I didn't want to do this, but I'm afraid I must: Time to break out my Star Trek IV rant.
My girlfriend accuses me of being a snob. When it comes to music, movies, TV shows and anything "artistic" (her quote marks, not mine), she says I flaunt my knowledge a little too much, that I'm condescending when I explain things, that I favor the obscure for its own sake, and disdain the popular because I assume the masses have deplorable tastes.
Let's take that last one first: Given that my all-time favorite band is a not-exactly obscure foursome called The Beatles, I just don't think that's true. Yeah, I probably know more about the band than the average person--my friend Howard and I spent at least fifteen minutes the other night riffing on John and Paul's well-known fondness for jam butties--but come on. They're the most famous band in history. There's a lot of information out there about the lads, and if you're a fan, it just makes sense that you'd want to know more. And the knowledge enhances the music: On the surface, Help is an upbeat, catchy song, but if you read it as another song John wrote to try to come to terms with the loss of his mother ("now these days are gone and I'm not so self-assured"), it becomes poignant...and meaningful.
As for the rest of her charges, I plead not guilty. I like what I like, and if that's obscure, hey, so be it. (Though again, given my obsessions with Star Wars and James Bond...obscure?) And if there are a lot of popular things that I hate, well, that's because I think we as audiences deserve better. There's nothing I hate more in popular art than cheap, easy writing.
Which brings me to Star Trek IV.
That would be the one in which the crew of the Enterprise travels back to modern-day San Francisco to save the whales because...Never mind, it's not important. The point is, in order to get our futuristic space folk to the late twentieth century, the film offers up a typical bullshit sci fi explanation. ("If we engage the whatchamacallit drive to maximum as we bank off the sun at a certain angle, we can bend the fabric of time and space and travel backwards...") Okay, fine. The premise of the movie demands this, and at least they made the effort to explain it.
But then the problem arises, once our plucky crew arrives here, how do they stay inconspicuous? Specifically, where do they park this spaceship? Well, they flip on the ship's Cloak Of Invisibilty and set it down in a heavily-used park.
Wha---? I used to complain about the whole Cloak Of Invisibility thing, arguing that asking us to accept another Idiot Premise after that whole banking off the sun bit was too much, but then I had people explain that said cloak is actually a given in the Star Trek universe, a premise that had long ago been established. (Those were the people who actually listened to this rant. Most people smile politely, pat me on the head and walk away as quickly as possible. And Tabbatha thinks I'm condescending...)
Okay, but just because a thing is invsible doesn't mean it ceases to exist. There's a spaceship in the middle of the park! Maybe you can't see it, but it still has mass. Joggers will smack into it, frisbees will bounce off it, birds will crap on it. People will figure out it's there. Yet the filmmakers ignore this, because it's easier for them. This isn't a part of the immediate story they're telling, so they neglect to construct a plausible backstory.
But backstory is everything. I have to believe that the story I'm being told is taking place in a plausible world. This is true whether the story is science fiction or a police procedural. (Don't get me started on C.S.I.) There are rules to storytelling, and if you violate the rules, you'd better have a reason. TV, movies, popular fiction...Storytelling is basically lying. The person telling us the story is basically telling us a series of whoppers. And even a seven-year-old knows that if you're going to tell a lie, it had better be believable.
