A FANTASY WORLD

by John M. Floyd

Leigh Lundin’s CB column “Hollywood Musts” a couple years ago, and his and Tony Harris’s examples of clichés and illogical scenes in movies, have done what every piece of writing should do: they’ve stayed on my mind. The points they made should be a lesson to everyone who writes fiction, because we’re so often tempted to take the easy way out. (I’m also reminded of several readers’ comments to my last Saturday’s column, which referred to goofs they’d noticed in movies. I love that kind of thing.)

I once heard an author say that fiction must be, if anything, more logical than nonfiction, and more logical than real life. Otherwise, readers won’t believe it. Writing about things that don’t make sense is not only lazy, it’s distracting.

How many times have we, as moviegoers or TV viewers, looked away from the big or small screen and thought things like:

• Why does everyone in town always belong to the same church?

• How can heroes play the guitar without moving their fingers?

• Why do barroom chairs always break apart when they’re used to whack folks on the head?

• Why do people being chased by cars run down the middle of the road?

• Where are the waitresses who ask customers what kind of salad dressing they want?

• How can clipped-on badges come off so easily?

• How do drivers always find parking spaces right in front of the buildings they’re going to?

• Were the streets in Westerns really that clean? Who scooped the poop? Marshal Dillon?

All this makes me think of a poem I first published in a journal called Mobius several years ago. With sincere apologies to any serious poets out there, I have included that piece here. It’s called “A Fantasy World”:

The only thing moviewise I find obscene
Isn’t brutal or racial or sexual;
It’s that scene after scene that I’ve seen on the screen
Could never be factually actual.

For example, in Westerns, the ladies of course
Still look fresh after months on the range,
No one’s ever injured when thrown from a horse,
And bartenders never make change.

All heroes bound tightly within villains’ lairs
With one touch of a knife can be freed,
And the chuckwagon crew might as well say their prayers
Anytime there’s a cattle stampede.

Every car, when it crashes, will burst into flames,
All cougars are shot in mid-leap,
Most private detectives have rugged last names,
And night watchmen are always asleep.

Our heroes are blue-eyed, their teeth are white-capped,
All six-guns shoot ten times at least,
And wrapped gifts and presents need not be unwrapped —
Their tops just lift off, in one piece.

And when stagecoaches fired on by unfriendly forces
Are chased twenty miles without rest,
No one ever thinks to shoot one of the horses —
That’d make things too simple, I guess.

More examples? Okay. Taking showers is deadly
(It’s better to just stay unclean),
And movie blood glistens a trifle too redly,
And windows don’t ever have screens.

Drivers don’t watch the road and they don’t lock their cars,
Bathers never use washcloths, just soap;
And the strength of a jail window’s solid iron bars
Is no match for a nag and a rope.

So the next time you witness an in-progress plot
To commit a spectacular crime,
Just step in and save everyone on the spot —
In the movies it’s done all the time.

And sometimes (too often?) in our stories.