{"id":44485,"date":"2018-11-15T06:00:14","date_gmt":"2018-11-15T11:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=44485"},"modified":"2018-11-15T08:39:07","modified_gmt":"2018-11-15T13:39:07","slug":"shut-up-about-shut-up-about-plot-holes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=44485","title":{"rendered":"Shut Up About SHUT UP ABOUT PLOT HOLES"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I really love the YouTube Channel of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/patrickhwillems\/videos\">Patrick H. Willems<\/a>. He&#8217;s done some solid work over the years. I think I&#8217;ve watched his entire channel twice by this point. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=yrwdBw4Gnuk\">How to Make a Perfect Action Scene<\/a> is brilliant and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bfjvoEvAzCE\">Marvel&#8217;s The Defenders: Why is the Hand So Boring?<\/a> answers a question that Netflix probably should have figured out about four years ago.  <\/p>\n<p>Over the past handful of years I&#8217;ve had to pay more attention to narrative and structure because the videogames I critique are so often designed and marketed with a huge emphasis on their stories. To do a proper analysis I need to understand what they were trying (and often <a href=\"?p=28485\">failing<\/a>) to accomplish in a cinematic sense. Which means that I&#8217;ve spent a lot of time watching stuff from filmmakers-turned-YouTubers. PHW is one of the better examples of this.<\/p>\n<p>A few weeks ago he published <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=j9HivyjAKlc\">SHUT UP ABOUT PLOT HOLES<\/a>. I knew the video was going to get him into trouble the moment I saw the title. At a couple of points in his essay he even says, &#8220;You&#8217;re watching movies wrong.&#8221; That&#8217;s provocative to the point of being flame-bait, although I doubt he intended it that way. As of this writing, SHUT UP ABOUT PLOT HOLES has more views than any of his other work, but it&#8217;s also the most intensely disliked. It&#8217;s got a 30% negative rating, which is way out of norm for the channel.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h3>We&#8217;ve Been Here Before<\/h3>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/j9HivyjAKlc\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=j9HivyjAKlc'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>The argument is very reminiscent of <a href=\"?p=17692\">the exchange I had with Film Crit Hulk<\/a> about plot holes. This was back in 2012 when <a href=\"?p=32094\">the end of Mass Effect 3<\/a> was the outrage fuel of the day. In his post <a href=\"https:\/\/birthmoviesdeath.com\/2012\/10\/30\/film-crit-hulk-smash-hulk-vs.-plot-holes-and-movie-logic\">Film Crit Hulk Smash: HULK VS. PLOT HOLES AND MOVIE LOGIC<\/a>, FCH made the case that the point of a story wasn&#8217;t to present a perfect, flawless, rigorously logical world, but to tell a particular story. <\/p>\n<p>I wonder if Patrick Willems is aware of the genealogy of this debate<span class='snote' title='1'>I&#8217;m not suggesting that FCH and I were REMOTELY the first people to tackle this. This debate is ancient.<\/span>. He&#8217;s wearing Hulk gloves in the video thumbnail, which seems like it might be a nod to the work Film Crit Hulk did six years earlier. <\/p>\n<p>Lots of other folks have responded to PHW&#8217;s video with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=w9Y4M00f6B8\">annoyed<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=IPkdJP0Ut2Q\">videos<\/a> of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2ciIkqQf9_Q\">their<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=9zx50GiqKjg\">own<\/a>. <\/p>\n<h3>Playing &#8220;Gotcha&#8221; With Movies<\/h3>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/plothole_3d.jpg' width=100% alt='I&apos;m not sure Behind the Indigo Door is the sort of movie you&apos;d want to watch in 3D. Of course, that&apos;s probably true of all movies.' title='I&apos;m not sure Behind the Indigo Door is the sort of movie you&apos;d want to watch in 3D. Of course, that&apos;s probably true of all movies.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>I&apos;m not sure Behind the Indigo Door is the sort of movie you&apos;d want to watch in 3D. Of course, that&apos;s probably true of all movies.