Story Magic and Fictional Logistics

This week, a brief intermission in the flow of retrospective posts.

I've been thinking a lot about Chapter Five of PRACTICAL DEFENCE and beyond, specifically who does what and where do they go. In my mind, I shuffle little army figures around a tactical battlefield. But when I find myself doing that, I often think about one of my favourite movies and the way the logistics for one of its most important scenes is absolutely, wildly inconsistent.

This week I want to take a quick look at JURASSIC PARK and ask, "how'd they get away with that?"

If you want the TL;DR version, here it is on the IMDB "Goofs" page:

I swear I checked IMDB in the past and this "goof" was not mentioned there, which always surprised me. It also meant I wasn't sure if I was imagining it or not. Now it's the first one on the page, so I don't feel clever about having spotted this "goof" on my own, but at least I know I'm not crazy.

Here's how it unfolds. (Excuse the poor-quality images; the easiest way for me to nab screenshots was to take photos with my phone. Thanks, technology!)

Two electric jeeps come to a stop next to the T-Rex paddock. Then the power goes out (Newman!). Inside the paddock, a goat bleats sadly, restrained at ground level.

Chomp chomp chomp, the star of the movie eats up the goat, tests the wires to discover they're not electrified anymore (clever!), and escapes.

All the visual cues here tell us that the ground on either side of the wall is at roughly the same level. The interior of the paddock shares the same ground level as the road.

Mayhem ensues, culminating in the T-Rex flipping over one of the jeeps to get at the chewy kiddy centre. Dr Grant is with the kids now, helping them.

As the T-Rex traps our heroes between a jeep and a hard place, our heroes have no choice but to get up on top of that wall…

… and we see that the ground inside the paddock is far, far away, very much in a downwards direction.

I had to watch this the other day because it seems like such a wild inconsistency that I knew there had to be some explanation. Maybe I was conflating two scenes. Maybe there's an establishing shot that builds believability. Maybe the T-Rex nudges the jeep further than I remembered, to a different spot. But no, our heroes go over the wall at the exact same spot as the T-Rex emerged. The movie has told us two very different truths about the ground inside the paddock. (Turns out I could have simply checked with IMDB, but again I was somehow convinced this inconsistency was not mentioned there.)

Jeep falls, heroes survive.

Later, Dr Sattler arrives to do some rescuing, and from this angle it still looks like the ground inside the pen is the same as on the outside, though I guess the darkness and haziness of the background buy some benefit-of-the-doubt.

Just as a brief-but-interesting aside, I noticed that when Dr Sattler descends the massive wall to check on the jeep wreckage…

… the movie spends no time explaining how she got down that wall. Was she lowered via tow cable? Did she climb down the same broken wires that Dr Grant used? How is she planning to get back up?

The answer — both with Dr Sattler's descent of the wall and the initial environmental inconsistency — and sing it with me here — is "who cares" and "it doesn't matter."

All writing advice tells us to "cut out the boring bits." The details of Dr Sattler's descent might potentially be boring, but we could make them exciting. Get a pterodactyl or seven in there to harass her, perhaps. I could have burned a thousand calories making that descent exciting, and maybe it would be, so does it still qualify for cutting? The advice "cut out the boring bits" becomes less actionable, and maybe that's the point of quippy aphorisms — they're supposed to be just actionable enough to get you thinking, but not so much that they're liable for bad choices. We need to look for better guidance.

In this case, I think that guidance is "we need Dr Sattler to know that Dr Grant and the kids are alive." This need has ramifications for the rest of the story. Dr Sattler will behave differently if she thinks they're dead. If that's all we need to establish, there's no point wasting the budget on a pterodactyl attack. We need to show the audience enough to establish Dr Sattler's knowledge. The details can be massaged using Movie Magic.

