Impossible.

Patrick 25 Comments

Computer nerds historically freak out whenever someone in a movie sits down at a terminal and starts using a computer, since the computers in movies typically look nothing at all like actual real computer terminals.

This is the first time it has occurred to me that architects might have that same jarring suspension of disbelief problem…

Patrick

Patrick is a mid-40 year old geek with an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a master's degree in Information Systems. Nothing he says here has anything to do with the official position of his employer or any other institution.

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  2. My most memorable freakout was when Jeff Goldblum used a Mac to communicate with (and upload a virus to) an alien computer, because at the time I was trying to get Macs to communicate with freaking Unix workstations, and even that was like pulling teeth.

    • Try living the life of working with Windows and UNIX. It’s like pulling teeth by sticking the implements up your hind end and working bass-ackwards.

      • I’ve been doing that for more years than I’d like to admit. Ar least they both have working TCP implementations . (Macs do now too, of course.)

        • Is there some legitimate medical justification for doing it that way, or are you just trying to inflate the bill?

    • Responding to the first part of the comment:

      My most memorable freakout was seeing Trinity run nmap at a command line in the second(?) Matrix movie. Never mind that the rest of the Matrix had crazy computer madness in it, I expected that.

      I *didn’t* expect to see anything that was actually coupled to the world. It was oddly jarring.

      • Tron: Whatever had the guy who sat down at the dusty workstation run a whoami.

        I leaned forward. Then he did a history.

        My mind was blown.

        • That was in the reboot? I was in the bathroom. I think I missed the best part of the movie.

          • There was also a uname -a.

            It’s weird how much that grabbed me.

            I mean, compare to Live Free or Die Hard and you find yourself thinking “no, that’s not how that works” before shrugging it off and going to the big splodey parts.

  3. I think once you get familiar enough with most any discipline, you start to notice how inaccurately/poorly it’s portrayed in the movies/on TV/in the news.
    Though I get the feeling some/all of these impossibilities were intentional on Kubrick’s part, to increase the sense of disorientation for the viewers more than that they were just colossally bad hotel designers.

    • Yeah, I agree. Well, to some extent; another part of it might just be unintentional laziness.

      It would be interesting to see/hear an interview with Kubrick regarding this video in particular. Mebbe there’s an “Inside the Actor’s Studio”. I must ask the Magic Internet Machine.

      • I’d suspect it was not unintentional laziness. See if you can find the BBC documentary “Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes”. The guy’s attention to every single detail in his films (and apparently the rest of his life) was way beyond obsessive.

  4. My father was an aerospace engineer when he saw Star Wars for the first time with some coworkers. Star Wars is not as enjoyable when you’re watching it with aerospace engineers.

    “BUT THERE’S NO SOUND IN SPACE!”

    And it’s downhill from there.

    • What did he think about parsecs as a unit of time? That’s the one that made me (literally) yell “Oh, come on!”

      • I should find out which number is greater: The number of treatises on the internet trying to explain the Kessel run statement, or the number of treatises on the internet trying to explain the camel through a needle’s eye statement.

        • “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle in less than twelve parsecs …”

  6. I try my best to ignore things like this so I can enjoy a movie. About the only one I could not do that too was The Day After Tomorrow. Ugh.

  7. And yet people watch (or read) “The Da Vinci Code” and think that everything it says about the Catholic Church is completely true…

    • Oh, sure, that too. Actually, this was pretty high on my list.

      Sort of in order of consideration, I thought about:

      * Doctors (Marcus Welby… ARRRGH!)
      * Lawyers (Twelve Angry Men… ARRRGH!)
      * Theologians/formal religion (your example plus numerous others)
      * General Science (just about every movie that has a physics-related plot line… ARRGH!)
      * Computers (already mentioned)
      * Movie people (the Wilhelm scream)

      The funny thing is that all of those itchy spots are usually where some body of professional knowledge is abused slightly (or heavily) for the sake of the story. It’s a bit, a moment, etc., which you can usually get over/past and go on with your suspension of disbelief.

      Architects getting knocked out of a story via Set Design has probably been going on longer than moving pictures. And yet it just never occurred to me. It’s not just about abusing the knowledge for the *story*… it’s about abusing the knowledge for the *actual construct of the surroundings*.

      Which, sure, is also in furtherance of the story in many cases, but it seems more primal. I’m going to have to ask the architects of my acquaintance how often *they* get booted out of enjoying something by noticing stuff like this.

  8. You know what I hate? “That does not compute.”

    • There was an episode of The Paper Chase (overall, a pretty intelligent show) that was stupid in a number of different ways. The plot was that the engineering students had built a computer that could do legal work, thus putting their hated rivals the law students on the road to unemployment.

      First stupid thing: They didn’t write a program to solve the problem, they *built a super-computer*.

      Second stupid thing: The “super-computer” was a roomful of PDP-11 peripherals: racks of tiny disk drives, tape cartridge drives, a couple 9-track tape drives whirring continuously, and lots of flashing light panels.

      The lawyers are crushed, until Prof. Kingsfield find the answer, which was the

      Third stupid thing: He asks it a hypothetical question, because a machine couldn’t possibly answer one of those.

      This confuses it terribly, as we can tell by the

      Fourth stupid thing: the computer is working so hard that the lights dim and sparks start to shoot out of it.

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