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>I can see where the author is coming from. I know there are a lot of people out there who like to play &#8220;gotcha&#8221; with storytellers. Some of this is the result of people doing &#8220;outrage as performance art&#8221; for their YouTube channels. Some people even take it one step further and suggest that if you didn&#8217;t notice these OBVIOUS AND GLARING plot holes then you must be a dumb popcorn-munching sheeple and you&#8217;re part of the reason movies are so stupid these days. I&#8217;ll admit these arguments are really annoying and I can see why you&#8217;d want to tell these people they&#8217;re &#8220;watching movies wrong&#8221;. On the other hand, claiming that &#8220;plot holes don&#8217;t matter&#8221; is a massive over-reach that leads PHW to waste his time demolishing pointless strawmen. <\/p>\n<p>I think <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/CinemaSins\">CinemaSins<\/a> is seen as the <em>King of the Pointless Plot Hole Nitpickers<\/em>. I&#8217;ve never seen a channel where its performance was so divorced from its reputation. CinemaSins videos regularly top a million views, and yet I can never find any fans. It&#8217;s not that people don&#8217;t like it, it&#8217;s that they actively revile it. This distaste comes from all over the spectrum. Even people who disagree with Patrick H Willems are in agreement that CinemaSins is trash. <\/p>\n<p>(For the record, I watch it once in a while. I&#8217;m not a huge fan but I do like when Jeremy makes an observation of a detail I&#8217;d missed, even if I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s strictly relevant to enjoying the movie. Having said that, I get that some people are driven to irritation by the CinemaSins style of rapid-fire nitpicks over things that often aren&#8217;t worth picking. I use the channel as a way to collect little lists of things I might have missed or not thought about. Which means that even if I&#8217;m not watching movies wrong, I&#8217;m probably watching CinemaSins wrong. Having said that, if you&#8217;re looking for nitpicking-as-comedy, then <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=cWQSPDWeLLw\">Screen Rant&#8217;s Pitch Meeting<\/a> series is a better place to go.)<\/p>\n<p>People do get annoyed with overly pedantic nitpicking and with lazy gotcha-style dismissals of a work based on trivial perceived sleights. People do sometimes make arguments like &#8220;they didn&#8217;t explain why the eagles couldn&#8217;t take Frodo to Mordor therefore the movies are dumb garbage for dumb people&#8221;. I imagine the public would probably welcome a good rant pushing back against this sort of thing. But Willems takes the argument so far and states everything in such absolutist terms that there&#8217;s no room left to draw a distinction between &#8220;trivial nitpick&#8221; and &#8220;massive violation of common sense that ejects the audience from the world and leaves them confused&#8221;. <\/p>\n<h3>Logic isn&#8217;t Everything &#8211; But it Still Matters<\/h3>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/plothole_popcorn1.jpg' width=100% alt='I&apos;m not one of those dumb lowbrow popcorn munching idiots. I&apos;m more of a Mike &amp; Ike fan.' title='I&apos;m not one of those dumb lowbrow popcorn munching idiots. I&apos;m more of a Mike &amp; Ike fan.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>I&apos;m not one of those dumb lowbrow popcorn munching idiots. I&apos;m more of a Mike &amp; Ike fan.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s clear that the video on Plot Holes isn&#8217;t totally in line with Willems actual beliefs. In the video he makes the case that you shouldn&#8217;t complain about people acting illogically because people are illogical in real life and that&#8217;s what drives the conflict. But in his video on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=c4Y9iXjK_uU\">Jurassic Park\u2019s Sequel Problem<\/a> he makes the case that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=c4Y9iXjK_uU#t=13m40s\">characters behaving irrationally prevents us from caring about them<\/a> and is one of the major failings of the franchise. It&#8217;s obvious that logic <em>does<\/em> matter to Willems, so I have no idea why he felt like he needed to take such a hardline stance. Maybe he watched one too many irritating episodes of CinemaSins and allowed his anger to carry him into imprudent arguments. Maybe he was trying to do the &#8220;exaggerated outrage as performance art&#8221; but it doesn&#8217;t work because he&#8217;s neither angry nor profane enough to sell it. Maybe he just wanted to stir the pot for some cheap clicks. I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n<p>Like I&#8217;ve said in the past, plot holes aren&#8217;t a binary thing; <a href=\"?p=25227\">they exist on a gradient<\/a>, and everyone has a different threshold for when nagging questions become distracting enough to take you out of a story. If you&#8217;ve got a lot of domain experience in a given field than you&#8217;re really likely to notice factually absurd details that go unnoticed by the average viewer. If you view a movie in sections rather than a single sitting, then those nagging questions will have longer to nag you. If you&#8217;re feeling restless and bored then you&#8217;re more likely to turn your mind to nitpicky details that would go completely ignored if you were laughing and having a good time. If a movie offends you on a moral or intellectual level then you&#8217;ll probably start distrusting the storyteller and you&#8217;ll be more inclined to look for justifications to hate the work.