This week’s question is a follow-up of sorts from last week’s. In that post, I discussed my transition from finding “Sex and the City” mildly enjoyable to finding it borderline contemptible. Part of it was a new appreciation for how materialistic and self-centered its main characters were. But part of it was my objection to its incredibly narrow, slanted depiction of New York City, the place I love most in this world and one that I felt deserved a richer and more nuanced portrayal. Several of the comments were along the same lines as where I’m going this week.
My objections to “SATC” stemmed largely from my own subjective experience of a particular place. My question this week is more concrete, and was inspired by yet another television show with a female protagonist. (Egads, I’m beginning to think I watch too much TV.) In this case, it was “Major Crimes,” TNT’s spin-off to “The Closer.”
As far as the show itself is concerned, so far I’m enjoying it well enough. What I really enjoy about it is that, like its predecessor, it gives a fitting showcase to a world-class actress who never quite made it big in movies. Kyra Sedgwick was wonderful as Brenda Leigh Johnson, and Mary McDonnell is just as good as Sharon Raydor. The two actresses are very different, and their interplay was one of my favorite parts of later seasons of “The Closer.” I think it’s a brave move on the producers’ part to keep most of the ensemble intact, along with the general theme of the show, but with an equally-talented yet distinctly dissimilar lead.
If you happen to watch the show but didn’t catch last week’s episode, Here Be Spoilers. (There will also be a mild spoiler later for 2009’s cinematic drek-fest “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.”) Anyhow, the big reveal at the end of the episode is that the medical resident who mowed down a bunch of people standing outside a nightclub with her car hadn’t been drunk, but had been drugged by her duplicitous boyfriend. He had been calling in prescriptions for Valium and Vicodin using her DEA number, and then dosed her with some at a bar.
Except there’s a gigantic plot hole. The doctor in question was just starting her residency (it was relevant to the plot), which means she would have graduated from medical school scant weeks before. Given that medical license applications in California can take six to nine months to process (not a whole heck of a lot longer than in a few of the states where I’ve been licensed), and that a state medical license is required to get a DEA number, there is simply no way the soon-to-be-resident in question would have one at that point in her nascent career.
The plot hole in “Wolverine” is just as laughable for any pharmacist, nurse or physician that might have been in the audience. (And here comes the spoiler, if such a crappy movie could ever be truly “spoiled.”) A major plot point required that a character be drugged such that her heart rate slowed so much that she could be mistaken for dead. The writers of the movie chose the drug “hydrochlorothiazide.” Friends, hydrochlorothiazide is a real medication. It is a diuretic. It will do nothing to slow your heart. (It would have been a surprising and strange plot twist to have the character wet herself dramatically, but at least it would have been more accurate.)
What I found so galling is the abject laziness both of these mistakes evince. In the first one, if the writers had gone to the least bit of trouble to ask any doctors if the plot held up, they could have been told that changing “resident” to “fellow” would have tidied things up nicely. (Fellows are still in training, it would have still been in keeping with where the plot was going, but fellowships come after residencies and thus fellows pretty reliably have licenses and DEA numbers so they can function more autonomously than residents.) For that risible mess of a movie, it boggles the mind that the mythos that gave us “adamantium” would not admit a made-up drug to accomplish what the highfalutin’-sounding real medication they chose cannot. Just make up a name, you morons!
I realize several things about these objections. They occur in works of fiction, one outlandishly so, that absolutely nobody should be taking seriously as sources of fact. They involve minor plot points, and ones that would not appear on the radar except for a small number of professionally-trained viewers. They are, in the grand scheme of things, the very definition of No Big Deal.
And yet…
First of all, it feels disrespectful to us professionally-trained viewers. The “Major Crimes” flub yanked me right out of the plot. (By the corresponding point in “Wolverine” I had already rolled my eyes so much I was getting a cluster headache.) It’s why I can’t watch medical shows, and why I imagine most attorneys can’t watch courtroom dramas. (“The Closer” also got a few legal points so wrong on occasion that even I noticed.) If the goal is to appeal to as many viewers as possible, it rankles me a little that carelessness means you’re willing to do without a few. Do a little homework so we can all enjoy your product!
My other beef is more about the principle of the thing. On a certain level, I feel that anything that gives people an inaccurate sense of the world does them a disservice. Maybe not so much with a flick about mutants wailing on each other with their bad-ass powers (of which there was not enough in “Wolverine,” by the bye), but in a show that seems to aspire to a baseline of verisimilitude, shouldn’t things that have an actual factual answer be verified? I’ve some notion, possibly apocryphal, that shows like “CSI” and “Bones” are making it harder for real-life forensics to succeed, in that juries unrealistically expect crime lab experts to take a fiber sample and tell them what brand of dog food the perpetrator’s schnauzer ate that day. Maybe I’ve gotten jaded, but it wouldn’t shock me terribly to learn that some hypertensive “Wolverine” viewer decided to stop taking her medication because she didn’t want it to stop her heart.
It’s one thing to grouse that the show you like is insufficiently comprehensive in its depiction of a particular place and/or time. Maybe you think a show set in New York should have included some aspect of life that didn’t revolve around designer goods or high-end cocktails. Perhaps you think life in WWI-era Britain should be more accurately reflected than through the viewpoint of a mostly good-hearted bunch of aristocrats. But one could argue that “SATC” and “Downton Abbey” offer a plausible view of some people’s lives in those places and times.
Is there an obligation to not simply get things wrong? Plainly, baldly wrong? If so, how big an error is acceptable? How much homework or fact-checking should script runners do? Or can everyone just make up whatever they want, and hope it seems accurate enough, and that maybe they too will one day be picked as a vice-presidential nominee? (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)
Where does one draw the factual accuracy line? Is there a line? Or should I just lighten up?
The thing is, if I let stuff like this bother me, I could never watch anything with a computer in it. And don’t get me started on the CSI-like shows that take 4 pixels worth of image and “enhance” it into a readable license plate.
CSI is to actual criminal investigations what Star Trek is to NASA.
Honestly, I think they started out OK. Like in the first season or two, maybe. (I would have to re-watch some of those.)
What gets me is just how incredibly much money Dade County, Florida must have to throw at these guys. I mean their lab is just gorgeous and where do they get these computers with the see-through displays and such?
Yeah, every time they take some grainy store surveillance camera shot and then somehow get a perfectly focused and detailed face from a reflection in some guys glasses I want to throw shit at the TV.
