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Comment by xaedes | Hacker News Reader

"The Room", by Tommy Wiseau, is a movie where Chekhov's gun isn't applied. It contains lots of small happenings with no further relevance. It has lots of other issues, technically speaken.

But together they make this film not only amateurish, but it also gives it a certain kind of realism. In real life stuff happens and still may have no further relevance to the "story" after all. In real life there is nobody enforcing Chekhov's gun.

Together with the other charming mistakes and bad acting the film feels quite authentic. It gives this impression that someone just wanted to tell his story, despite not being as professional as we are used to. Like a little child coming home from playing in the woods that excitetly blabbers out the story of what he just experienced.

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Same with the Big Lebowski, but in a much more deliberate (and professional) way. The Dude, imagining himself in a film noir story, thinks that every detail is some clue relevant to Bunny's disappearance, but turns out to be completely irrelevant: the guy following the Dude in the VW, the essay in the Dude's car, Jackie Treehorn's note, etc. Instead, basically every single event in the movie after exposition is a red herring when it turns out that the Dude's initial hunch that Bunny kidnapped herself was true all along.

Well, he was on a strict drug regiment during the whole thing.

The Coens do it a lot, in fact it’s basically the entirety of Inside Llewyn Davis.

The one that always gets me is Luke's lightsaber in the original Star Wars. It's introduced as a connection to the father he never knew, making it hugely significant. There's a whole scene on the Falcon of Ben training him to use it. And then he never takes it out again for the remainder of the movie.

Wow I never realized that. Did they already intend to film a sequel and call back to his lightsaber, or was that just a random detail they worked in later?

Lucas definitely had sequels in mind, but it was very much in doubt whether the movie would succeed. There was an official sequel novel by Alan Dean Foster called Splinter of the Mind's Eye released in '78, which was explicitly designed to be filmable on a very low budget if the original didn't do too well. That does feature Luke duelling Vader with his saber.

It also (rather uncomfortably in light of later revelations) features Luke & Leia as a romantic couple! Apparently Lucas signed off on Foster's manuscript, so he hadn't had the idea that they were siblings yet.

Luke and Leia were teased as a romantic couple in Empire, she kissed him on the lips to draw Han's ire, and then it's hinted that she's his sister in the final scene of Dagobah/when he calls out to her via the force. The incest thing is something that Lucas was deliberately playing with, whether Splinter took that into account or not.

How do you get “deliberately” from that?

The comment you’re replying to is correct; there’s plenty of evidence that Lucas made up both the plots and crucial details of all the Star Wars films as he went along, rather than plotting it all out in advance. Telling people he had, or at least allowing them to believe so, was just another inspired marketing trick.

Even though Luke never uses his saber again, its introduction and exposition gives some heft to the later fight between Kenobi and Vader.

You see this in lots of long-play shows/properties. Adventure Time comes to mind. A number of seemingly irrelevant details become central to the main plot in much later episodes (years/seasons later).

I am wondering, however, whether there is some sort of plot bible that lives with the “keepers” of the storyline, or whether some details are just randomly sprinkled here and there as hooks with the hope that writers will weave them into the future plot.

Either way, this type of writing is extremely rewarding to long-time fans of a show.

Archer is also known for this sort of thing.

https://www.engadget.com/2015-03-21-massive-archer-easter-eg...

Doctor Who is similar, with plot twists often spanning seasons.

"And you, daughter of London, there is something on your back." -- Lucius, the chief auger of Pompeii

That quote raises goosebumps on my arm every time I hear it...

He has blinders on and is learning to use the force, which he does use again. his lightsaber isn't used again, but they are used again in a master's fight.

That is a surprising thing to note. Though it does help set up two of the most important scenes in the movie: Lightsabers are used in the dramatic battle between Vader and Obi-Wan; It's good to have them in a few scenes if the first time they're in a battle, the mentor is killed. Furthermore, at the end when Luke is doing the trench run, he's relying on his targeting computer until force ghost Obi-Wan tells him to use the force. This relaxing and trusting in the force was directly set up in the Falcon training scene.

I think overall this is the best way to use Chekhov's Gun: Introduce several things, but don't make it obvious how they're going to fit together.

