Tag: plot hole

A Maelstrom of Confusion

You’re a writer – you know when you’ve goofed up something in your story – wait, how DID that guy know what time it was? Of course you scramble back to work to somehow give that guy a watch or a view of the clocktower or something, right?

Even the greats sometimes miss it. In the 1946 detective movie The Big Sleep a guy named Owen Taylor gets murdered, shot up by a machine gun, right in front of detective Philip Marlowe’s eyes. This was a big film, directed by Howard Hawks and featuring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Hollywood’s hottest couple of the day. It was a first rate adaptation of the 1939 Raymond Chandler novel.

But who was behind the machine gun? Who shot Owen Taylor? The guys who adapted Chandler’s novel never explained it. Eventually, Raymond Chandler himself came out and said that he had no idea who killed that guy. And he wrote the book!

This weekend I was half-heartedly watching a 1967 episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea on YouTube while half-heartedly putting up Christmas decorations.

If Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is new to you, it was a TV show that ran on ABC from 1964 to 1968, featuring a nuclear research submarine called Seaview in the far-away future of the 1970’s. 

Where Star Trek, running on NBC during the same period, presented its viewers with intriguing characters and often deep philosophical questions, Voyage episodes centered around monsters and ghosts and mad scientists intent on sending the Seaview to the Bottom of the Sea. 

The episode I saw, called The Fossil Men, was preceded by an episode called The Heat Monster and followed by The Mermaid. Gives you an idea of the plot lines.

Anyway, it’s kind of cruel to point out plot holes in a show devoted to costumes and special effects, but this one caught me.

The sub’s sonar has picked up a strange clicking noise from the sea bottom, as if rocks are getting pounded together. Admiral Nelson, the resident scientist, just happened to be reading ancient sea lore about this very spot of the vast ocean (no mention of which). According to his book, sailors 200 years ago reported hearing the exact same thing just before their fleet of ships was sucked into a huge maelstrom and never heard from again. 

Duh-duh-DUH just then the sea bubbles and foams and the Seaview is herself caught in a huge maelstrom. OMG, will they ever survive? Or will they be back next week to face The Mermaid?

I paused in my half-hearted attempt to untangle Christmas lights and thought, wait a minute. The old-timey crewmen reported hearing weird noises just before their ships were sunk.  So, to whom did they make these reports? This was 1967, so the ships went down in 1767, roundaboutsy, so radio wasn’t a thing. A maelstrom’s a pretty big deal, drowning-of-sailors-wise. 

It didn’t matter to the plot of the show, of course. From what I could tell, the ancient sailors were now fossilized and wanted to sink the Seaview. Something like that.

I turned it off because my wife came home and I didn’t want her to catch me watching such drivel. 

Closing plot holes like that can sometimes get sealed up in a sentence – only one ship survived to tell the tale. That’s if you’re lucky.

If it’s a big gaping hole, it might take a chapter, even a whole rewrite to get that character around to where the story makes sense. 

Admiral Nelson has bigger fish to fry than that plot hole – maybe the answer was on the next page of that sea lore he was reading.

But it did give me pause to think about my own work. Plot holes. Hmmm. 

Where are those questions in my own work that I’m afraid to ask because I know there’s no answer because I didn’t think of it until just now? 

Uh oh.

How does he know what time it is?

Uh oh.

Mr. Nolan, You Insult Me, Sir

If you’re sitting at the car dealer, ready to put money down on that snappy red sports car and another you walks in the door and tells you that he’s from the future and you should instead buy the gray sedan because that way you’ll invent a time machine, don’t you believe him. There’s been a mistake.

I mean, with quantum mechanics maybe there’s a very, very, very tiny chance that it could happen, but it’s like a one-in-ten-trillion chance.

You see, I just finished watching Interstellar, the Christopher Nolan film. Man, am I disappointed.

He got me the first time with that movie Dunkirk. A well made, handsomely crafted film right up to that scene where the pilot sets fire to his Spitfire fighter plane to keep it from falling into German hands.

It’s a beautiful scene, the plane blazing away on the twilight beach, the German soldiers running up, the pilot standing proud and defiant.

And then you see that there is no engine in the plane. It’s clearly a plywood mockup, featuring a length of pipe in the place where the engine should be!

Mister Nolan, you insult me, sir! Palming off such shoddy filmmaking as art!

You couldn’t spend fifty bucks and just put a piece of sheet metal in there? Surely you saw the missing engine during post? Did you think no one would notice? Not even airplane nerds?

And so back to Interstellar, an intriguing movie about the nature of time. There are some heart-rending scenes – “don’t leave me, Daddy!” and “you mean there IS no plan A?”

The film begins in a farmhouse on a clearly dying earth…

Stick with me here because this is a good writer’s story.

The house seems to have a poltergeist, except the unseen ghost isn’t scary and is leaving clues instead of breaking stuff. “It’s a code!” Cooper exclaims, and figures out that the waves of dust on the floor are binary coordinates which lead him and his 10-year-old daughter to a secret NASA installation. Believe me, I’m not revealing a thing so far.

Cooper takes off with three others, including pretty Anne Hathaway trying to broaden her audience appeal (I CAN do real drama), into a wormhole and another galaxy and eventually down the maw of an ancient and evidently not-so-violent black hole.

Inside – okay – here comes the revealing. Stop reading if you don’t want know what happens. We’ll wait while you decide…

Still with us? Cool. Thanks 

Inside Cooper screams and whimpers a little bit – fine acting by Mr. McConaughey – and finds himself inside a beautifully rendered tesseract of unimaginable dimensions. I mean, seriously, here the filmmaking is beyond compare. It is stunning.

And then he finds himself inside the walls of that dusty farmhouse from two hours ago. There’s his 10-year-old daughter, and there’s him. He’s gone back in time. That’s cool.

We’re still okay.

Then he starts leaving clues.

Wait, you mean, HE was the poltergeist? HE left the binary clues that made farmhouse-him drive to the NASA installation in the first place?

So, current Cooper would not have gone to NASA if he hadn’t seen the binary signals future Cooper left for him in the dust. 

Doesn’t that mean that future Cooper uses the time machine he’s created to go tell past Cooper to create a time machine? 

You can’t do that! From a storytelling aspect, that’s cheating!  That’s like Prince  Charming knowing the glass slipper was Cinderella’s all along because he secretly told the fairy godmother to give it to her.

That’s a closed loop, with no entry point!

Every time loop must have a beginning, a point of entry. 

But we humans, we like to close loops and tie things up. You can imagine the writers thinking “it’d be so cool if, like, it was Cooper leaving the code…”  So poetic.

Mr. Nolan, you insult me again, sir!

More insulting are the people I’ve met who tell me that’Interstelallar is the best film ever. They’re so impressed by the pompous filmmaking they never even see the flaw in the story!

Granted, it is well made and breathtakingly beautiful. I can’t unsee the thousand-foot waves.

But your wiggly lights and gussied up dancing girls do not blind me to science, Mr. Nolan. Science!

So, the pretty and thunderous Interstellar is off my list of recommended movies. The Texas-sized plot hole cannot be explained away. Like the engine missing from the Spitfire, it’s too obvious to ignore.

And, Mr. Nolan is off my list of great directors. He makes a pretty film, surely, but I find his obvious disregard for the easily-fixed-but-clearly-flawed details quite insulting. It’s as if he’s saying “nobody will notice.”

Well I, sir, am that nobody.