Are you stuck in movie logic?

I completely agree with the point, and I've made the same point myself.

However, I think "good will hunting" is a bad example.

> “I feel like you have a tremendous amount of intellectual potential that you’re wasting here — why are you getting in fights rather than trying to do something interesting?”

There is a scene where they have this conversation without words. Robin Williams is asking him without spelling it out and Matt Damon understands what the question is and dances around it. They both know what they're talking about even if they don't put it into words. In the case of this specific movie the problem isn't communication, it's just that the main character is incapable of dealing with things inside him that he doesn't understand (aka "emotionally immature"). (well, that was my interpretation anyway).

The problem is being told those things (e.g. the examples in TFA from Lala Land, Good Will Hunting, etc) often accomplishes nothing. If anything, being told about such issues, even softly and subtly, will make people recoil, be offended, double down, or deny them.

It's only when push comes to shove, or when you get a bitter reality lesson, that you can understand them, or that you can accept and benefit from being told such advice.

This really interesting, and I first observed this with the movie the Matrix. Not so much that the conflict couldn't be resolved. (although the Oracle's entire character is based on this idea) But instead, if I were really on the Nebuchadnezzar I would have wanted to have hours-long conversations with Neo about the nature and limitations of his powers. The crew is faced with a deistic and perhaps apocalyptic super hero on their crew. They might be witnessing the end times!

And NO ONE digs into this for more details? When I was younger this frustrated me, but as I got older I realized this was a reflection of normal human psychology. People avoid interesting topics all the time. "Why did you cheat on your husband?" "How come you're depressed all the time?" "What do you do when no one is watching?" "Do you like your job?" etc ... all of these questions have pretty direct answers, but it seems like people will do almost anything to avoid speaking about uncomfortable topics directly.

It's still not something I fully understand, but it's something I've at least made some peace with. It's human nature, for better or (usually) for worse.

Reading these examples, you might have noticed that it’s rare to hear people talk like this. I think there are a couple of reasons for that...

I think it's even simpler: very few people actually have communication skills. Being able to formulate thoughts and communicate clearly is itself a difficult skill, and in the era of generating instantaneous ChatGPT articles and online-first social lives, no one is developing said skill - nor do they realize they're terrible at it. Or at least, they don't want admit it.

Part of the reason movie logic seems illogical ("just say this and the problem is solved!") yet realistic is because we are looking externally at someone else's problems, and not our own. There was a good HN comment yesterday making this exact point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945216

The good news is: if you manage to develop communication skills, you'll be a step ahead of everyone else, especially as people become more reliant on AI chatbots to formulate their thoughts.

> Good Will Hunting. The entire movie feels like it could’ve been skipped if literally any emotionally intelligent person said to Matt Damon’s character: “I feel like you have a tremendous amount of intellectual potential that you’re wasting here — why are you getting in fights rather than trying to do something interesting?”

Maybe I'm missing something but that's literally what everyone in the movie is telling Will. HIs best friend, his mentor, his girlfriend, his therapist. They all literally say this in some form during the movie. His character growth is believing it himself.

I see this advice a lot in various forms. I think people are probably too conflict averse on average so there is some merit to it but there are limits. I feel like there are a lot of times in my life where just moving on or being diplomatic has been the right call.

The manager example is a good case study. There are a lot of examples here where there might be genuine repercussions for raising an issue with a manager. I wouldn't give this as blanket advice.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's a simple rule about whether or not you should raise an issue and it needs to be decided case by case.

I think part of the reason I'm "conflict averse" is that airing things out very often doesn't turn out like... well, like the movies. Sometimes the issue I have with someone is just "weird" and socially unacceptable to air out, or maybe the person doesn't turn out to be as reasonable or understanding as I hope they are. Or maybe after enough of these, it just become overwhelming to the other person.

Not sure how good of an example good will hunting is or if the author has seen that film - at least half of the movie and basically every supporting character is constantly telling him he can do better. It's one of the central themes!

Interesting to read, but this is where movies are more "real" than true life - people can't verbalize their true feelings and need to experience or work through them in some way non-verbally.

If you've seen any Kar-wai Wong movies, that's basically his whole filmography (In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express, etc.).

What’s interesting about this, is there are actually game theoretic repercussions to what the author is expressing. By making implicit knowledge explicit it changes entire game trees. You no longer play the i think that he thinks that I think that he thinks… branch, and you are literally changing expected payouts as a result.

Once I learned this, it changed how I live. Similar to the article, I’m much more likely to say out loud the thing that people are only thinking. It removes so many potential problems that create prisoners dilemma type payout stuctures that it rarely seems useful not to make things explicit.