The thing is… there’s a technology sort of like that but they never have used it to my knowledge. It would be where you had a video of a moving object like a car. The pixels wouldn’t line up from frame to frame so you could theoretically figure out the most likely license plate that would produce the recorded light and dark patterns on a number of frames. Maybe.
Enhance!
And another:
http://youtu.be/OqzazgjP80Y
My favorite ‘enhance’ joke:
http://youtu.be/Ln-_uP6z_FU
I have to second the CSI episodes.
“Here, I’ll just stick this into my MS and see what it prints out!”
10 seconds later….
“He’s guilty!”
er… WATAF?
No replicates, aliquots or whatever you want to call them; no research of the applicable method to run the machine to determine what’s in the sample, etc. Just 10 seconds and here’s your answer.
@#)(*@)#*(@ I WANT THAT MASS SPEC!
So then my question remains — do “CSI” and its ilk have any obligation to be more accurate? Conceding that a more accurate portrayal of forensic work is likely to be less glamorous and less entertaining, is the primary obligation to entertain sufficient to justify a certain kind of misinformation?
No, for the ‘general’ population, it’s accurate enough. It’s had an unintended effect on juries IIRC, as they want to see the ‘CSI results’. You know, where you’re 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999998% sure it’s his DNA, etc.
I mean, I don’t work in forensics – but I’m familiar enough with the protocols for using a GC-MS, ICP-MS and the like from my own work/research, etc – that CSI and NCIS make me grit my teeth.
On the other hand, one that still bothers me, fifteen years later:
One of thee characters in Tom Wolfe’s A Man In Full wants to move his family from arid El Cerrito to green, leafy Danville. In reality, El Cerrito is in the middle of the fog belt, and stays cool all summer, while Danville, which is separated from the bay by a good-sized range of hills, gets and stays hot. This isn’t hard: you can look either at the weather data or a map. This wouldn’t bug me if Wolfe weren’t so self-congratulatory about how meticulously he researches things.
I love how the Caldecot Tunnel works as a weather barometer and it becomes significantly warmer as soon as you pass from the Oakland/Berkeley side to the Lafayette/Orinda/Walnut Creek/Danville side.
Though in terms of different worlds, I always feel like crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and into Marin feels like it might as well be a different universe. Marin as an alternate reality.
What makes you say that?
Maybe I’ve gotten jaded, but it wouldn’t shock me terribly to learn that some hypertensive “Wolverine” viewer decided to stop taking her medication because she didn’t want it to stop her heart.
I went to the completely opposite place. I imagined some dumb-assed person out there trying to pull the “faking dead” thing as a prank. And, of course, hilarity ensuing.
It would sure have helped Romeo get over Juliet.
That’s a conversation we could have with Shakespeare.
“Dude. Let’s give this thing a happy ending instead but let’s make it like a GWAR concert. Let’s swap out everybody’s poisons with ipecac.”
How realistic do we want our fiction or our television, anyway? If Hollywood gets the medication wrong, I’ll bet the medical advisors to the show said “We’re not going to use a real medication. If we do, every hypochondriac and/or actual cardiac patient who watches this show will go to his physician and demand a prescription. Go with the diuretic, that way the physicians will know the score.”
Humankind cannot bear too much reality. Looking at television’s representation of software, particularly machine intelligence, is enough to routinely annoy me. So I just don’t watch much Teevee, there’s my solution.
A surfeit of detail can make or break a novel or a screenplay. There’s the old writer’s conundrum about character development: does the writer have the hero go to the bathroom? Hollywood can’t even get bathroom dialogue right. A good deal of significant dialogue goes on in restrooms but nothing like what we’re shown.
Politics, police work, prosecutors, psychology, hell, Hollywood can’t even get car repair right. Hollywood doesn’t get real life right because writers aren’t politicians or policemen or any other reputable profession. You’d think, since so many of these screenwriters have been waiters in Los Angeles, they could get restaurants right, but even that industry escapes them. And don’t expect things to get any better; realism’s been tried and it’s failed every time.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love
There’s a difference between realism and verisimilitude, though.
We can all handle Superman standing proud while a robber empties his gun into Superman’s chest. It’s when the gun goes empty and the robber throws the gun at Superman… AND SUPERMAN DUCKS that screws everything up.
Yes! Right there! That first line in your comment!
I don’t care if they choose to elide details that aren’t important. But if you’re going to put details in, then get the fishing details right, dammit!
From what I understand, there are Star Trek: The Next Generation scripts that include the phrase “(insert technobabble here)”.
“Sir, the problem is that we cannot communicate with Starfleet as long as our dilithium crystals are ionized.”
“Could we reverse the polarity of the crystals if we hit them with a phased cationic pulse?”
“Couldn’t hurt.”
I think that science fiction has enough of this stuff that the audience has been trained to say “okay, fine, the real problem is the inability to communicate with Starfleet and it has nothing to do with ionized crystals. What the hell.”
The problem is that “(insert technobable here)” is as lazy as it looks. The fact that hospital/cop/law dramas have adopted it is a point against them rather than for them.
From what I understand, Scrubs captured themes that eluded the script writers for (insert serious hospital drama here) and Ally McBeal hit notes that (insert serious law drama here) failed to hit. Is this true?
If it’s true, is it because they had better consultants to correct the little “no, that will make you pee” issues that might spring up or is it because they just pretty much knew that the audience would immediately recognize/forgive technobabble?
From what I understand, Scrubs captured themes that eluded the script writers for (insert serious hospital drama here) and Ally McBeal hit notes that (insert serious law drama here) failed to hit. Is this true?
I can’t speak to the latter. In my mind, “Ally McBeal” is “show I most strongly suspect makes lawyers scream at their TVs.”
However, at least at the beginning, “Scrubs”got closer than any show I’d seen set in a hospital to how it felt to work in one. There was one scene I remember well, with Elliot going back to argue with a nurse because she just knew she was right, and the shot cuts to her digging her own grave. And I laughed so hard, because that is just so right. Nothing is stupider for a resident than to get into a pointless pissing match with a nurse, because the nurse will crush you.
When it was good, it was better than anything “ER” ever dished out.
Zazzy, formerly of bedside nursing and now in informatics, shared this sentiment. It made the show unwatchable for her, because the last thing she wants t be reminded of is 4 years as a naval nurse or 1 on the burn unit.
