What is it with Hollywood? Is there a book, some elementary primer, that states the maxims of the human condition, replacing actual investigation because actually knowing what’s real, or how things work, or why those people are the way they are is so ‘middle America’.
The cheap platitudes of Hollywood have warped popular perception so completely that many who read this will be shocked that ANYONE could possibly disagree. Well, I’m not debating, I’m flat-out stating these are lies, and not only are they not true today, they were never true. Yet, they retain the de-facto popular understanding if movies were consulted…and it’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing when a popular art form can’t live up to the most basic goal of art: the truth of the human condition.
Subjectivity is fine. But these are not subjective tropes, they are bald-faced lies concocted for one reason (politics) or another (personal discomfort) or another (being a silver-spoon shut-in unaware that Malibu isn’t the geometric center of the known galaxy).
So, I will give you the Top 10 movie tropes that have to go.
When I said you’d think you were fucked by a train, I never thought…Wow! This one’s for the newsletter. Okay, you can stop bending over, I’ve seen enough.
10. Religious people are hypocrites. [Editor’s Note: They are hypocrites, each and every one. If you can fling around absolutes, so can I]
Writers and producers who flog this dolphin do it out of the most crass, dull, self-condemning reasons possible: They 1) Are hypocrites themselves, and in recognizing their own flaw are unwilling to allow that others are not in such a way flawed, this is usually out of sheer pride. 2) They resent the feeling of condemnation that comes from the Abrahamic religions and so try to slather everyone else in the same mud, thereby justifying themselves and making it seem rational to ignore sermons of morality that hit too close to home 3) A vindictive need to attack one particular faith (usually Christianity) in a nasty attempt to reduce its societal gravitas 4) a political desire to eradicate those religious voices who rebut theirs on the national stage.
Am I saying there is no hypocrisy in any religious population? Nope. But I have rarely seen it in the pews, and neither have the writers and producers of movies. True hypocrisy, the jaundiced saying of one thing while fully practicing the opposite—is rare. Hypocrisy requires that one knows it’s hypocrisy, it is the knowing and willful practice of that opposite married with the knowing and willing promotion of its counter.
Hollywood will point to preachers who diddled the babysitter—and yes, the preacher who blares against lust while having a running tab at the local brothel is a hypocrite, but the preacher who, after a lifetime of monogamy then diddles the babysitter, is not a hypocrite, he is a moral failure. But this is not how it is portrayed in movies. Moreover, it’s the religious individual that is condemned as a hypocrite, not merely clergy–bring a bible to work you’ll be shown to be a child-pimp or dogfight promoter.
When Bill Bennet, a famous Christian moralist and author of the Book of Virtues, was exposed as a slot-machine addict, having lost 2 million bucks, the demonic guffaw from Hollywood that followed was sickening. The noise of it was not justified, the shallowest gotcha ever, they said he was somehow a hypocrite, and for what? Being frivolous with money? His money? Some will bring up the biblical proscription against ‘casting lots’, but Bill Bennet, himself, never mentioned gambling in any of his dissertations on morality, he kept his focus quite broad, and the criminal—read that again, I said ‘criminal’–lack of distinction between hypocrisy and self-conscious moral failure isn’t indicting of Bill Bennet, but shows Hollywood to be low-brow, thimble-deep dullards.
Of course, there are religious tyrants, using religion as a mask in the Machiavellian sense, consider the warden in The Shawshank Redemption, a great example, but that’s not what the movie was intimating, it seemed to be indicting religious devotion itself as fraudulent–there hasn’t been a single religious person I have ever known—and I’ve known hundreds intimately enough to say this– that would memorize scripture, forbid blasphemy and line every speech with a quote from John and then and only then threaten the poor bastard who made him rich with confinement with sodomites. “You’ll think you were fucked by a train.” A hypocrite’s mask is stifling, he can’t wait to rip it off, if you don’t believe what you profess, like the Warden, you don’t bother wearing it except at times of peak interaction with the public.
If you don’t believe me, you haven’t met religious people, especially Christians. This trope is so wildly out of whack, it’s perverse. False witness most vile. The thing about Christianity, Protestantism specifically, is that it makes the practitioner terrified of virtual sins, and when I say ‘terrified’, I mean ‘waking up in cold sweats’ because you got a semi looking at a College Bowl cheerleader. But if you were to believe Hollywood, you’d think every church is a secret sex coven of graft and extortion and every churchman a murderous meth-snorting subway groper.
