You\u2019ve seen this. You\u2019re reading a book or watching a film and some character says something that jars. It sounds more like the author talking than the character. It feels imposed somehow, like an idea has been added in through product placement. <\/p>\n
Sometimes it actually is product placement. There was a sitcom recently where a character needed to find out something and announced that he\u2019d Bing it. No, he wouldn\u2019t. He\u2019d Google it like everyone else, but Microsoft was paying for the promotion of their search service. <\/p>\n
Often it actually is the author or the screenwriter, such as when there\u2019s a political point to be made and it\u2019s theirs instead of the characters.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a tougher one: I don\u2019t think writers always notice when they do it.<\/p>\n
And then you have issues like Abi Morgan\u2019s Suffragette<\/a>. I think she did a marvellous job of conveying society and in particular men\u2019s rejection of women\u2019s rights. Yet it\u2019s a case where the protagonists are the suffragettes and the antagonist is an entire society that is giant and also so clearly, entirely, totally wrong. <\/p>\n Drama works best, I believe, when it\u2019s about two people arguing and they\u2019re both right. Morgan had to find a way to embody male society and for dramatic purposes also to not make it as clear-cut a case of men wrong, women right as it actually was. The more I think of what she had to pull off in that script, the more impressed I am that she did it yet it\u2019s still a case of the writer\u2019s politics impressing on every character in some way.<\/p>\n The Bing case just saw me jerk my head and lament the state of advertising on television today. The Suffragette one was a case of my thinking about it after seeing the film.<\/p>\n Whereas \u201cI said explain it to me, not talk science\u201d is a line that stops me watching.<\/p>\n Quite literally: that line stopped me watching.<\/p>\n I relish time travel stories and there\u2019s an intriguing film called Deja Vu by Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio but I can\u2019t get through it. Because of that line. In fairness, it isn\u2019t quite as bad as the more common \u201cTalk English, Doc!\u201d that you regularly get.<\/p>\n But the intention is the identical and so is the effect. It’s just that those two things are not the same.<\/p>\n The intention is to make an explanation sound scientifically plausible while simultaneously making it accessible to non-scientists. The intention is to have us identify with the hero, who is always the one saying this, and so humanise the situation.<\/p>\n The effect is to say that the audience is stupid and the hero is more so. Without one single exception, whenever you hear a line like this, it is interrupting a scientific explanation that a five-year-old would\u2019ve understood anyway. This is because the writer has no interest in science and so picked up the first fact he or she found in Physics for Dummies and assumes you don\u2019t know it. <\/p>\n invariably, the science is nothing so having the hero interrupt is actually making that hero look thicker than multiple planks laid together. You can argue that it\u2019s making an adversarial relationship with the scientists and drama feeds on argument, but instead it\u2019s telling me that the scientists are rubbish and that they are the hero\u2019s enemy.<\/p>\n Every character comes out of this badly and perhaps that\u2019s ultimately the problem: I cease to believe any of them. i\u2019ve said it before, if I don\u2019t believe the characters, I don\u2019t give a damn what happens to them. And this particular case, i\u2019l never know because I stopped Deja Vu right there.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the trailer. If you see the film or if you have already seen it, tell me whether it gets any better. I\u2019m on @WGallagher<\/a>. Thanks.<\/p>\n