I think that science fiction has enough of this stuff that the audience has been trained to say “okay, fine, the real problem is the inability to communicate with Starfleet and it has nothing to do with ionized crystals. What the hell.”
You underestimate the True SF Fan, who will complain that, back in Season 2, Data determined that it was possible to de-ionize dilithium crystals by charging a quantum capacitor in series with a decatalyzed transsubstantistor.
I have been rewatching Star Trek: TNG recently and it has been producing interesting reactions.
Now I seem to view episodes as being excellent or horrible with nothing inbetween. I obviously get a lot more of the adult themes and concepts than I did as a 7-14 year old (my age during the original run), and I still have a crush on Ensign Ro. Some dreams of 13 year old boys never die.
Interestingly technobabble has never bothered me in Science Fiction, I suspect this is because I was not a science and math kid academically speaking and real world science would largely go over my head. I understand the basic concepts of earth science, physics, biology, and chemistry from high school but I went to a super arts and humanities oriented liberal arts college that allowed me to get by with just taking Intro to Psych to fulfill my requirement in math and science.
My main problems with Star Trek: TNG now seem to be interesting concepts that are taken in very wrong directions. It is interesting to have a planet break off from the Federation and descend into tribalism and anarchy. It is bordering on the pornographic (in a very bad way) to have Tasha Yar talk about how she dodged the “rape gangs” as a teenager.
Yeah. I liked that little in-joke in Futurama, where Bender learns to play Dungeons and Dragons and lapses into the persona of the knight Titanius Anglesmith, Fancy Man of Cornwood.
On his coat of arms is “Machina ex Deo”, the machine from God.
I’ve gotta go with Blaise here — real life is basically boring. DNA tests are expensive, and take weeks to process and match. That’s boring.
So CSI uses it for everything, and the results are back in hours. Because while part of the appeal is OH COMPETENT HOT PEOPLE DOING SCIENCE AND CATCHING BAD GUYS WITH THEIR BRAINS, it’s the “catching bad guys” that gives closure to the story.
Frankly, the rest is basically hot people standing around with beakers. We watch them, we think “Oh smart and sciency isn’t modern life grand” and then “yay! Bad guys caught!”.
At least it’s a bit more realistic than all those dramatic courtroom confessions. 🙂 I’m pretty sure it’s kinda rare for a clever defense lawyer to get the REAL criminal on the stands and get him to confess.
On the other hand, as a programmer, I do kinda want to smack lazy writers when it comes to cryptography, any sort of ‘software enhancement’ and the like.
If you want to play cutting edge, why not just push the envelope a little, rather than to absurdity? Make some faux Google Glasses, slim them down to make your Hot Science Nerds even hotter, and shove heads-up display info everywhere. Like, say, faking good (current written text auto translation is..pidgin, at best) automatic language translation — or facial recognition. Or life-logging so you can go back and scan your suspect’s reaction to your every word…
Of course, then I’d just get upset because that stuff is a decade or more away, minimum, if it can ever be made to work. (But unlike magic code-breaking machines, you don’t have to build quantum computers first. A world in which magic code-breaking machines work is, in fact, a very different world. If you can factor large numbers in polynomial time without a quantum computer….among other things, all those problems with AI go away….)
On the other hand, as a programmer, I do kinda want to smack lazy writers when it comes to cryptography, any sort of ‘software enhancement’ and the like.
That gets back to the crux of my question. When you want to smack them, is it because you think they really should have gotten something right that they didn’t?
It’s the reduction of science and problem solving — in what is the real world — to hand-waving technobabble. Which is fine for Star Trek, because we don’t actually have starships, so it doesn’t matter if you want to claim reversing the warp core’s polarity will scare away the Space Ghost. (It doesn’t. He just had a TV show to get host).
But this is real life — I can watch, oh, people fake survive in the wilderness for entertainment. Sure, he’s got a host of local experts and camera tricks and cleverly arranged ‘finds’ so he can show off how to eat a rotting goat’s brain, but the theory is fundamentally sound.
So…when it comes to “take grainy image and use computers to enhance it” what they are SAYING is “Wave magic wand to solve real world problem” when they could, you know, come up with some shorthand for the way people actually solve these problems.
(They look for other cameras. They run exhausting searches on car models. They make WAGs).
It’s not just a lost oppurtunity to showcase the real world, it’s lazy writing. You might as well send in the ninjas, because even though the writers created the actual plot and all the conflict, their only solution involved magic. Despite taking place here and now, and not in Dresden’s Chicago.
Soft sci-fi does it all the time, but soft sci-fi is about “What if the world was like this, and people could do that?” and the science is just a handwave to explore the real story. What does gender mean if nanobots can alter it at will? If you can toy with your own brain chemistry to get non-addictive, non-damaging highs of any variety you want — or massive increases in focus or spatial awareness or mathematical acuity — what does that world look like? How might people interact?
But CSI isn’t postulating “What’s life like in a world where a hot chick and her equally hot stud coworker can wave a magic wand over your body and identify everyone to be near it by DNA” or “What’s it like when the world is videotaped to such fidelity that government can identify everything anywhere there’s a camera — which is everywhere”.
It’s a crime procedural, here and now. So using sci-fi technobabble to solve plots is…lazy. It’s a magic wand to fix the plot, not a magic wand to create an interesting stage.
Sci-Fi has always faced what I call the Failure to Communicate. Comm tech is always screwed up in SF. The Internet completely surpassed anything SF had come up with to that point. If someone wanted to truly integrate tech into storylines, they’d only make passing references to it, or bypass it completely. The message is the important part, not the transmission technology.
Jinx!
Amusingly enough, sci-fi has also driven tech — Sci-fi fans are often found among techies, engineers, and scientists who often say “I’d like a real one of those”.
It’s fun watching ST:TNG and seeing what are, for all intents and purposes, iPads — except they hand them around instead of transmitting data wirelessly. OTOH, given cloud based computing, it’s entirely possible there’s just stacks of the things somewhere and you just pick one up and it auto-configures for you.
So handing them around in one more or another might be viable.
Still, I recall on blogger (who I vaguely think might have been an actual Sci-Fi writer) discussing how jarring it was to see Spock or Data ask someone to physically come over and look at something on the screen, which doesn’t seem the way the future would be. You’d think it’d be more “take a look at this” and squirting them a file, image, or even sharing a desktop-equivilant.
