup attempt in part by convincing millions of people that the election had been ‘stolen’ from him. And we are bracing for the coming cries of fraud should he once again be the presidential nominee for the Republican Party.

Among the political talk there is a great deal of chatter and debate concerning Trump’s chances of grabbing that nomination. ‘Is he slipping? Who can beat him and take the base away from him? Is Candidate X the Trump-killer?’

Not once in all the articles I have read or the podcast I have consumed has anyone addressed the most glaring and obvious fact about the GOP primary and Trump.

He can’t lose, he can only be cheated.

Even if some other rabid and foaming at the mount southern governor wins the contests, Trump will concede to reality. That mad narcissist is incapable of admitting any sort of error or defeat. He will take the air, to the social media, and to his rallies with cries that the ‘establishment’ colluding with the ‘deep state’ has stolen the primary election and even if the convention goes against him, he will claim that ‘rigged’ that too.

What happens then?

What happens when he insists he really won the primaries and demands all those spineless, sniveling, cowardly politicians who have bent the knee to this obscene protofascist once again repeat his lies and throw themselves on those electoral grenades?

Would that finally explode the GOP? Shattering it with schisms and internecine warfare? People talk of a GOP civil war now, but I think the debates and appeasements we see now would fade into invisibility compared to this scenario. Elected in solidly gerrymandered districts might survive reject his lies but not the next primary or even possibly recall elections, but candidates in more evenly distributed districts would face losing voters from their base because they didn’t back Trump or losing voters from the middle because they did while still facing the wrath of the base in the next primary.

The GOP is far from done with Trump and he is far from done with them.

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