National Post (National Edition)
Why can’t my favourite movies be flawless?
Why can’t my favourite movie be flawless?
There is a question posed by Die Hard that admirers of the movie have been turning over in their minds now for nearly 30 years.
You may recall the midfilm interlude during which Bruce Willis, playing everyman hero John McClane, happens upon an expensively besuited milquetoast who introduces himself as American financier William Clay, but who is of course Hans Gruber, the nefarious German mastermind played by Alan Rickman, in disguise.
McClane seems taken in, and offers him a spare Beretta. But when Hans reveals himself — when he aims the gun, and pulls the trigger — he is astonished to find it empty. “No bullets,” McClane sneers. “You think I’m stupid?”
McClane is hardly stupid, as the audience well knows. But the question remains: how exactly did he discern that this seemingly harmless fellow was in fact Hans Gruber? What did Gruber do that gave his identity away?
Moviegoers have ruminated on this mystery for three decades. Until at last this month it was solved: Steven E. de Souza, who co-wrote the adapted screenplay, explained at a 30th-anniversary screening of his film The Running Man last Tuesday that the revelation had to do with watches — the 12 identical Tag Heuer watches Hans and his henchmen throughout the film.
McClane had begun to notice the trend after dispatching his first few villains. When he spots the same timepiece on the wrist of Bill Clay, Gruber’s scheme is brought to light. You may not recall any meaningful reference in Die Hard to a series of identical watches because, as de Souza clarified, all references were excised from the final cut of the film in order to address a more glaring discrepancy involving a getaway vehicle and third-act reshoots.
“When Bruce offers the cigarette to Alan Rickman,” de Souza said, “Bruce sees the watch. You see his eyes look at the watch.” We just don’t have the evidence to glean the import of that look. A negligible change was made in editing and a momentous plot hole was born.
The plot hole is a fissure in the smooth surface of a story, a rupture through which credibility seeps out; it’s a cataclysmic breach, the leak that sinks the ship.
Or anyway, that’s the idea. We tend to seize upon plot holes with a fervour hardly merited by their importance to the moviegoing experience. We fixate on them, rooting out a film’s every implausibility and debating obsessively whether each might be resolved. They become regular dinnerparty conversation among cinephiles: isn’t it odd that Charles Foster Kane speaks his world-famous final word alone? Or else they become passion fodder for the easily crazed: message boards and YouTube channels are rife with the testimony of movie lovers committed to uncovering narrative faults. Plot holes are tenacious. It’s why Hans Gruber’s blunder has been a point of contention since 1988.
It’s easy to understand the intellectual and conversational appeal — particularly in the case of films with the longevity of Die Hard. It’s no coincidence that the films most often subjected to this kind of scrutiny share Die Hard’s nostalgic affection and fame: they’re the readily re-watchable blockbusters of a generation’s childhood, typically, rather than the mainstays of the international arthouse or avant-garde.
And so one wonders how it is that so little time seems to pass between the Millennium Falcon’s escape from the asteroid field and its arrival on Cloud City when Luke Skywalker’s training with Yoda seems to take eons. Or one heads online to theorize about Marty McFly’s parents and their lack of confusion over the resemblance between the man who introduced them and their teen child. Where did Edward Scissorhands find all that ice he’s carving at the end of the film? How does Buzz Lightyear know to play dead when Andy enters the room? Why does the hero of Memento even know he has short term memory loss?
The common theme here, I believe, is not shoddy script work or careless plotting. It is virtually impossible for a feature film of considerable scope to evade plot holes entirely. No matter how scrupulously the screenplay has been constructed, no matter with what painstaking detail the whole thing has been realized by the director and his team, some niggling detail will puncture the membrane of perfection. Movies are never perfect. The standards of the audience – the attention they bring to bear on every facet of every film – are simply too high to meet.
What these films share in common, rather, is how frequently and rabidly they tend to be watched – and how insubstantial they prove on repeated viewing.
Lord knows I adore Jurassic Park and have watched it many dozens of times since childhood. But lord also knows that Jurassic Park is not Ulysses, and it is hardly sturdy enough to sustain the intellectual pressure of the umpteenth re-watch. So my mind turns to the unimportant details, as one’s mind naturally does: the eighth time through I’m consumed by how the T-Rex enclosure is flat when one steps over the fence but an 80-foot precipice when it knocks the jeeps down.
How, I wonder, could such a mistake have made it past the defences of Steven Spielberg?
This is a plot hole. It resolutely doesn’t matter – only the most stunningly literalminded viewer would insist that it has any negative effect on the quality of the film. And yet a part of me nevertheless dimly hopes that its screenwriter will address the problem and solve the mystery for the world one of these years.