Although the total lack of social media is weird. People like to gossip. It’s built into us on practically a genetic level. And speech is so unfathomably slow and low bandwitdh way to pass gossip (basically useful only when you have time to kill and someone’s right there to gossip too) — Facebook, email, twitter, tumblr — a thousand ways to gossip to anyone who cares simultaneously.
all interns, at least in their first 6 months, are credentialled on teaching licenses for their DEA numbers. First prescription I wrote as an intern on Day 1 of residency was for IV morphine.
1) Her residency hadn’t even started yet.
2) It is my understanding that teaching DEA numbers only work within the licensing institution, and can’t be used at outside pharmacies. I was able to write controlled substance orders throughout my residency, but they couldn’t be filled at Duane Reade. Am I wrong about this?
Do you think it’s possible that the writers of Wolverine really did come up with “hydrochlorothiazide” on their own, ignorant of the fact that this is a real drug?
I could mmmmmmmaybe see the “hydrochloro” part. “Thiazide”? I don’t buy it.
And even so, we had The Google back in 2009 (or shortly before, whenever that lamentable mess of a movie was written). They could easily have typed that in, sighed, and said “No luck, chums. It’s a real medication. Unless we want her to piss herself, we’ll have to come up with another name.”
I’d like to think the writers knew the movie was a lost cause, and it was one of their in jokes. 🙂
Interesting question that I can think about as an artist (MFA, Theatre Directing) and a Lawyer (another professional)
In general, poor comprehension annoys me. NBC decided to use God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols during their opening titles for the Olympics cycle. They did so in a misleading way by just having Johnny Rotten sing God Save the Queen. They cut off the following lyrics of “And the Fascist regime. There is no future in England’s Dream”.
Needless to say this annoys me. The problem is that most TV and pop culture entertainment is not meant for the expert or active viewer. It is still meant for the passive viewer and it is not meant for vermisilitude but truthiness. They don’t want things as being 100 percent realistic but how a non-participant views these exciting and professional worlds in their head.
Alfred Hitchcock had a later movie called Marnie which improbably starred Sean Connery as the scion to a wealthy Philadelphia Mainline family. One scene features Sean Connery driving a very fancy sports car. The screenwriter (who as a Philadelphian Mainliner) objected and told Hitchcock that the Connery character would probably drive a pick-up truck. Hitchcock’s reply was more or less “I know that. You know that but a midwestern housewife does not know that and will not accept it.” The same thing is true for the costume choices in the Devil Wears Prada. A real fashionita would not wear the featured clothing but do something like take an expensive top by a desirable but non-mainstream designer (read: snob appeal) and combine with something like a pair of ordinary jeans. They would not be in the huge big names and nothing else.
I think anyone in any scene or profession develops these same complaints and we all probably miss the point. Real lawyering would look very boring on TV (hours spent on Lexis!), People who read 50 Shades of Gray are not really interested in an accurate description of S & M as a practice. The kinky (to them) sex is part of the appeal of course but I suspect they are mainly interested in the fantasy of being a young college woman who is the object of attraction for an improbably rich and handsome 27-year old. I suspect that many people who read 50 shades would be extremely bored by something that depicted the S and M scene accuarately especially when getting into the very complicated ethics of the scene. And it is largely the lack of ethics (and maybe safe words. I have not read the books). that my kinky friends seem to complain about in 50 shades.
Professionals or people in a subculture/life style have two not very good options. One is to completely ignore all popular descriptions of your profession or culture. Two is to take the Hitchcock view and know that it is not meant for you.
I think I stuck with theatre instead of going into film and TV because I like accuracy and it is more important. We have dramaturgs to figure these things out! Why I left theatre for law is a completely different story.
Why I left theatre for law is a completely different story.
Well, now I’m terribly curious.
The comment below was obviously meant in response to this.
One of the things I like to do is read the “Trivia” and “Goofs” sections on IMDB. Some folks are mind numbing when it comes to what they consider a goof. They’ll put something in like, “Johnny was smoking a cigarette and holding it in his left hand. The camera cuts to Jane and when it cuts back to Johnny 10 seconds later, he’s holding it in his right hand.” They seem to think it is impossible for anything to have happened off-screen, like maybe Johnny switched hands somewhere in the 10 seconds we weren’t looking at him.
I used to feel this way about Law & Order. “Why is it always the first place they go that gets clue?!?!” Then I realize it is just assumed and implied that they probably went to a number of places beforehand, but no one wants to watch them bang on doors and walk away with nothing for 20 minutes. Likewise, I’m willing to concede that they may have DNA results back in a day when in real life it takes weeks. Or that prosecutors and detectives work as closely and as frequently as they are often shown on TV. This isn’t laziness as much as it is sacrificing a certain about of realism for story telling. No one wants to learn a new characters every week because of the rotation of prosecutors or a bunch of detectives sit around waiting for DNA results just like no one wanted to watch 15 minutes of Keifer Sutherland on the crapper during “24”.
What I will *NOT* forgive is when actors are supposed to play athletes in serious or quasi-serious sports movies but they aren’t even passable as functioning bipeds. Seriously, folks? You can’t look like you’re not throwing with your opposite hand? It is one more reminder that all these folks truly are actors, meaning they likely weren’t jocks, and therefore often lack the physical prowess, coordination, muscle memory, and/or experience to actually run like a running back or shoot like a basketball player or throw like someone who has arms.
So there remains a line for you, it’s just drawn through athletic versus other professional accuracy.
Oh, yes, there is a line, and I wouldn’t limit it to athletics, I think that is just where I notice it most.
I don’t watch a lot of shows about teachers (outside of “Boston Public”, I can’t think of a recent show that was really ABOUT teaching) though Zooey Daschestupid’s* idiotic portrayal of early childhood professionals on that vile “New Girl” is one of the many reasons it remains the single biggest threat to Zazzy and my relationship. And teacher likely differs from a lot of fields in that there isn’t enough standardization that I could definitively say, “No way! That’s just wrong!” the way you could with the name of an actual medicine.
Ultimately, it comes down to the impact on the plot. If the plot centers around Actor X being an otherwordly athlete, but he looks like he’s never actually picked up a ball before, that’s a problem. Because, really, that’s poor acting. He’s not selling me on him being an athlete. Other things about sports will bug me to, such as teams facing off in a game that they couldn’t face off in (like teams from different baseball leagues playing in an early playoff round).
