Classic Edition: Move Out of Your Parents' Basements

Benjamin Cohen at The World's Fair posts a link to an article about physicists in movies. The author provides a surprisingly detailed breakdown of what must be every character described as a physicist in the history of motion pictures. He also says really nasty things about What the Bleep Do We Know?, which warms my heart.

In the "elsewhere on the web" list at the bottom of the article, they mention the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics site, which was the subject of the fourth post ever on Uncertain Principles. Which is all the excuse I need for some Classic Edition blogging-- the original post is reproduced below the fold.

A week or so ago, when I was talking about setting up this web log but hadn't gotten around to it, Kate sent me a link to the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics site, which she'd seen on MetaFilter. Thinking that this would be good blog fodder, I took a look, and had a Shatner Moment.

I don't mean that I suddenly started putting big... pauses... in... my speech, while runningotherwords... together-- instead, that's a reference to the SNL skit where William Shatner blows up at a Star Trek convention, thundering "Have you ever kissed a girl?!?" at Jon Lovitz (who's wearing an "I Grok Spock" T-shirt and pointy ears). Don't get me wrong-- the movie physics complaints are all perfectly valid, physically speaking (I've even considered using the "Blown backwards through a window" business as an exam problem). They also largely miss the point, in a way which suggests the site was put together by the sort of humorless dork I try very hard not to be. (Says the man with a "Don't Drink and Derive" drink cup sitting on his desk...)

Most of the specific complaints are constructed with the Jerry Bruckheimer class of action movies in mind, and many of them are things that I've remarked on myself (the fact that movie cars seem to have their frames packed with dynamite before leaving the factory, for example, and who hasn't commented on the way that movie guns never run out of bullets?). But it's important to keep some sense of perspective about these things, particularly when it comes to the specifc genres in which the movies are made.

Complaining about the exploding cars in a typical action movie makes about as much sense as complaining (as the history book I was reading last night does) that Henry V didn't actually speak English, and thus would've been hard pressed to deliver the "Once more into the breach, dear friends..." speech, let alone the "St. Crispin's Day" speech. Yeah, fine, strictly speaking, Henry was Henri, and spoke French, but realism isn't the point-- the point is that those two speeches are some of the most rousing speeches ever written in English, and the historical scene is just a stage to let the actors and audience glory in the beauty of Shakespeare's language. (And to provide a little royal propaganda, as the book went on to note.)

OK, I'll admit that, say, Hard Boiled isn't exactly Shakespeare, but the tuth is that action movies are at least as stylized as Shakespearean drama, and probably closer to Kabuki theater. Realism isn't the point-- the point is to present a sort of visual symphony of creative mayhem. If that requires gratuitous slow motion, exploding cars, sparking bullets, and Chow Yun-Fat diving across a room with a pistol in each hand firing a hail of bullets through plate glass windows for no good reason, then so be it. (Apparently, it does require all those things, plus the opposition of the most pointlessly destructive criminal organization outside a Warner Brothers cartoon...)

Which isn't to say that there's no limit to idiocy in the name of spectacle-- Armageddon was a dreadful movie, and they hit most of the reasons why (leaving out only the nauseating Animal Cracker Foreplay, which isn't physics, and thus not within their purview)-- nor that there's no place for citing unreality in reviewing a movie-- Red Mike's Reviews use this sort of thing to devastatingly humorous effect. But as Teresa Neilsen Hayden notes in The Evil Overlord Devises a Plot, just because something's a cliche doesn't mean it can't be effective, and I'd extend that statement to cover stupid movie physics as well. Just because the physics is stupid doesn't mean you can't get $8 worth of entertainment out of Things which Go Fast and then Blow Up.

I also don't want to give the impression that the site is nothing but obsessive dork-itude. While the front page was real Shatner Moment material, the specific reviews are significantly better, and even manage a little self-deprecating humor (in the somewhat stiff and didactic vein favored by professors everywhere). And even though they have a few gripes with the physics, they do allow that the safecracking scene in The Score is pretty damn cool, so they're not completely hopeless.