QOTD
Feb.01, 2009, filed under Miscellany
I’m following TVTropes on twitter, which is a very, very dangerous thing to do. I am a troper myself, although I try to stay away because it’s so addictive. I’ve wasted hours clicking randomly through that site and have occasionally been reduced to enfeebled gales of tearful, gasping laughter.
Today I made the mistake of clicking on one of the tweets and then following a link. And another. Until I came to Chekhov’s Gun. This trope is named for the playwright Anton Chekhov, who said:
“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
It’s an instruction to the writer to maintain narrative concision. If the reader doesn’t need to know that the character has two buttons and a half-chewed stick of gum in his pocket, why tell him?
Unfortunately this can all-too-often lead to a certain degree of boredom. When I can see something coming a mile off, a story really has to go to extra effort to keep my attention. Don’t expect me to hang on by virtue of dramatic tension when you’ve flagged the critical component early on. It was blatantly obvious, for instance, who Kaiser Soze was, and as that constituted the main point of the film I found The Usual Suspects incredibly tedious.
Which brings us to Signs, Shyamalan’s melodramatic and ludicrous effort to pitch a celebrity death match between God and the Greys.
I mean, come on. Intelligent enough to cross millions of light years of space, and yet they pick a planet with a surface that’s more than 70% covered by water, which has the same effect on them as aqua regia does on human flesh? And not wear hazmat suits?
However, it now has one redeeming feature. This line from the TVTropes entry for Chekhov’s Gun:
Let’s face it… Signs could very well have been retitled Chekhov’s Gun: The Movie.
We need a Chekhov’s Gun drinking game.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