I got really mad with a lot of the plot holes I found in Harry Potter, largely because they simply destroyed the plot. So it is not limited to sports, but since I’m on record as being way too into sports, that is where it most often manifests itself.
* I’m a little worried about bashing Zooey Deschawhateverhername is on a gay man’s blog. For some reason, I have the sense that she might be a big deal for you guys. But I also might have completely made that up. Still, if I have committed any faux pas, just know that it is solely because my hatred for her burns eternal.
That is the best disclaimer ever. I love citing eternal hatred as some kind of mitigating factor for a social misstep.
If Zooey Deschanel is a big deal among my peeps, I didn’t receive that memo. I actually like her just fine, perhaps because I thought her take on the whole manic pixie dream girl notion was nuanced in “500 Days of Summer,” a movie I really enjoyed outright because 1) our then-infant son slept through the whole thing when we finally ventured out to see a movie in the theater after he was born, 2) I appreciated its mature take on a romance that just didn’t work out because the people ended up being wrong for each other, and 3) I have a massive crush on Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who was particularly charming in that film.
I think her in that role is part of the hatred, though it is far deeper than that. Speaking of “500 Days of Summer”, I had a friend who was notorious for getting into, out of, and back into emotionally tumultuous relationships. He called me one day to rave about a date he had planned: dinner, wine, and a viewing of that film, which he had not seen and assumed was a quirky romcom perfect for an early-in-the-relationship date.
“Have you SEEN that movie?”
“No. Why?”
“Dude. That is not a date movie!”
“But it’s got Zooey Deschanel and JGL in it.”
“Yea, and it is about them repeatedly breaking up and him repeatedly having his heart stomped on and it makes you relive every breakup you’ve ever had. And you’ve had plenty. And you tend to get emotional.”
“Oh.”
“Yea. Oh.”
“So it’s not a wine and dinner date night movie?”
“No. It’s a watch alone under a blanket with a bottle of scotch when you have a 24-hour period wherein no one who doesn’t know you cry won’t see you kind of movie.”
“I owe you one.”
I know all of this because I made the mistake of watching it with Zazzy. Zazzy who never dated anyone before me and for whom “breakup” is as foreign a concept as “self-doubt” is for me. She didn’t understand why I wanted to go punch things for a few hours after that movie.
Am I ranting? Maybe just a bit. Oh yea, and she spells her stupid name stupid and wrong. And I’m glad the gays don’t love her. Now I don’t have to hold back…
[Eyes glaze over… shakes head…] … where am I …?
Also, I struggled to see JGL as anything but the kid from 3rd Rock, but his performances in Inception and TDKR have made me a huge fan.
JGL was great in 50-50 too.
Speaking of IMDB, 500 Days has one of the top crazy credits ever:
The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Especially you Jenny Beckman.
Bitch
I think Zooey Deschanel is probably a bigger deal among indie-oriented heterosexual guys.
I think she is really cute. I have not seen her TV show but it was nice to see her bounce around in a skirt at a Music Festival in She and Him. She is also good at skewing her persona like she did on Louie CK’s show.
I know a lot of women who are bugged by guys having crushes on Zooey Deschanel for some reason. Though I think guys can say the same for Ryan Gosling as an agent of jealousy.
The thing I struggle with (and I think Cracked.com did a write up on this) is that it is hard to tell if she is genuinely attempting to indoctrinate herself into hipster/nerd culture or if she is really subtly mocking it. She plays the “I’m just the lovable nerd who good-guys-who-finish-last have a chance with” role not just in TV or in movies but in real life, even though she’s not a lovable nerd and good-guys-who-finish-last don’t have a chance with! She’s an attractive, highly talented actress and musician who comes from a family of talented performers and is anything but the underdog she so often tries to pretend to be. She’s married to a similarly highly talented musician and has probably never dated anyone who wasn’t part of the “in crowd”.
I have no objection to her playing these roles on TV or in movies, but there is something so highly artificial about her personality as to be grating. It feels highly exploitive of a cultural movement (hipsterdom) that seems particularly attractive to disaffected youth and others outside the mainstream. Someone as mainstream as her co-opting it the way that she does just irks me. And I’m the last person to be sympathetic to hipsters, yet she almost gets me there. Almost.
… wait … where am I?
Hi, I’m Russell. (Well, not really. But you know what I mean.) I am, in fact, the last person on earth to be sympathetic to hipsters.
They’ve divorced.
ZD is often the best thing in a movie I’d otherwise dislike completely. (Elf, Failure to Launch, Hitchhiker’s Guide.)
I am neutral on ZD herself, but I HATED HATED HATED ‘500 Days Of Summer’ for much the same reasons you describe here. It felt like such a transparently cynical and empty attempt to market to a subset of people, and limned its characters based on nothing more meaningful than the fact that they have some of the same musical artists on their iPods as does the target audience (‘hey, this guy in the film likes The Smiths! *I* like The Smiths! Therefore, I *identify* with this directionless schmuck, despite him having no other identifiable or likeable character traits!’).
Gah. If I could somehow take whatever money that film made, and give it to ‘Eternal Sunshine’ instead, I would.
@ Mike…I also get ZD mixed up with Anna Friel a lot, who I liked quite a bit on Pushing Daisies. There’s actually a third actress that I also mix up with these two, but can’t think of her name rt now.
Kazzy,
I think your criticism of Zooey Deschanel can be true of many celebrities. Though I don’t pay attention to the gossip mags and such, so I have no idea where she has said stuff that you imply. I think most people would need to suffer from a legitimate delusion to think they have a chance with any celeb. I have huge crushes on Maggie Gyllenhaal and Zooey Deschanel but do there is not one part of me that thinks I will ever meet them, yet alone become friends or date them.
I have no idea what her off-screen presence is like.
What I find more interesting is your sympathetic portrait of hipster culture. Most people do not see it as a place for “disaffected youth and others outside the mainstream”. Rather, I think many people view hipsters in a light that is largely negative. Hipsters are mainly seen as being upper-middle class and above, dilletantish (I can’t think of a hipster neighborhood that does not also have a reputation for being filled with trust-fund kids. Lena Dunham even shows this as being partially or largely true on Girls), but also more-pro Corporate in many ways. Hipsters are not known for rejecting the 9-5 world in the same way that Hippies did, they love tech and gadgets.