<\/p>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/plothole_distracted.jpg' width=100% alt='Maybe it&apos;s a plot hole, or maybe you need to stop channel-surfing in the middle of the movie when shit is being explained, Kyle.' title='Maybe it&apos;s a plot hole, or maybe you need to stop channel-surfing in the middle of the movie when shit is being explained, Kyle.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>Maybe it&apos;s a plot hole, or maybe you need to stop channel-surfing in the middle of the movie when shit is being explained, Kyle.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>No matter how logically sound a movie is, there will always be a few people who feel the need to nitpick a few details. Maybe they were having a bad night when they saw the movie. Maybe they went in expecting something else. Likewise, no matter how infantile, nonsensical, or structurally incoherent a movie is, there will always be a handful of people who don&#8217;t care because the movie gave them the 90 minutes of low-effort sensory stimulation they were looking for that night. <\/p>\n<p>This doesn&#8217;t mean that plot holes are purely a matter of taste or that they don&#8217;t matter. A sloppy or poorly conceived movie will have more people griping about plot holes. A good storyteller will anticipate what elements might frustrate or confuse people and will address it early so it doesn&#8217;t fester in the minds of the audience. A sloppy one will overlook important details and lose some people along the way. <\/p>\n<p>A great example is the one we talked about in <em>Mass Effect Andromeda<\/em> just <a href=\"?p=44380\">two days ago<\/a>. The main character breaks their helmet twice. The first time the problem is quickly and easily fixed and the second time it&#8217;s a dire life-or-death situation. People get distracted arguing about what the technology can and can&#8217;t do, or how big the crack was, but that&#8217;s not really the source of the problem. These two scenes caused confusion because they created an expectation in the minds of the audience that the first scene was the set-up for the second. The fact that so many people had a problem with this scene shows that the writer&#8217;s intentions weren&#8217;t being properly conveyed. That&#8217;s sloppy work, and the writer should have anticipated the audience expectations and made allowances for them. (Or, you know, cut the first scene since it&#8217;s not required by the story.)<\/p>\n<p>I have this sneaking suspicion that all of this debating over plot holes is based on the residual bitterness over <em>The Last Jedi<\/em>. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=w1VeOlIDD9o\">Willems was a huge fan<\/a>, and a lot of his critics responded to his video on plot holes with digs like, &#8220;Pfft. What do you expect from someone who liked The Last Jedi?&#8221; The movie was pretty divisive and some culture-war baggage got dragged into the analysis. A lot of the criticisms of TLJ focused on supposed plot holes. I think that&#8217;s really unfortunate, and maybe the culture war is polarizing people into untenable positions of &#8220;plot holes instantly invalidate a movie&#8221; and &#8220;logic is for losers&#8221;. I plan to do a long-form analysis on <em>The Last Jedi<\/em> at some point, so we can come back to this topic later. <\/p>\n<p>Whatever the root of the problem is, I&#8217;d like to see this debate move in a more healthy direction. I believe strongly that craft matters. We should celebrate creators that can get the audience to buy-in rather than condemning the members of the audience who don&#8217;t. At the same time, it&#8217;s good to remember that movies are not logic puzzles, and there&#8217;s a big difference between something that broke your immersion in the theater and an inconsistency pointed out by some rando in a Reddit thread a week later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I really love the YouTube Channel of Patrick H. Willems. He&#8217;s done some solid work over the years. I think I&#8217;ve watched his entire channel twice by this point. How to Make a Perfect Action Scene is brilliant and Marvel&#8217;s The Defenders: Why is the Hand So Boring? answers a question that Netflix probably should [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dream-cast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44485"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44520,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44485\/revisions\/44520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}