> charming mistakes

One character being played by three different actors (either that, or three characters being so similar I confused them as the same character despite being three different actors) is hardly charming IMO.

Longer form stories, such as Game of Thrones (where Azor Ahai, and other such plotlines are literally killed off) are probably more entertaining. It sucks to see a fan theory turn out to not matter at all, but not everything ends up being relevant to the conclusion.

I don't think a 2 or 3 hour movie has any room to dwell on unimportant details. Anime and miniseries do have that time. We can watch Goku mess around with Princess Snake or Krillen get his Namekian power up (which doesn't matter for any fight, but is good development for the character in isolation).

That's probably the charm of Cowboy Bebop. There's so much detail and none of it really matters. The interesting story happened like 10 years ago (in universe time). That's be my pick for a show / story with very little Chekhov gun going on.

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Chekhov gun is probably contrasted with Red Herring, which is explicitly a detail that not only doesn't matter, but purely exists to mislead the audience. Any Chekhov gun heavy plot needs red herrings to balance things out, otherwise it's too predictable.

“ Red Herring, which is explicitly a detail that not only doesn't matter, but purely exists to mislead the audience.”

There is also the McGuffin which appears to matter, but exists entirely to elicit character action. For instance, in “Psycho” the plot line about the stolen money is dropped almost as soon as it is established, but it did its job by getting Marion on the run and into the motel.

The MacGuffin isn’t just there to elicit a response though… it’s a primary motivator for the characters. It’s usually (but not always) a physical object, but that matters less than the fact that the characters are trying to obtain it (usually unsuccessfully). It’s also rarely explained — it is an object that simply exists.

Hitchcock loved the MacGuffin, but Psycho isn’t the example I’d use. The money in Psycho is a useful plot device, but is not a MacGuffin. Money is too common ofna motivation. The briefcase in Pulp Fiction (which is of unexplained importance, but clearly something they want to obtain) is a classic example of a MacGuffin.

The Pulp Fiction briefcase is more of a "pure MacGuffin", where the film director / scriptwriters are playing with the concept of MacGuffin more than actually using it as its intended purpose.

After all, its a Tarantino film. He basically expects the audience to be familiar with film theory (or at minimum: expects the audience to already be familiar with "typical plotlines").

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Your typical action movie / popcorn movies: Raiders of the Lost Arc (The Arc of the Covenant), Mission Impossible (The Rabbit's Foot), and Men In Black (Orion's Belt), and pretty much every James Bond movie, has MacGuffins galore and are better examples of it.

The scriptwriter doesn't care about the MacGuffin. But a well written story has the __audience__ care deeply about it. Otherwise, the escalation and conflict has no purpose. Pulp Fiction / Tarantino used the briefcase as an exercise in how to make the audience care for an object, despite never really explaining why that object is the center of all this conflict.

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Golden Fleece, Apples of the Hesperides (aka: Heracle's 11th task), Holy Grail. It doesn't really matter what these objects do, we just use them as storytelling devices to get the characters thrust into conflict.

the Pulp Fiction briefcase is actually a deconstructed MacGuffin, stripped of everything except the plot device itself - no explanation for why it's important, no inherent meaning, no payoff, just a thing that drives the plot. A lot of Tarantino's work has this kind of postmodern element to it.

I don’t know if I agree that the audience needs to care about the MacGuffin for it to be a well written story though. I think in some circumstances it can help, but it’s not necessary (or sufficient) for a good story.

I mean, I read that Lucas thought of R2D2 as the MacGuffin of “A New Hope”, and thought that it was important for the audience to care deeply about him. And it worked. However, as a film device, I think it’s more important that the audience cares that the protagonist cares about the MacGuffin. I still don’t know why I should care about the Maltese Falcon, but I know that Bogart certainly cared. And for me, that was enough to make the story compelling.

I do agree though about Pulp Fiction. The briefcase was a very meta reference where the audience is assumed to know what is going on. And in that case it helped to provide a common thread through the different plot lines. But from a higher level, it was done with a wink and a nod to the audience. It was basically using the MacGuffin as a foil to use as the “typical linear storyline” when what Tarantino was really doing was playing with time lines and points of view.

