The Weekly Screed (#739)

The movie drumstick
by David Benjamin

PARIS — This familiar movie scene is always guy-intensive, with squads from the Tactical Police, the bomb unit, the FBI and a few Homeland Security kibitzers, along with our unattached hero and — for gender balance — one gorgeous starlet with no lines and very little control over her blouse buttons. This elite task force is closing in on an alleged villain played by one of those Hollywood heavyweights who have more testosterone in their toenails than I have in my whole torso — Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham…

It’s nighttime. It’s a big city — New York, Miami, L.A., Bismarck.  They’re in a building. The sun won’t be up for another nine hours. Suddenly, a deputy commander, depicted by a reliable character actor like Will Patton, shouts something like, “OK, Units A and B, come with me. I want Unit C to concentrate their firepower on the northwest corner.”

At this point, I’m hoping with all my heart that our hero — Kevin Spacey or Ethan Hawke — responds by whipping out his Swiss Army compass, or firing up his wrist-mounted GPS device, or simply turning to Will Patton with this, “Sarge, we’re in the basement of a building we’ve never entered before. It’s the middle of the night, and the prevailing westerlies don’t blow down here. So, northwest? Where the hell is that?”

Of course, this doesn’t happen. In the movies, cops are apparently blessed with the homing instincts of whooping cranes and the field training of Eagle Scouts. They all know, without hesitation or any point of reference, which way is due west, southeast and north-by-northwest. So much for cinema verité!

Since we gave up riding buckboards, plowing the south forty and sniffing the wind for rain, normal people have little connection with compass points. Most of us, driving into the sunset at 7 p.m., couldn’t guess which way is east. I doubt that non-movie cops are any more compass-savvy than the rest of us. If you told a dozen police to mass at the northwest corner, they’d go off every which way while Denzel, Bruce and Jason slipped out the front door, turned left and headed uptown.

I love the movies. When we’re in Paris, with no TV reception, I watch lots of old flicks. But I grind my teeth over certain idiotic script conventions — like compass-obsessed police — that most screenwriters don’t seem to think about.

For instance, one of my favorite cop comedies is Stakeout (John Badham, 1987). In one scene, Emilio Estevez is stuck freezing in a rundown apartment manning a surveillance camera while partner Richard Dreyfuss is wooing Madeleine Stowe. Estevez’s only companion is a picked-over KFC bucket, and he curses when he finds nothing there but a couple of cold, dried-out wings.

I love this. This, my friends, is beautiful screenwriting — because it’s deeply human and absolutely true.

However, in most movies, chicken defies reality. In a typical scene, our hero — let’s say Jeff Daniels — can’t sleep. He gets out of bed, pads to the fridge, looks inside and pulls out? Voila! A drumstick, juicy, plump and (not even swathed in Saran Wrap) ready to gnaw. I curse like an Estevez. This moment is less credible than Godzilla giving birth to 200 velociraptors in Madison Square Garden, because nobody — since the dawn of man — has ever left a drumstick in the bucket.

I grew up in Wisconsin, whose unofficial state motto, is “You gonna eat that?” Cheeseheads occasionally leave food on the table. Boiled parsnips, for example. Mom’s experimental liver-and-carrot juice cocktail. But chicken? As Vizzini said in The Princess Bride: “Inconceivable!” Even wings rarely make it to the fridge.

In my whole life, I’ve never looked into a refrigerator and beheld, unbitten untouched, pristine, a Kentucky Fried, Tennessee Roasted or Minnesota Braised, drumstick. They only exist in movie fridges.

Another case of cinematic dissonance: Tom Hanks, say, has been trading double entendres for half the film with, say, Catherine Zeta Jones. Finally, they lower their shields just enough to make a date. “Dinner tonight?” says Tom, to which Catherine flashes that come-hither smirk that melts the average guy’s suspender clasps. And Tom says, “OK then” and exits smoothly before she can change her mind. Fade out?

Meanwhile, all around me, moviegoers are staring and cringing because I’m on my feet in the multiplex, screaming: “What time, Tom? Dinner WHERE?! Is she supposed to read your fricking mind? Tom? TOM!”

What would you do? You’ve scored a date with the most sumptuous living woman on the silver screen (I mean, really. The opening number in Chicago?). Looking at her reduces you to a warm puddle of quivering fig-paste. But she has said, incredibly, ”Yes.” To you. Any normal guy would confirm this rendezvous, ideally, by putting it in writing and getting the woman to sign the contract in the presence of a Notary Public. But the least you would do — the least!— is make sure you’ve both memorized a Time. And a Place.

But in the movies, a date is a sort of magical conjuration. Fade into the next scene, and there they are, Tom and Cate, leaning over a table at the Oak Room.

Yes, I know, the Oak Room is gone. But we’re talkin’ movies here.

After all, only in the movies does a guy walk into a bar, order a glass of Glenmorangie (which nowadays costs, like, twenty dollars), meet someone, talk for 45 seconds, and then — No! Wait! — throw a double-sawbuck onto the bar and walk away from a twenty-dollar drink that he never even swirled.

And then there’s Upham’s Opposite. In one of the most wrenching scenes in Saving Private Ryan, Upham, the scrawny stenographer is on the staircase of a building during a horrific battle. Atop the stairs, his comrades are engaged in loud, agonizing, hand-to-hand combat with a sadistic Nazi. They’re crying, “Upham!, Upham!” He’s their only salvation, but Upham can’t bring himself to enter that horrible, terrifying, death-soaked room.

And he’s right. Only bad stuff can happen in that room. This scene is another rare case in which screenwriting insightfully reflects human reality. Now, if Upham were a normal movie character in, for example, a cop movie, he wouldn’t call for backup, wait for help, or just freeze in terror. According to Upham’s Opposite, he’d draw his gun and plunge blindly into that hopelessly fatal, pitch-dark trap.

Or, worse, if he were in a horror flick, he’d be a teenage girl, already covered with blood and almost naked. But rather than get out of the building as fast as she could go, Miss Upham would creep upstairs in excruciating slow motion, as the monster, Nazi or fiend behind the door can be heard chewing the entrails of her dead boyfriend and smacking his lips at the prospect of eating her bowels on a bone-china plate with a nice Chianti and a portion of fava beans.

Who goes undergunned or unarmed into a dark, dangerous dead-end full of ghastly noises. Nobody in his right mind. But, incredibly, annoyingly, everybody does this in the movies. I don’t mean to suggest that these predictable moments of abysmal idiocy ruin my movie-watching pleasure. No, but they get on my nerves and they always leave me wishing I could crawl right through the screen, like the little girl in Poltergeist, and do a little populist editing.

I’m not sure how I got this way, but I think it all started with the Lone Ranger’s hat!