There is the whole artisnal economy aspect of Hipsterdom where people try to make livings by producing craft food products or running food trucks but just as many if not more hipsters work in tech and other cool fields for multi-nationals. And also many people understand that the craft economy is not completely self-sufficient or sustainable. As New York mag put it: People who buy 9 dollar jars of jam are not the same as people who make 9 dollar jars of jam. Same with expensive Mast brother Chocolate bars, etc.
So I don’t think people see hipsters as being for disaffected youth but rather as being where very educated people spend their 20s and 30s before becoming part of the upper-middle class elite.
@Glyph — Now see, I thought “500 Days of Summer” did a really good job of showing that a relationship largely based on exactly that kind of shared association was not sustainable, and that he didn’t see that but she did. He saw her as this collection of tics and attributes he liked, and she understood that that was how he saw her, and knew that they were wrong for each other in the long run.
Or at least, that’s how I saw it.
But I loved, loved, loved “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” one of my top 20 all-time favorites probably. So if I had to choose just one of those films to make any money, I’d choose it.
@ Russell – see, now you make me think I missed the point. Could be that I felt it was pitched at people like me (music fans) and I just felt insulted, like I was being treated as a ‘demographic’ rather than a ‘viewer’ by the film. If I was ever a hipster, it’s over now that I am a dad, but maybe the truth just hurt too bad for me to see it. 🙂
OT, but I totally missed the joke in the book ‘American Psycho’ when I read it back when it was news. I thought Easton Ellis was such a bad writer that the only way he knew to describe characters was via their clothing labels.
It wasn’t until I saw the movie that I realized it was the narrator, not author, who was so shallow that this was his only way to describe people. I thought the movie was hilarious.
American Psycho is narrated by Tom Wolfe?
American Psycho is narrated by Tom Wolfe?
I have only ever read ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’ by Wolfe – is this a common knock on him? Looking at a plot summary of ‘Bonfire’, it wouldn’t shock me if it shares some characteristics with ‘American Psycho’, given the setting & subject matter.
@Glyph — The scene that, I think, makes that point clearest is the one in the record store where he holds up an album they both like, and instead of being charmed she’s obviously unimpressed and annoyed. I took that as her saying “Yeah, we both like the same music, but that connection is played out and you don’t see that, and don’t see why we need something more to keep going.” He saw her as “girl who likes cool music” and she saw herself as a person.
@Glyph: Wolfe’s novels (Bonfire and A Man in Full, at least — I didn’t read the third one) are full of characterization-by-describing-possessions.
Glyph-
I didn’t hate the movie. Nor did I hate ZD in it. My aversion to it is that, as Russell said, I think it captures a particular type of failed relationship very well. One that I’ve been in. So I have a visceral repulsion to it because it puts me in a bad place emotionally. Which probably means it is doing at least SOMETHING right.
ND-
From what I’ve seen of ZD, her public persona is nearly indistinguishable from her on-screen persona at times, which leads me to think she is cultivating that same image.
As for hipsters, I don’t think that our descriptions are necessarily mutually exclusive. A lot of the hipsters that I know very well might be from middle or upper-middle class upbringings, but were still sort of the odd ball out socially. They were always a bit quirky and weird and were likely never going to be the “cool kid” in the Zach Morris kind of way. I think hipsterdom appeals to these kids because it is basically a big middle finger to an establishment they can’t be a part of and it embraces their quirks and oddities. From a personality and social standpoint, I think most hipsters are kids on the outside looking in, looking for their own in to make others feel outside of. My aversion to hipsterdom is that it seems almost reflexively without a core. Ask a hipster why they wear the clothes they wear, and their response is never, “Hey man, I like this and I don’t care if other people don’t.” It is always something along the lines of, “I’m being an original! No one wears these things! Look how different I am!” Of course, they ignore the fact that they are standing next to a handful of folks who look exactly like them.
Recently, on these very threads, I was accused of being a hipster when I described my style of dress. And I balked at this because I don’t know or care if what I wear is fashionable or not, the coolest thing ever or the weirdest thing ever. I like what I like and I go with that (much to my wife’s chagrin). But the joke that hipsters will quickly abandon something they claimed to once love because it became popular isn’t really a joke… it’s the goddamn truth. Which is why the movement keeps moving further and further to the extreme. It started with kids in throwback shoes and funky glasses and has evolved to walking around in novelty Native American headdresses. What the F? What the hell does that have to do with anything?
And if you think I’m kidding, check out: http://lookatthisfuckinghipster.tumblr.com/
Maybe I’m dead wrong, but I’ve got a lot of friends who are hipster or quasi-hipster, live in NYC and frequent Brooklyn/Williamsburg, and once had to explain that my bro-lo couldn’t partake in his first ever lap dance at my bachelor party because no body knew what would happened if he popped chub in skinny jeans.
… wait… seriously… where am I? This thread has taken a very bizarre turn for me. And I sort of like it 😉
The Cracked article… http://www.cracked.com/article_19493_4-reasons-zooey-deschanel-can-stop-pretending-shes-dork.html (NSFW)
Kazzy,
I was the one who accused you of being a hipster but it was only in jest at the mention of you wearing a Tom Selleck t-shirt. A Tom Selleck t-shirt sounds like the ne plus ultra of “ironic” hipster wear. The perfect thing to find in a thrift store.
I can pass for quasi-hipster as well because of many of my cultural interests though not my fashion choices. I lived in Brooklyn (though not Williamsburg) and now live in the other hipster haven known as SF.
What distinguishes me from hipsterism is a lack of piercings, tattoos, facial hair (I am very familiar with the Look at the Fing hipster site) and clothing choices. This is where I become critical of hipsters: their appropriation of blue-collar culture and aesthetics even though they are often middle class or upper-middle class (and above) suburban kids originally and often with degrees from the tonier colleges and universities of America (disclaimer: My undergrad alma mater is one of the tonier colleges of America and I am a proud almuni).
You are probably right that a lot of hipsters were never Zack Morris. They were the arty kids who did not quite fit in. I was one of those arty kids in high school and went to a college filled with said arty kids. I think for many of us, college was the first time we felt like a true member of a community. However, I also think there is an element that I don’t share where a lot of upper-middle class kids feel “inauthentic” because of their upper-middle class upbringing. Hence, the thrift shopping and drinking formally working-class PBR and the tattoos. For somereason, the blue collar is considered real. Keep in mind that culturally these kids are still very elite to the point of being almost academic.