It’s gotta go. Find another form of self-righteousness to illuminate a villain’s craven soul. This one was never true.
So, uh, like , uh—um, so, you know, I saw you and I, uh, kinda, you know, wanna do you, real quick, if that’s possible—it’s totally cool if you gotta be somewhere, but, you know, can I? The doing of you, I mean.
9. It’s easy to get laid.
In three scenes the gawkiest, cow-licked college freshman finds himself straddled by the cover-girl from Seventeen magazine. Here’s where the wish-fulfillment of movie writers comes into play to warp the lens. College dorms are not Bacchanalian temples and college parties are not impromptu orgies fueled by Natural Light. And yeah, I’ve seen the porn. The porn is lying.
Getting consistently laid, for a guy, is nearly impossible. The Pick-up Artist community (PUA) is positively the best source of information on the topic, and they estimate that even for a handsome, well-off, socially coherent, well-spoken, extrovert the rate of getting laid tops out at…wait for it—nine percent. That means the captain of the football team with a mane of gold and a father who owns a Porsche dealership has to strike ELEVEN times before he hits.
For the average guy it’s 3 percent. Thirty-three strikes per hit.
If you’re taking 15 hours and work part time at Kinko’s you ain’t got the time to get laid, and after college your chances drop even more.
This whole ‘ideal male experience’ bullshit was a lie from the start. Chuck it.
Uh-oh, what do we got here? Mr. I have a car, Mr. I pay taxes. Mr. I can stay up after nine—here, come the check-train, hoot-hoot!
8. Chess is the crucible of intellect.
Every damn time. Smart guy = chess player. Well, let me inform the writers of Hollywood that just because you don’t understand the game, it doesn’t mean those who do are wunderkind uber alles. I used to hang with the chess guys, they’d meet on Friday nights at the local coffee bar and let me tell you, these were not unsung-Oppenheimer’s waiting for their moment on the world stage, they wore stained t-shirts and crocs, they swore like sailors and bragged about fucking their wives on her period.
Children! There are children in New York right now beating adults in the park. Chess is a talent and a very specific talent, it’s a spatial-linear talent like drawing, and we all remember the D-student in class who could render a pencil sketch of Jim Morrisson in five minutes but couldn’t solve a quadratic equation for a dime bag of Mexican hash: if a dope can dunk a basketball, you can find one who can fend off a French defense playing black.
You’re embarrassing yourself Hollywood, stop it.
The ‘89 Ford Apocalypse was recalled after a design flaw caused ‘safety issues’ when the radio played ‘smooth jazz’.
7. Cars blow up when they roll over…or get shot…or hit a tree.
Every gearhead just decided to name their firstborn after me, because they HATE this one. Cars have caught fire after accidents, when a fuel line severs and there’s enough oxygen mixed with the vapor under the hood to ignite, but it doesn’t blow up. In fact, it can’t blow up, there just isn’t enough free oxygen to mix with vapor to cause an explosive detonation.
Shoot a car in the gas tank, you know what happens? A rivulet of gasoline dribbles out, the bullet settles calmly on the bottom of the tank and that’s all.
Even if that gasoline forms a river to your feet and you’re smoking a cigarette, flicking that cigarette into the stream will not cause a crazy train of flame to sprint backwards and deliver an explosion. In that case, there’s too much air around the vapor and the only result will be a dyspeptic hiss…from the cigarette being extinguished by the liquid gasoline.
This is willful ignorance. I introduce you to a term: ‘Cinematism’, the lie told and retold for its purely cinematic benefit.
And even if you could get a car-full of gasoline to explode all at once (it’s not Uranium, people), the result would not be a forty-foot fireball licking the heavens while some muscle-bound douchebag walks away uninterested. It would be a kind of horizontal claw of flame, extending out only six feet or so from every side, then a rising puff of black smoke, then a leisurely burn-off of the car’s interior.
I understand the lure of cinematism, but it is lazy, over-done and, to this point, insulting.
See, nothing here.
6. Getting shot in the shoulder means you can keep fighting.
Anytime I see a hero shot in the shoulder—because it’s, of course, NOT more likely that they would be shot in their center body mass resulting in a sucking chest wound making them gurgle their last fourteen minutes into the movie, no, everybody gets shot in the shoulder, it’s a fact—I groan like a co-ed given cab fare the morning after a frat ragger.
