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TV and Movies vs. Reality
I often watch videos from a site called “Fire Department Chronicles.” The host is a firefighter/paramedic and some of his funniest videos are picking apart TV show scenes. “911 Lone Star” seems to bear the brunt of many of his videos, but after watching them he is definitely not unfair. What fascinates me is that they must have technical advisers but don’t appear to listen to them.
Honestly, EMS and firefighting are often dramatic enough without making stuff up. In general, I find the abandonment of any attempt to be technically authentic very strange.
Since the Mrs was a pilot, watching movies with aviation themes can be funny as she gets so annoyed. Die Hard 2 probably comes in for the most derision. Yet she thought the aviation stuff in Castaway was very good. So it can be done; Hollywood just doesn’t care.
That reminds me — there was a very good UK mystery series called “The Fall” with Gillian Anderson. There is a 15-minute sequence where they pick up a gunshot victim and transport him to the ER for treatment. It’s probably the most realistic EMS scene I’ve ever watched (I’ll post it below).
I guess my general question is why do they do it? As demonstrated, producers could create technically correct yet still compelling drama, yet they routinely abandon the attempt. And if you are knowledgeable about firearms Hollywood makes you want to scream at the stupidity.
Please describe how your area of expertise gets thrashed in the movies.
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Published in General
I never watched LA Law: SUV or whatever it was called but I did stumble upon an episode of something in which two detectives knock on the front door of someone’s house, ask to come in, and while the resident goes to turn off the tea kettle of something, they enter and open the drawers of her hallway’s table and flip through a date book which I guess provided a clue. I turned it off in <60 seconds.
Then my wife interrupted my musings (rant) and told me that the legality of it is not the point: it’s just a show.
You should absolutely be entitled to your hard-earned knowledge and craft. But Breaking Bad is one of the best t.v. shows ever made and is the American equivalent of Macbeth. Other people should enjoy it despite its flaws. So was Hank a decent representation of a cop or what?
Extended Hearty Bechortlement (EHB)
The problem is, people’s pictures of reality are formed by visual shows. Maybe somebody who is strongly steeped in law knowledge can resist the influence, but even such people probably have to work at it. I don’t even read historical fiction, because it puts vivid images in my mind, and then I have to go to a lot of mental effort to separate those images from what is actually known. I have a fairly good knowledge of certain historical subjects, but I get tired of the work I have to do to put those images out of my head. And once I put them out of my head, they tend to come back again.
If it’s a subject I don’t care about I suppose the false images don’t matter so much, but it’s hard to find subjects I don’t care about. And why would I watch or read historical fiction (e.g. documentaries) about a subject I don’t care about?
If it’s a lousy documentary or lousy historical fiction book I suppose the images it leaves aren’t so vivid, but why would I watch or read if it’s boring?
Or, even more relevant:
Contra argument:
“We need to shut down the Russian nuclear reactor before the aliens get there! Jenkins, I need you to hack it!”
“I’m not sure I can, Mr. President.”
“Just do it. You have 30 seconds!”
<Jenkins pulls out MacBook, furrows brow> Click-clack-clackity-clack. <sighs> “I’m in.”
“15 seconds, Jenkins!”
<Jenkins adjusts nerdy glasses> Click-clack-clackity-clack. <Reactor shuts down>
I think it was Dave Barry who noted that Jeff Goldblum could hack into the alien ship computer in “Independence Day” because even the alien mother ship would be running Windows 95.
In the NYPD, an improbably lucky parking place (like, say, right in front of Madison Square Garden, or Rockefeller Center) is still known as a “Kojak spot”.
On the west coast, young undercover police officers working a high school problem are called “Depps”.
My best friend in college was a nuclear engineer and I made the mistake of going to the movies with him to see The China Syndrome.
My revenge? Several years later I took him to see Broadcast News.
To be fair, Hollywood sorta kinda doesn’t want to depict television accurately. They are still all suffering from Orson Welles disease. It’s the mythos that War of the Words was too on the mark on their use of radio as a plot device.
For a couple of years we had an Intelligent Use festival of non-left wing environmental films, and yes, there are some. At one of them we had some city and county bureaucrats, since they were lending us the theater for free. I was amused that the “water people” thought that the city’s transportation problems were all explained by “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”. But the highway people rolled their eyes at its oversimplifications. They, in turn, thought “Chinatown” really explained the city’s relationship to water. The Department of Water and Power chieftains shook their heads with disdain.
Veep seems to get DC
My sister once told me a story about how she hated watching tv with a botanist friend of hers, because the friend would always point out whenever the plants in the background weren’t native to the place where the tv show was supposed to take place.
One hundred percent.
Since trespassing laws allow for “implied consent”, I would wager that a judge would rule that leaving the door open and moving to a different room would also count as implied consent for police to enter a dwelling. Furthermore, since consent to enter a dwelling arguably also counts as consent to search that dwelling (according to my very cursory Internet research), that scene strikes me as fairly realistic, but it would be even more realistic if the legality of the search was challenged during the courtroom section of the episode since opening the drawers arguably extends beyond the consent provided by the homeowner.
That being said, I’m not a lawyer…
I’m lucky. The closest fictional representations of my job are Yes Minister, The Thick Of It, and Veep, and all three shows do a very good job of it.
;-)
FIFY
No. Detectives are mostly secretaries with guns. Except when they forget to bring their guns when going to pick up an out-of-town fugitive. I’m not denigrating them. Most of the job that they do is putting the evidence together in a way that will be presentable in court. Hank wasn’t boring enough to be a detective. And he made several glaring procedural errors.
True story: As a rookie, I was the first officer to seize a meth lab in Albuquerque. I told the tale to an a guy at a party who was a reporter. He said that what happened was boring and “there’s more excitement in a single episode of Breaking Bad.” Unfortunately, real life doesn’t have scriptwriters.
Probably not as much nudity either.
I was a kid living in Cocoa Beach, Florida at the peak of the U.S. space program (late 1960s). Real Cocoa Beach looked nothing like what was shown on I Dream of Jeannie, especially the plants. No way could you get such green uniform grass to grow in the sandy soil of Cocoa Beach, The houses shown would never withstand a tropical storm either. Since the show was silly, we just laughed at the gross inaccuracies.
CSI was set n Las Vegas. All the lab techs were hot 20-30 somethings in fancy clothes.
Saw an episode of COPS from Las Vegas, where they called in the CSI team to process a murder scene. They were 60-something women in grey sweatshirts.
I’d bet they weren’t driving HumVees either.
I think maybe we’re better off that real life doesn’t have many smart bad guys like the guy who ran the chicken franchise.
I watched the series many years after it aired. To my untrained eye I thought that Walter was still alive at the end and agreed with the fan theories that the cops found him alive and were able to save him.