With regards to Pulp Fiction, is the Gold Watch another MacGuffin?

> In real life there is nobody enforcing Chekhov's gun.

Of course not. Which is sort of the point. We already have real life. Stories are something different. Checkov's gun isn't a statement of some kind of platonic ideal of fiction construction, it's a convention. We like stories with "tight" framing because it's easier to watch and keeps our attention on the things that matter. And that's all it means.

You can tell other kinds of stories. Art is art. But if you want people to like your stories (or whatever other artwork you're producing) you'll probably be better served y adhering to convention and violating it in small, targetted ways than you will be throwing out long-held standard assumptions.

(Note that the fact that these conventions exist is itself ammunition for creativity, btw. A "realist" story where nothing necessarily matters is going to have a very hard time delivering a creative twist at the end. A conventional plot, though, can leverage the fact that the audience is conditioned to expect things based on rules like Chekhov's, and subvert those in interesting ways.)

Chekhov's gun treatment can remove an element of surprise, or worse, reveal whole plot-line. It's a convention that is an art in itself, too much and too little can ruin the experience.

Properly blending it in is a form of art, and a surprise in itself. For example, [spoilers] the rock hammer in The Shawshank Redemption, or more literally, the rifle on the wall in Shaun Of The Dead. A good gun makes you go "oooooh!"

On the other hand, building up readers' expectations with details that turn out to be irrelevant is just deception. See the last season of Game of Thrones, for instance. All those characters that were carefully built over the last seasons get discarded without any explanation.

There's sometimes stuff like that in Tarantino movie, like the outlaw lady in Django.

Discarding with explanation can sometimes be used to effect too.

For example, suppose a character sends a spy to accomplish an objective. Meanwhile, another group of people are also trying to do this, which will benefit the main character, although the main character is unaware of this. The second group gets there first, and even though there was considerable buildup to the spy's mission, in the end, his presence doesn't matter (much).

If you want as lean a story as possible, you would cut out the spy's mission altogether, but its presence gives a sense of realism, because the character in the story doesn't know ahead of time that sending the spy would be redundant.

I'm pretty much alone in the world in thinking this, but I consider the rock hammer in Shawshank to be a bad execution of Chekhov's Gun, albeit for reasons unrelated to the core logic of that rule.

Basically, Shawshank clearly establishes itself as having a gritty, realistic tone, where shit happens for reasons that have no cosmic significance or relation to your epic hero arc. Specifically, when that prisoner turns out to be a witness who can clear Andy, and just suddenly gets shot by avaricious guards who don't care about the injustice. (If it hadn't been already, Red's final parole speech cements that tone.)

It's a huge betrayal of that when you turn around and say "oh man, if you just belieeeeeeeve in yourself hard enough you can somehow make a figurine carving tool last 100x longer than is realistically possible and accomplish major excavation work, it's all about your force of will".

(Similar complaint about Interstellar, which commits to hard sci-fi enough to include an expensive, photo-realistic black hole, and doubles back and resolve the plot with "ah man we just have to tap into the mysterious fifth-dimensional power of love!")

I don't think that rule expresses universal truth. These rules come and go. You have great writers who wrote famous books which don't follow these Storytelling that follows then becomes boring and predictable when they are widely used.

The junk adventure/vampire what not literature tend to follow all the structural rules and is as forgettable as it gets.

The argument with real life matter. Because when your storytelling rules make it impossible to tell real stories, then there is something wrong with them.

according to some theories, there is enforcement of Chekov's gun. Reality is combinitorial explosive, ie. there are vastly too many inputs for us to synthesize. So our perception and memory both function to "chunk" events and objects. These "chunks" are what you perceive and remember. So you don't just bump into random objects, but in fact you only see and remember things that are in some way relevant. In other words, everything is a Chekhov gun in some ways.

I think there are lots of different thinkers with this perspective, here is one concise formulation:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPByuAeFxwE

The movie that comes to mind for me is Napoleon Dynamite. My first impression was that it was just aimless slapstick, but really it's about a group of misfits becoming friends. The events that lead there sometimes pay off and are sometimes are seemingly random. This really makes it feel charming and realistic.