And if I see that same shot hero raise that very arm to fire back, well, now I want to key somebody’s car.
Most of the time the enlightened mem-sahib of Hollywood places the squib on the neck side (the side nearer the center) of the joint. It’s the same two-inch circle every time. But what’s in there that’s so inconsequential that a soldier/cop/misunderstood teenage rebel can have a .45 caliber slug enter, mushroom, obliterate and exit while leaving him enough wherewithal to do his taxes?
In that two-inch circle is the brachial artery, a fat tube, now shredded, that is gushing a pint of blood every thirty seconds. You pass out just from blood loss after a minute. Not to mention the brachial plexus, a tangle of nerves, once severed, means that arm ain’t liftin’ shit. Then, of course there’s the radial shock of the bullet which fractures every bone within a hand’s breadth from the point of entry even if the bullet did not directly hit bone—which of course it will, at least on the way out, on the dexter side of that squib is, I dunno, maybe, the shoulder blade—bye-bye shoulder blade.
Almost instantly you go into shock, your arm won’t work and the only way you could use the other is if you were already raising it to use. In response to the trauma your body almost immediately shuts down which means you can’t remember your name after fifteen seconds much less get that final shot out to the bastard who betrayed your partner.
Accounting for battle incidents wherein the adrenaline staved off the shock until the wounded man lost consciousness from loss of blood, you ain’t fighting a lustful thought much less another person the moment you’re shot in the shoulder.
It took me five minutes to find this information, Hollywood has yet to find it after 111 years.
“It’s for squirrels.”
5. Hunters are driven by some cheap, juvenile need to hurt things.
I live in the ‘Sportsman’s Paradise’, Louisiana [Editor’s Note: No kidding. # 1 for gators, #3 for feral pigs], which is just a nice way to say I live in a primordial swamp cohabited with monsters from the Triassic—but hey, they’re tasty. The dilettantes of the Northeast—and they are that, unschooled and arrogantly so—got it in their avacado-addled minds that hunting is an excuse for good old boys with Confederate Flags stenciled on their Ford F-150s to enter nature and tear it the fuck up.
I’ll say this once, for you New York nabobs are still convinced that that shitty city is culturally relevant: No hunter. In the history of hunting. Has treated the activity like the dunking booth at the Feast of San Gennaro.
Did you ever stop to consider, in your weak-chinned contempt for places that don’t smell like spoiled milk, that people who have actually seen a tree have more respect for nature than people who huddle around Woody Allen’s apartment building and wait for a hawk to swoop down and choke on a bottle cap. You don’t, do you? Because ‘respect’–i.e. having an unvarnished appreciation for the wild, differs from ‘pagan idolatry’ i.e. creaming your jeans over a lost bird, the presence of which gives your pointless, acontextual existence hope that ALL creation doesn’t find your burg repulsive and embarrassing.
Killing an animal by yourself takes YEARS of experience and, well, you know, to NOT do it accidentally with the front bumper of your car. This piggish notion that somehow and for some reason Good Ol’ Boys (whether or not they sport Confederate Flags) enter the forest out of a troglodytic need for destruction is more proof that this country’s great misfortune was your prominence in constructing the national narrative.
To hunters, guns are not toys, killing things is not taken lightly (even for trophy hunters) and there are better ways to channel Godzilla then trudging out in 11-degree weather to freeze your nuts off while staring at a green void for six hours.
To the degree that the New York/Ivy League/Adult Bed-wetter imagination is fused into Hollywood, it must be eradicated with prejudice pending a field tribunal by three guys named Cleetus.
Psssst! I have the amyls, the cock ring, some oil-based lubricant—hotel room?! What are you, a fag or something?
4. Homophobes are secret queers.
This follows the line of religious people are hypocrites, but it’s even more ridiculous. I tried my hardest to trace this trope to its origin but I could find none, it just appeared, sometime in the 80’s. Maybe it was the beginning of AIDS and homosexuals felt put-upon so with degenerate spite decided to just semantically flip the tables on those that despised them. It’s also how the “Born Like That” trope developed, it was a crass game of Trump-level nonsense-pong: say it because it’s opposite of what he said whether you can back it up or not, then bite the pillow and don’t let go.
And some people actually believe this. I’ve seen people publicly berated as closet queers in front of their wife and children for expressing a personal concern about the cultural legitimacy of pride month, and it’s in eleventy-hundred movies. You got a guy who says fag a lot: the quarterback, the cop, the family man, and, of course, the clergyman, you can almost be guaranteed that the character will be discovered buying Magic Mike on DVD in a trench coat and Trilby hat.