The phenomenon described in movies has a name called “Idiot Plot” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_plot) an older term which Roger Ebert popularized. Feels missing from blogpost.

This article should be included in every Professional Development program. This is excellent advice.

I live in an area of the midwest United States where nearly _everybody_ is kind, but severely conflict averse... To the point where it becomes difficult to gauge true intentions. Lack of clarity on everybody's priorities make work far more difficult than it needs to be because everyone here are people pleasers who don't know how to say "no" or "I don't like that".

> It’s the cheapest way to build effective drama, but if you don’t fully dissolve yourself in the movie logic, the whole time you want to scream, “can’t anyone just talk about what’s happening directly?!”

> It’s my experience that movie logic is endemic in dysfunctional organizations, friendships, and marriages.

This is why it's not the "cheapest" way to build drama -- as the author quickly admits, it's how most people actually are. We watch drama precisely because it teaches us how we can improve. We see a character who needs to grow, and either they don't and is a cautionary tale (and shows us what might happen to us if we don't), or they do (and shows us how we might improve our own lives if we learn the same lesson).

Nothing about this post is wrong, exactly, but the problem of "walking around in a haze of denial" isn't something that you're going to fix with a blog post. This is a huge part of therapy -- talking about the issues you're facing, so your therapist can start to put together the patterns of what you're in denial about, and surface them to you so you can actually address them. But the whole point is, you generally can't do this yourself, because you're not seeing the patterns to begin with. You're so used to them, they're invisible. You can't do it by yourself, almost by definition. How can you fix the things your brain is hiding from you it just not seeing to begin with?

So this post is on the right track, but the idea of trying to distill it down into three "tips" is about as simplistic as "Step 2: Draw the rest of the f***ing owl". They're not wrong, but learning to apply them properly can take years of work.

I agree, but...

Sometimes problems are real. That guy will never be my friend because he wants my position. That other guy is scared because he thinks my work is a threat to his silo, and he's right: the management is after him.

No frank conversation is going to change those situations.

There was an anime called Marmalade Boy where I believe every plot involved people being unable to communicate. It had the central romance that was a "will they or won't they" plot... They liked each other but were usually incapable of talking about it. Then the subplots involved their friends who were constantly scheming to break them up. Which the central couple was also incapable of discussing or confronting. It gets worse when they mistakenly believe at the end of the series that they were siblings. Did they ask for clarification? Nope, not until maximum drama was extracted from each misunderstanding.

I agree with this post, and suspect a lot of us will see the logic in approaching problems like this.

However, this approach isn’t universal and should be used with caution. A head-on approach isn’t effective with a person who is conflict-avoidant. Any of the given examples, no matter how gentle the delivery, will be seen as a personal attack and cause to pull away.

People always ask for feedback, but I haven't met anybody that can actually take it.

Most people just don't want to hear, don't want to know. And people know it, so people don't say what they think.

This can work on a feedback loop as well -- popular media is where young people learn how communication works. If they all watch the same "movie logic" scenarios, those scenarios are the only examples they have of how to behave.

So while Hollywood writers may have just needed a mechanism to make the plot interesting, that pattern can become reality as well.

It's a bit like people talking reading ChatGPT crap, will start talking and writing like ChatGPT.

The Good Will Hunting example is terrible, since it's clear that Will has been told this before the movie and was told this by at least 2 of the 5 therapists he saw before Sean...

Fully behind his argument, but boy did he pick a bad example with Good Will Hunting:

> “I feel like you have a tremendous amount of intellectual potential that you’re wasting here — why are you getting in fights rather than trying to do something interesting?”

Nobody said that because that was his whole problem, that he _couldn't_ go there. That was his entire character!

This is one of those things that, for some people, will be simple but not easy.

If you grew up with an emotionally erratic parent or caregiver, who might suddenly explode with anger at unpredictable times, that’s probably why you’re unwilling to bluntly address what should be simple issues. You were conditioned early on to think that anything that could possibly be conceived as critical would be met with anger and possibly violence. So you avoid exposing yourself to that risk.

What you have to learn, and what this post is indirectly trying to tell you, is that’s not normal, and most people won’t react like that.

A related problem, which was mentioned somewhere on HN about a year ago, is that too many movies have a "chosen one" mindset. The entire Marvel Overextended Universe runs on this. They're all Chosen Ones. Real life does not work that way. Read biographies of famous people. Most of them involve grinding upward.

(Trump is the counterexample. From zero to President. Nobody did that before. Every other president in the last century had some major public office first. This may be part of his appeal. He fits the model Hollywood teaches people to expect.)

I think Roger Ebert had a quote about movies where the problem could be resolved if the audience could shout one sentence to the characters.