This is where hipsterdom becomes odd to me, the combination of blue-collar appropriation of thrift store clothing, bars meant to resemble a 1970s hunting lodge*, PBR with upper-middle class culture like indie rock, NPR (especially This American Life), and periodicals like The New Yorker, N plus One, The Believer, lit fic over genre fic, etc.
*A very popular hipster Bar in SF is called Buckshot. Besides featuring the Deer hunting video game, the aesthetic is very much of a midwestern hunting lodge circa 1970 complete with Velvet painting tackiness. I don’t quite get why this is supposed to be fun or appealing.
The hipster embrace of “blue collar culture” itself seems somewhat mocking, which is another real problem I have with it. It smacks of the type of liberal cultural elitism that makes me want to vote Republican. Not that I would. But it gets me closer than most other things.
Drink PBR if you like it. Drink PBR if you’re broke and it’s the best you can afford. Drink PBR if you want to consume a lot of liquid without getting a lot of drunk. Drink PBR if you want a really bad hangover. Don’t drink PBR because of some weird notion of socio-economic/cultural tourism when you’re just there to laugh at the locals.
I wear steel-toed boots. Can we still be friends?
To all, this is an awesome discussion. I loved the movie and Russell has given me an ever further appreciation of it. I think Kazzy hits the nail on the head, too. It captures something very real in a very particular way.
The adoption of working-class signifiers is as old as rock and roll itself, and maybe older. Joe Strummer & Richard Hell lived in squats, but the zillions of ‘punks’ that came after had the money for better clothes. John Fogerty wasn’t really from The Bayou. The Replacements, and the Seattle musicians who idolized them like Nirvana, wore flannel because it was cold where they lived, but kids all over got flannels and ripped jeans (and biker wallet chains) anyway. Hip-hop kids continue to bafflingly emulate the low-pants style, derived as I understand it from the fact that belts are confiscated in prison (so this is a signifier of being ‘hard’).
Pulp, Common People:
http://youtu.be/yuTMWgOduFM
Will-
I rarely give people crap for the clothes they wear. I might not like it myself, but I really am a “to each their own” kinda guy. So if you like the look or feel of steal-toed boots or if they are practical for you based on what you do on a daily basis, rock on! But if you’re wearing them in some odd form of mockery of those who genuinely do wear them for good reason, I think thats douchey. I doubt that is the case for you. So, yea, still BFFs!
Glyph-
That’s not quite what I’m talking about. People, young people especially, are going to appropriate cultures. This is generally well-intentioned, even if it is lazy. There is something else at play when someone appropriates certain cultural elements of a given group of people while mocking those very same people. Which is what I often see hipsters doing.
Teenagers in the 90’s wearing flannel because they genuinely loved Nirvana is fine. Hipsters in the 2010’s wearing overalls while laughing at the backwardness of ‘stupid hill billies’ is a whole other thing.
Kazzy – Ah, gotcha, sorry. Please disregard my comment (except Common People, which is still apt I think).
Kazzy, rock on! I actually started wearing them because they were the only non-sneakers in my gargantuan size (15) at Academy Sports & Outdoors when I needed to find something for my job (sweeping hair at a chain haircutting place). Once you have steel toes, they’re hard to go without. You get used to kicking things and it hurts when you don’t have steel toes (or maybe my toes are weak). Interestingly, a few jobs later I had one that required them because I was the IT guy at a fabrication plant. So I guess it’s genuine enough.
Glyph,
William Shatner, Common People
she’s cute and all but a terrible actress and an even worse singer. so she’s not really different from most of hollywood, but with an even worse band.
as an aside, despite having lived in williamsburg for about half a decade many years ago, i can’t really take the use of the term “hipster” seriously. it’s sort of like “PC”. i know it means something to someone, but i don’t know what that is and i’m feeling confused and old the more they use it.
Kazzy,
I don’t think that all the hipsters are secretly laughing at the working-class. Some or even a lot might be but I do think a lot of them do feel less “authentic” and “real” because they grew up in the suburbs.
This does not make me want to vote Republican though. I can see why it angers people but I think a lot of the liberal elite stuff is just bullshit resentiment.
I looked at the Cracked.com stuff and all I can say is meh. Perhaps this is because of my experience in the industry (however limited) but almost all actors have personas that are on-screen and off-screen. Old Hollywood had a very well-oiled PR machine to give their actors a certain off-screen image to be sold to the masses. I don’t think this ever really went away. It just is not as formal anymore. Zooey knows what her fans want and she is willing to put on the persona. This is the very nature of the beast, I don’t blame her for it.
Glyph,
Thanks for the Pulp. I love Pulp though Disco 2000 is probably my favorite song from the Disco 2000 album.
You are probably right about the appropriation of working-class culture. The original “hipsters” were upper-middle class kids who went slumming in Black Jazz culture of the 1940s and largely pre-rock 50s (Norman Mailer coined the term.) Back when Charlie Parker and John Coltrane was the rebellious music to listen to. It probably goes back way before then.
@ NewDealer – I really need to check out more Pulp, b/c Disco 2000 and Common People are just amazingly-well-written songs, like short stories.
It is not terribly exciting.
I was getting cynical about the business while in graduate school. Everyone told me I needed to go to graduate school to gain opportunities but grad school was not operating those opportunities. I was working at various office jobs for money in a way that seems unsustainable.
I think you need one of two things to try for a career in the arts but especially theatre/performing arts:
1. Be Independently Wealthy
2. Be so much of a misfit that a life in art is all you want at the expense of everything else. It also helps to have an absolute inability for office work.
I come from a very comfortable background but not an independently wealthy one. A lot of people I know in theatre are backed by trust funds of several million dollars or more. They have enough interest income to provide for rent, insurance, etc without working. This is not saying anything bad about them, it is just a fact of life.
I was just getting to an age (late 20s) when having a reasonable and comfortable life seemed more important. Law seemed like the natural pick because it runs in the family and was intellectually stimulating. I considered publishing and academics briefly but became too much of a realist for either field. Being a professor would be nice if I was tenured at a small liberal arts college in the Northeast or West. I would not enjoy working at the University of South Dakota. Not because of the quality of the students but I like cities and have my NY snobbery about what constitutes a good city.