Do people think that revulsion for homosexuality is so ridiculous it could only be a manifestation of self-consciousness? Weiners in men’s heinie-holes is guh-ross. Weiners in general, to a heterosexual man, are gross. Two dudes kissin’ is gross. There was a study just released that found when showed a picture of two men kissing, straight men experienced as much mental trauma as when shown a bucket of live maggots.
There’s nothing beautiful about male homosexuality, it’s not life-affirming, it’s not societally productive, it’s not even evolutionarily viable—it just is. I’m not even saying its unnatural, [Editor’s Note: Homosexuality is perfectly normal, it is just not the ‘norm’] but ‘witnessed in nature’ and ‘inborne’ are vastly different things, you know what else is witnessed in nature? Pedophilia, necrophilia, rape, bestiality and buckets of maggots, an open aversion to these isn’t secret testimony you wanna hump a dead adolescent walrus, but Hollywood’s logic says it is. [Editor’s Note: Beware of the perils of false analogies]
If looking side-eyed at a practitioner of any paraphilia is evidence of a desire for the practice itself, are tough-on-crime advocates secret gangsters? Are clean-street advocates clandestine litterbugs? Are Mothers Against Drunk Driving, chugging Wild Turkey and doing drifts in the Costco parking lot? They can’t even sit next to a Trump-supporter on a plane yet somehow the idea that jizzum exchange could render you persona non grata is so bizarrely out of touch it could only be because the jizz-phobe secretly wants it in his butt.
Advice: open the door of your bungalow and have a conversation with someone that isn’t on the GLAAD board of directors.
Godamn halfwits.
That’s right I took out all the urinals! I also hammered the nail in the thermostat! And next week: new dress code. Make sure to give me your measurements because corsets don’t tailor themselves.
3. Men are intimidated by female strength
This one is born of a feminist need to bring men down to their level, because feminists are most certainly intimidated by male strength, plus it’s a rhetorical way to call men paper tigers or, more explicitly, ‘pussies’ because they recognize their own fear and their misandry will not allow them to admit that men aren’t intimidated by women in any situation.
What Hollywood does is mis-define ‘intimidation’ and then mis-define ‘strength’. To the Hollywood writer a ‘strong woman’ is one who is aggressive, bombastic, rude and ambitious—essentially women who act like men without the male biochemical imperative to do so. Men act like men because they can’t help but act like men, without the chemical imperative to behave this way do you know what a person might be called?
–A fucking psychopath.
When a gorilla rushes at you beating his chest it’s because the gorilla is spurned-on to do so by instinct, but if a hamster rushes at you, clamps onto your face like a starfish starts humping your nostrils—well, that little shit’s gotta be put down.
Then they like to define ‘intimidation’ where others might call it ‘aversion’. Men avoid these mis-characterized women, not for fear of the women, but for fear that this bitch might just piss them off so much a distinctly one-sided ground & pound is in her future. And that’s a sure loser in court, no matter what she did to bring it on. Male aggression and the other attributes in the masculine package come with a sturdy dose of stoic restraint, see, you shouldn’t act like a man unless you can hit the brakes like a man, unless you know the fight triggers of a man and when you flick those triggers. So, men will avoid these women, but the clueless writer, as well the clueless feminist, snort that this is evidence of some interior weakness when it’s literally the only thing keeping you out of the hospital, bitch.
Strength is not loud. It is quiet, competent, jocular, but Hollywood makes it seem like it’s two drinks away from a total mental collapse.
When female characters express these qualities, men aren’t intimidated. Sitting in their seats watching the story unfold they root for that lady because they recognize she isn’t a phony. She gets it. They want her to win.
Ripley in Alien. Sarah Conners in The Terminator. These are male favorites. But, when they say they need a ‘strong female character’ say, like in the second season of Westworld, what they write are murderesses and 90-pound kung fu titans without the masculine understanding that it’s not a proper use of superpowers to knock a construction worker’s head off because he cat-calls you from a scaffold
* cough * Captain Marvel * cough * cough * .
So evenly matched were they, that as the sun set Lord Pickering ordered corn-dogs be brought as he and his opponent felt a might peckish.