Isn't this called "name it to tame it?" When you engage higher level cognitive functions it reportedly helps you escape predominantly emotional responses.

I'd like this to be a Reddit post, and people reply with their successes and failures using the method(s).

Might sound simple in theory, reality might get messy.

> It’s the cheapest way to build effective drama, but if you don’t fully dissolve yourself in the movie logic, the whole time you want to scream, “can’t anyone just talk about what’s happening directly?!”

People in real-world situations aren't exactly good at recognizing what's really happening, much less talking about it directly. Humans spend a lot of energy on self-deception, as well as lying to each other to reinforce everyone's respective delusions.

The famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan claimed that if everyone said exactly what needs be said, language wouldn't exist or something like that. I'd wager movies are a reflection of how our psyche works, including 'main character syndrome', omissions of causality for narrative coherency, etc.

What the author ignores is speaking from the point of view of the omniscient observer these things seem obvious. But the characters, even if they were purely rational happiness optimizers, lack all the information the movie viewer has.

> Or: Good Will Hunting. The entire movie feels like it could’ve been skipped if literally any emotionally intelligent person said to Matt Damon’s character: “I feel like you have a tremendous amount of intellectual potential that you’re wasting here — why are you getting in fights rather than trying to do something interesting?”

This person did not watch Good Will Hunting. I'm not a fan of the film, I just know for a fact several characters do this at several times. That is, y'know, the plot.

I haven't read further enough to discern whether this is AI slop, but it doesn't look promising.

A better example might be The Acolyte, though it isn't a movie. The entire plot is based on a lack of communication. Not to mention being a pretty bad show all around.

The thing I love most about the "why am I not just saying the boring, clumsy thing I'm actually thinking, instead of assuming everyone already understands it" rabbit hole is that once you actually commit to it, everything becomes simpler and easier. It takes away the pretense of religion, or anything supernatural, and it relieves you of ever having to feel "smart" because you're always one saying the dumbest things, it's just that no one else was daring to say them (which, ironically, doesn't make people think you're dumb, it just makes them introspect about why you would "just SAY that").

Of course, once you circle around to realizing that most human interaction is dependent upon insinuation and assumption (and how that often helps), and that most movies (media, in general) is made for people who haven't figured out how to be a person yet by people who haven't figured out the kind of person they really want to be yet, it lessens the overall takeaways from it. But things are a lot simpler!

"It's complicated" is probably the line I hate the most in movies for this very reason. It's lazy writing made vocal.

There is another way to think about things, which is that people shouldn't have to talk so much unless say they're a part of a family. For people communication outside their family, there should be tighter contractual obligations that define interactions and expectations.

To say it differently, define the smart contract that details the expected behavior! Everything else is then supposed to be mechanical. If one doesn't want to abide by the contract, one doesn't then get the associated payments or privileges!

> Have you ever noticed just how much of the drama in movies is generated by an unspoken rule that the characters aren’t allowed to communicate well? Instead of naming the problem, they’re forced to skirt around it until the plot makes it impossible to ignore.

That's the core of most of real world issues be it at work or relationships of any type. I can also personally attest most of issues of any type in my megacorp are caused by bad communication. How many times you see a barely functional marriage where unspoken things hang around and one party is afraid to tell them to the other side, and subtle hints are ignored. How many folks from older generations had a good talk about their true sexual preferences for example. Some nationalities have issues speaking frankly, ie British circle around issues with too much politeness. Good luck getting any Indian (in India) telling you "no" or "I don't know" (spent so much time wandering in wrong directions in good ol' times before smart phones).

Remove this issue and psychologists lose 95% of their work. Perfectly clear communication is an exception in this world.

I'd say movies gradually found this topic since many people will find themselves in those movies and identify with struggles of protagonists. Then logically frequent ending resolving many if not all issues allows people to have a little dream of resolving stuff they struggle with (subconsciously or consciously) in their lives.

> It’s the cheapest way to build effective drama, but if you don’t fully dissolve yourself in the movie logic, the whole time you want to scream, “can’t anyone just talk about what’s happening directly?!”

Yup it's insane. At the end of a very long series of three movies I told my father: "OK so this all basically happened because the person who sent the letter considered the (snail) mail service to be flawless and didn't bother to make sure the recipient got the letter in the first place".

Doesn't matter which (french) movies: some dumb plot where relatives don't know they're relatives because the only person who knew didn't bother to make sure the letter explaining they were relatives arrived.

Not naming the movies otherwise we'll get nitpicking.

TFA is right: it happens all the time in movie plots and really doesn't help with the suspension of disbelief.