If I had been born into money, I probably would have been an artist–sculptor, musician, painter, something in those directions. I thoroughly admire artists and love to consume art, and if I could spend the time I spend in my engineering job instead perfecting my meager artistic skills, I know I’d have a great time at it. But in the end I chose to do something I could enjoy that would make me enough money that I could live something approaching the lifestyle I wanted.
too much asskissing. I know someone who’s a composer… but his music, while awardwinning, is “commercialized”… he writes good riffs, but nobody will ever remember his name.
(Nothing like watching a TV show, and having someone pause it saying “that’s the creaking door sound from Thief!”)
The other day, I mentioned Parker, the professional thief from the Richard Stark novels. Occasionally he works with Alan Grofield, another professional thief, who uses his ill-gotten money to support the theater where he acts and directs. Because there is NO money in live theater.
That sounds about right.
I’ve had dreams of opening up a hugely successful law firm and using some of the profits or my income to fund theatre projects.
what about broadway?
Most of Broadway is “for profit” this is true. Some of the bigger 501(c)(3) Theatre Companies like Manhattan Theatre Club, Roundabout, and Lincoln Center run Broadway theatres. There are also shows that start in the off-profit world and move to Broaway like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Urinetown.
Broadway is still an incredibly risky business. It is incredibly expensive to keep a show running for a long time and the biggest profit makers are the ones that can appeal to tourists for extremely long runs like Les Mis, A Chorus Line, and Phantom. Movies make most of their money in the opening weekend. Broadway plays need to constantly sell-out for years to really make a profit. The new Broadway economy also demands a lot of stunt casting for the leads for a while. For example, casting Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in the Producers. Two movie stars that non-theatre goers will pay to see in person.
I am sure that Broadway Producers have all sorts of accounting tricks to make a profit even if a show is technically a bust. I also have heard of stories of people getting Broadway productions because the rich grandparents payed the bills.
For further reading on Broadway read “The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway” by William Goldman. Yes this is the same William Goldman who wrote the Princess Bride.
I am sure that Broadway Producers have all sorts of accounting tricks to make a profit even if a show is technically a bust.
Though the real money is in huge failures you’re sold 10,000% of..
oh i have no doubt it’s a rocky road, and that much like the recording industry, the money is entirely in the handful that rise per year. the people like what they like, for reasons that remain mysteriously their own.
Is it possible the hydrochlorothiazide thing is a deliberate mistake so if someone tries that at home, the worst they get is a soggy bottom instead of constant sorrow?
(similar to there’s supposed to be a deliberate mistake in every military uniform, but I think that’s a myth)
Supposedly “Fight Club” had to change a number of things to avoid actually giving people the recipes for napalm and such.
any kid can make thermite….
Breaking Bad is, I’ve read, very careful not to show anything that would aid in meth cooking.
NOW what am I gonna do with this hi-tech underground lab and 500 pounds of Sudafed?!?!
Open a day care center for kids with photophobia and allergies.
kids with photophobia and allergies
Also known as a ‘Goth nightclub’.
I don’t see it.
First of all, they could have just made up a name. You can’t take “madeupium” at home to your sorrow, because t’aint no such thing.
When I was in residency, one of the busier departments was the epilepsy service. We would have kids there for days on EEG leads, waiting for them to seize. Some of them had pseudoseizures. The head of the epilepsy service would sometimes try to induce one of these fake attacks by giving a “medication” that he told patients often triggered seizures. He called it “normalzaline,” and gave it IV push. (It had the desired effect a lot of the time.) If the writers had gone with something like “normalzaline,” it would have accomplished the same winking effect without having been stupid.
Unobtanium was a clever made-up one in “Avatar”.
Kids these days.
“Unobtanium” is an SF in-joke, decades old.
I thought it was particularly lazy techno-babble. Like the writer just put [unobtanium] in the script and no one ever bothered to make up a better word.
I agree. It felt incredibly lazy – equivalent to actually naming a character “John Doe”* – and having “normalzine” in a show would come across in the same way. But they could make up another name.
* Hiro Protagonist, however, is an awesome name.
We used to occasionally use the word “unobtainium” in engineering conversations at NASA. I’ve noticed no one says it anymore after Avatar.
But on your point, as I think I’ve said somewhere around these parts before, I’m not going to be able to watch ‘Last Resort’ (aka “Lost In Subs”) because I used to do that. The trailer was already sufficiently eyerolly.
With only a few exceptions (The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, and Moon come to mind), no one even tries to get stuff related to space and dynamical systems right. So usually I just find it amusing when things are wrong. I still smile when I think about Armageddon–they got advice from NASA engineers, so at first I thought it was going to be realistic, but then they went so over-the-top that I was laughing by the end.
I was mightily annoyed by the trend in the ’00s for action films to include a scene in which the heroes run away from an explosion and just barely escape. Finally, film critics started making fun of this effect appearing in every, single action film, and filmmakers stopped using it. Also, with special effects being created more and more with animation based on a simulated environment with its own physics engine, movies seem to me to be increasingly believable in my department.
I guess I was miffed about the turbine engine failure in The Avengers. When a turbine is spinning at full tilt, the vanes expand, so if they were in contact with the engine sides when at rest, there’s no way that situation was going to get better. But, as others have said, I just tried to look past it and move on with enjoying the film (which I did thoroughly).
I thought BSG got the space scenes pretty good. The ships moved realistically and you saw shit blow up without hearing anything. Also, no lasers/phasers/etc. Just good old kinetic weapons and missiles. Of course, they also had a FTL drive but I’ll forgive that.
I think a lot of the BSG F/X guys came over from Firefly, which also made an effort at more realism in the space scenes.
The much bigger problem with the scene you refer in Wolverine is: how could a guy with super-sensitive senses not be able to tell whether a person was alive or dead? Or that the blood on her was animal and not mutant? Or, for that matter, that she had no physical wounds that would account for that much blood loss.
Most moviegoers wouldn’t know what hydrochlorothiazide is or does, but they could definitely pick up on the other problems without needing a medical license. A terminology error pales in comparison to everything else that’s wrong with the scene.
Basically – if a show or movie is at least decent, you should be able to expect it to do a baseline amount of research. If it’s dreck, you shouldn’t be surprised that they don’t.
Disclaimer: I only read this post because it came with a picture of Wolverine.