2. Swordfights last a long time.
Another cinematism. Sword duels are not leering, posturing, circling displays of strike-counterstrike for three minutes over uneven ground, up a ladder, down a rope, over a barrel whilst peppered with jaunty quips.
Saber duels, for instance, lasted an average of six strokes, at roughly a second per stroke. That’s
it. Ping-pang-whoosh-pang-ping-ping dead. Most of the time, if the skills of duelists were uneven by a mere fraction, it was three strokes: Ping-pang-pang * gick* “No you can’t marry my sister.”
Other European sword styles like the French foil or the epee, were even less dramatic. Catch an Olympic fencing match one year, here’s what you’ll see: the ref says ‘en garde’, ref drops his hand in a chopping motion, there’s a chaotic blurrrrrrr, a red light comes on, ref says ‘touché’, applause. And it wasn’t any slower or more decipherable than that in the past.
Bummer, I get it. Again, cinematisms are arguably necessary for the medium, but only arguable, they aren’t verité, so in films pronouncing verité, realness, grit—historical re-telling, for instance, I better not see the glint of rapid steel and an endless symphony of pings. We’re not children. Tell the damn truth.
“Hi. I’m Azoon-Fud. I ‘ll be showing you around heaven–Yes, I’m an angel. What do you mean “not attractive”, “weird and creepy” is a bit harsh, “no obvious design logic” and?I look like a “Japanese toy your uncle bought”? Sca-roo yoo! No, I’m not “tall” or have a ”sword” but you know what else I don’t have……? A BUTTHOLE! I literal hole in my butt that excretes noxious fumes and half-digested pizza!– Show yourself around, I’m going on break.”
1. Angels were once people
This flips me like a low-paid gangster facing thirty years.
I’ll say it slow for those who think the bible is a book from hotels you hollow-out to hide your weed:
ANGELS AREN’T DEAD MEN. And most on Earth DO NOT HAVE WINGS! The Archangels, Michael and Gabriel DO have wings [Editor’s Note: In mythology], possibly as a symbol of their rank but above angel and archangel are the Cherubim and Seraphim, that’s right, there is no specific name for these beings that curate Earth other than ‘angel’ which would also mean we’ve been calling Satan an angel falsely.
Earthbound, non-archangels, are never seen as having wings when the veil is slipped in a vision, except for Michael, Gabriel and, well, non-angel Rebellious Cherubim, Satan.
Satan, being a cherub, has wings, four, to be exact, he was called ‘the anointed cherub who covered’ as Cherubs are those who can shield the face of God from those who would gaze upon him, like the poor bastards in Iraq, using asbestos shields to deflect the furnace of an ignited oil well……kinda. Satan’s rebellion took a mixed bag of Cherubim, Seraphim and angel. And counter to much Christian supposition, these did not become demons.
The Seraphim are split into groups, some are described as glowing six-winged man shaped creatures others have four beast faces, but these have never traveled to Earth, unless they fell with Satan:
The origin of the of ‘Angelic Creatures’ (I have to name them something, even if it isn’t Linnean in its accuracy, but angels and archangels are really the only ones that deal with humans) They were ‘made real’, by God, ‘willed’ into existence, with jobs and attributes already granted—They were not created in the image of God!—that should be made clear, because they can take any shape according to class: some depictions of one variety translates bizarrely as two interlocking, winged wheels–two winged wheels with eyes, those eyes running along the entire exterior of each wheel…for some reason.
Angels are a very convenient narrative device, I’m not arguing they not be used, but man cannot become one! Firstly, because they have a strict height policy and their ASVAB is tough, man—tough! The reasons why men can’t become one, other than their notoriously crappy dental plan, is that man is under the Edenic lineage, is made in the image of God, is befouled by Adam’s sin and therefore must be judged with only two outcomes advertised.
This is basic Sunday school shit here people.
Angels could fall in the cinematic category of ‘traditional monster’ like a leprechaun or a dragon, these have very specific origins and attributes and any writer mangling these to fit his hastily cobbled plot should be offered to the Aztec God of Corn to ensure America’s next harvest. But more so with angels as they are pivotal in all Abrahamic religions, unlike leprechauns and dragons, and shouldn’t be brought down into your movie without a full treatment. The ‘Angels are Good Dead People Who must Earn Their Wings’ trope is like saying Bigfoot is just an escaped zoo ape trying to find his way home—sure, there’s poetry in that, but it robs the monster of his mysterious glory.
For God’s sakes, stoppit.
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