A Movie Tropes Guide to Living
According to movies, a lot of us are still revealing ourselves to be beautiful by undoing our ponytails and taking off our glasses and shaking out our honeyed tresses. Which is just plain dumb. Hair up, hair down, glasses on or off - none of it matters. We’re just OK looking.
According to the movies, we are all really good at headbutts. Whether we’ve ever tried delivering one or not.
According to movies, all hitmen wish to retire. But, they’re all the best there is, so their handlers need them to do one last job. Whereas actually, assassin job satisfaction is the highest of any sector in the economy. These dudes make like ten mill a year working like seventeen days.
According to the movies, if the driver fails to yell “Hang on!” right before whipping around a corner, we, in our confounding lack of instincts for self preservation, will fail to do so and our big dumb heads will smash clear through the passenger window.
According to the movies, when you sweep all that shit off a table/desk to lay out the big giant paper map/blueprint/schematics to explain how the heist is gonna go down, it SEEMS like you don’t ever have to straighten up after, but you do. True, they may be thieves, but they’re not uncivilized. The scene where you tidy is always tucked into the Extended Cut someplace, or appears in the DVD Extras.
According to the movies, the clip in any gun is bottomless. In a gunfight, you can fire and fire and fire and never hafta reload. You can be spraying bullets in all directions for days on end when, like seriously squeezing the trigger through lunch and on the crapper and when you run and pick up the kids from their swim lesson - even if you gotta sit in traffic - that thing will keep on firing right up till the moment somebody’s got deliver some plot-critical line of dialogue.
According to the movies, the only way to have sex is to yank each other’s clothes off in a seam-ripping, button-popping frenzy, slamming into walls and overturning end tables. So if you’re not tearing hunks of each other’s hair out and biting lips bloody, you’re doing it wrong. If you haven’t bought yourself a minimum of fourteen years’ bad luck in shattered mirrors, you can stand down, Megavirgin.
According to the movies, when we roll up to the next place we need to be, there will be an improbably vast parking spot right out front. On the same side of the street. Seriously, like nine car lengths. In midtown goddamn Manhattan in the middle of a goddamn workday. You could be pulling up the courthouse for the trial of the century; you could be heading into a toy store the week before Christmas; you could be late to a parade you’re supposed to marshalling - doesn’t matter, there will never not be a big honking spot for you, a spot you could fit a damn naval destroyer in.
According to the movies, gay couples don’t really touch each other. Not in view of anybody else, anyhow. Especially if they’re dudes. Almost as if some unseen cowardly old white men holding the pursestrings on everything imagine a mess of Bible Belt dipshits being so weirded out by a display of affection they’d set the cinema on fire. NOT because they are deeply closeted and self-loathing gay dudes themselves, these Bible Belters. Nuh uh. Super butch. Every one of them. I mean, they each came here in a truck.
According to the movies, when we wake up next to each other, we share a kiss. With apparent enjoyment. Even though every surface inside our mouths smells like it’s been painted with liquified roadkill. Oh, and ladies wear lots of makeup to bed that somehow survives a full night of getting mashed into a pillow unscathed.
According to the movies, all dudes from Boston are one of the Afflecks. This is factual.
According to the movies, the only thing standing between you and sports greatness - even against all the odds, when all the chips are down and your back’s against the wall and everything is on the line, after you been knocked down and you’re not sure if you can get back up again, when you think your pelican gullet is stretched to its limit and you can’t handle even one more fish - is an overwritten speech by your coach.
According to the movies, all those Innocuous Fruit Stands and Clearly Empty Boxes Stacked on the Sidewalk For Some Reason that you’ve never seen before totally do 100% exist. They’re just all concentrated in Carchaseadelphia, where the majority of hot pursuits take place. A Councilman has proposed an ordinance to prohibit this frankly baffling practice, but it’s stuck in committee, blocked by a coalition of groups like Citizens for Lazy Ways to Add Visual Dynamism and Aproned Proprietors Glimpsed Hollering in the Protagonist’s Rearview.
According to the movies, there are only two kinds of Poor People: A) Heartstring-Tugging Bootstrappers Who Make It, Teaching Us All Some Valuable Lessons Along the Way and B) Grimy Tent City Montage People. Everybody is Not Rich, But Comfortable. Utututututut - don’t be looking out the window. Eyes on me. Don’t be gathering evidence to the contrary, stirring up a bunch of guillotine talk, there, Comrade.
Ian Belknap is a Chicago writer presently living in Baltimore.