Speaking of that movie, I can recommend anyone who is familiar with The Room, but who hasn’t seen The Room, to watch the movie The Disaster Artist (2017) instead. I’ve only watched the latter and not The Room itself but watching the latter instead was a nice experience.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3521126/

The Disaster Artist is based on the book "The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made" by Greg Sestero, and it’s got James Franco portraying Tommy.

I had high expectations for that movie but it didn't turn out as good as I expected.

I have to agree, but this seems to be a bit of an unpopular opinion. I don't think it really captured the spirit of the book. It was too nice, and made the characters too likeable.

I think Tommy should always be a villain. You should never like him! He's this terrible person that on some level you despise, but at least he's interesting.

How many miserable jerks are there that won't shut up about their stupid film idea? How many actually follow through?

It's worth watching The Room first, IMO

I also think that the rifle can “set the frame” for the character or scenario.

E.g. that the character is the kind of person who owns guns.

It does not go off or get used, but the viewer will use that as input to make a judgement about the character.

Maybe the rifle/gun is just a bad example today? I watch movies all the time where there are guns or rifles which does not gow off. And I sure don't feel like some promise was broken.

Chekhov used this example of a rifle on the wall in 1889, years before the invention of the movie camera.

It shouldn't be taken as advice on movie production design.

I think it’s something which is more obvious in a literary context where not talking about the gun means there is no obvious reference to it, but in a movie it may still exist, they just do not draw attention to it.

Gun isn’t literal here. Gun is a metaphor for details; if the details don’t serve the plot (if the gun doesn’t go off) then the details should be removed (don’t show the gun)

In good writing, details serve multiple purposes. Just showing a gun because it will be used later will seem ham-fisted to an audience. A good writer will introduce the gun as a character moment and as setup.

One of the things that made Quentin Tarantino's early films, particularly Pulp Fiction, such a breath of fresh air is that they did this with abandon. John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson would chat away about McDonald's in France or whether or not they were prepared to eat pork and it was of no consequence whatsoever to subsequent events, other than to give characters a bit more depth. Too many films and novels have things happen for no other reason than that the plot is going to require it in the next act and it's great when a writer takes a different approach.

The great thing about the Room is that it is so poorly acted that it is impossible to replicate. So it is a kind of a side-channel into the minds of the people playing here. It might be lame and unwatchable at places, but it's also more genuine than any performance a trained person could put forth.

Not to be confused with "Room", which I recommend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_(2015_film)

But some of those things that are dropped don't make any sense to have no impact on the characters, like someone having cancer. It's just mentioned and never brought up again.

I think I see the argument for why that's 'charming', but I've seen far more enjoyable media that does it better.

Details that build characters is good. X has cancer is fine, albeit heavyhanded. Certainly enough of a characterization to work in low-plot action movies for example.

Not everything needs to be relevant to the plot. But I'm not convinced that a 2 hour movie has the room for this kind of storytelling.

It’s also celebrated as the worst film ever made.

I've never seen The Room so my opinion may change if I ever do, but there is another movie that I have seen (though only by proxy of MST3K) called Manos: The Hands of Fate that also has been referred to as the worst movie ever made, and I wholeheartedly agree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manos:_The_Hands_of_Fate

Not sure why I chose to watch that but I have to agree, that's comparable to The Room (if not as funny on it's own like The Room is, absent the jokes added by the MST3K hosts this one would be getting fast-forwarded constantly).

Things that are "bad" like that are uniquely bad. It's not just annoying or purposefully bad, it's a side effect of a series of poor judgements that make it amusing.

The most revealing part was in a Youtube comment that explained the master's helper guy (who takes up a ton of screen time) was clearly on acid the whole time, which makes his totally unusual behaviours understandable for anyone who has tried that before. But still very very socially awkward and creepy.

Those 2, and "Plan 9 from Outer Space", are the 3 I generally hear "lauded" as the worst.

Probably suicidal to say so, but I thought I made the most awful films. https://poetaster.de/vendetta

I thought Battlefield Earth held that title?

If you're masochistic, download it from somewhere. If you're sadistic, have people watch it with you.

I'm not engaging in hyperbole when I call it ridiculously bad.

Going to test my pain threshold with that this evening. Thanks.

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