It takes a lot of Movie Magic to make us accept or ignore that there's solid ground inside the paddock one minute, and the next minute it's a 400-foot drop. Plus, while writing advice tells us to "cut out the boring bits," I have yet to read, "ahhh who gives a shit about the specifics of the environment."

At this point I should acknowlege that if anyone knows how to leverage Movie Magic, you'd have a hard time arguing against Steven Spielberg. He gives us enough time between the T-Rex emerging from the pen and when they go over the cliff that we develop priorities which are much more pressing than "hey where's the ground level here?" We are hypnotized by the buildup of suspense (e.g. the ripples in the water cup, and, "where's the goat?"). We get wrapped up in the kids' all-encompassing terror. We are awed by the T-Rex, especially at the time the movie came out, when special effects like that were not commonplace. We learn things, like "he can't see you if you move," so we're paying attention to our characters and how they either do or do not adhere to this "rule." The T-Rex chomps a bureaucrat and we cheer. Just typing this all out, I've almost forgotten what the original point was.

Then the movie-makers encounter their need to extract Dr Grant and the kids from the T-Rex. You could do this boring-ly, like maybe everyone stays perfectly still (per the rule) and the T-Rex loses interest. Or you could have our heroes not only jump off a cliff — in true adventure-movie fashion — but then the jeep which previously offered them safety is now a deadly object which will crush and kill them, being nudged over the edge in a way that makes the T-Rex seem sadistic but in a believably animal way, and you stretch out that tension with all the fumbling around on the tree, and and and you cap it all off by having the jeep fall on our heroes, but the giant sunroof has been knocked out — demonstrating diligent attention to the detail or logistics of the car's design — so, like Buster Keaton, it does not hurt them, and then the kid says, "at least we're back in the jeep," and we all laugh. It's all so aggressively tight and tense, and then such a huge relief, that it would take razor-sharp cleverness and a will of steel to notice the "goof" upon a first viewing.

What I take from this is that when you arrive at a story problem like, "how do I save our heroes from the T-Rex," and you're doing the brainstorming like, "we could do this, or we could do that," it pays to consider superficially-implausible but exciting ideas. If I were writing Jurassic Park and arrived at that point, and "have them jump off a cliff" came up, I'd probably say "but there are no cliffs nearby."

A better response might be, "will that be more exciting?" The answer is yes, yes it is more exciting to have them jump off a cliff. But there is no cliff. Who cares! There is now! But there can't be. They're not architectural plans, you moron. Try harder. Make them do the exciting thing.

And when you wonder, "but how will that make sense," perhaps the best response is, "will anyone even notice?" Will the audience really care about the logistics? If they do, have you succeeded as a writer? This applies in any circumstance. Can I use all the tools at my disposal — empathy, questions, fear, relatability, humour, suspense, surprise, expectation, etc. — to twiddle magic fingers at the audience and misdirect them from what would otherwise be a wildly jarring environmental incongruity?

The answer has to be, you've gotta try. When you need to extract the kids from a T-Rex and one option is "jump off a cliff," it's worth puzzling out the sequence to see if that can, in fact, not only be a useful solution, but become one of the high points of the story.

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I should also acknowledge that this kind of narrative cockiness can backfire. One of those live-action TRANSFORMERS movies with Marky Mark in it has such a jarring discontinuity during one of the action sequences that it makes the whole movie feel like twice the rusty clunker that it might otherwise have been. The stupid-but-fun BATTLESHIP (remember that one? the one based on the board game?) has a similar juddering mess of a sequence discontinuity. But those movies not only lacked Movie Magic, it seems like no one in charge cared about what they were making. So when you ask yourself, "will the audience notice?" you do actually have to follow it up by making an effort misdirect from the inconsistencies.

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Tale as old as time: this turned out to be longer than I thought it would be. Thank you for joining me on this little tangent. This stuff fascinates me.

I'm off to start prepping and lettering PDAP Chapter Four!

Until next week,
I remain,
twice the rusty clunker I might otherwise have been,

TC