Are you stuck in movie logic?
94 comments
·November 17, 2025wmeredith
mrkiouak
Yeah, not only are people doing this, but this is possibly one of the most common problems int he real world with real people. The blog post may have some helpful suggestions, but these descriptions seem to signal a really large "human people understanding" blind spot. The author's circle of friends may all be high EQ, well adjusted people, but this just isn't representative of the real world. (Which its fine to ignore, but don't pretend thats not the case!)
bryanrasmussen
they probably missed that little bit of the movie with the psychologist giving Will treatment to try to keep him from wasting his potential. Easy mistake to make.
mcv
You know, I've been wondering why the Rebels in Star Wars don't just shoot down that Death Star, if that thing is such a problem.
Groxx
I try not to judge other cultures, but that seems like a strange name for a moon.
bryanrasmussen
if only the Eagles hadn't carried Sam and Frodo to Mt. Doom to throw away the ring that short story would have been a really epic series of books.
J_Shelby_J
Ok buddy cinephile has gone cross platform!
AllegedAlec
INdeed. The entire point of Chuckie's "If you're still here in 20 years I'll kill you" was just that.
null
mock-possum
Yeah I’m pretty sure his girlfriend, best friend, and therapist all pretty much explicitly tell him that.
gilleain
"It's not your fault"
(also the graph theory examples in the beginning are really simple. Good Will Hunting is not really great as a math movie. I preferred 'Proof' with Paltrow, Hopkins, etc)
coldtea
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.
andrewflnr
Yeah, while it can be a cheap plot device, it's also largely an accurate depiction of what it takes for real humans to change.
Lots of teachers have told their students that they have lots of potential and shouldn't be getting fights. But if that student is getting in fights, it's not because no one ever told them it's dumb and this one line will be the great revelation they need, it's because they have deeper problems in their life.
techblueberry
Yeah, I think the point this article is trying to make is somewhat interesting, and I do try to do this in my life, but the analogy their trying to make is actually I think the opposite of what they present. The point of Good Will Hunting is how hard what they’re trying to do is, that despite being confronted with “the problem” repeatedly Will needed some other life experience to snap him out of himself. And actually by the end of Good Will Hunting, I think what you realize is that everyone was wrong. That what Will was looking for was someone who could look past the surface conflict and love him for something deeper, and really simpler. I don’t think she needed him to be a genius the way his teacher tried to use him for that, and neither really did Robin Williams.
And in this I think movie logic is in some ways correct, that people often have to have experiences to make real change happen.
Maybe this is about deep truths vs shallow truths. “Hey it seems like there’s beef between us, is a shallow truth (for a relationship without years of history, if it’s father/son after 30 years of beefing, same applies?) Just addressing it is fine. “Hey, I think you’re not achieving your life purpose” is a deep truth. You can’t just tell someone what their purpose is.
dominicrose
Well you are only responsible for your side of a 2-person relationship, no matter what kind of relationship it is. If the other person doesn't react in the best way, at least you tried and maybe that was the best thing to do based on the information that you had.
I guess most people think that it takes two persons to end a relationship but that's not true. It only takes one. If you're not that person, then maybe it's enough to know that it wasn't you because you tried.
Being stuck or being at the end is pretty much the same thing if you never get unstuck.
trgn
most of her examples are incredibly patronizing and prying. these are tactless overbearing comments, and they can -if ever - only come from a place where there's already a mutual admiration or respectful bond.
phito
Yes especially the one asking a colleague if their are scared of them...
closewith
Just evidences a lack of emotional intelligence on the part of the author, ironically.
everdrive
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.
eslaught
It's because if you explain what's going on, you stop the action. And viewers/readers don't like that.
In fiction it's called an info dump. As an aspiring science fiction author, virtually every beta reader I've had has told me they don't like them. I want my fiction to make sense, but you have to be subtle about it. To avoid readers complaining, you have to figure out how to explain things to the reader without it being obvious that you're explaining things to the reader, or stopping the action to do it.
Movies are such a streamlined medium that usually this gets cut entirely. At least in books you can have appendices and such for readers who care.
DoomDestroyer
I would argue that it is the opposite. People expect an info dump and everything explained to them. I remember watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier (I think it was the last movie I watched in theatre) and pretty much everything was explained to the audience. Guy Richie has character intro screens like Street Fighter in his movies.
Even in movies where everything is explained e.g. in Blade where they will have a scene where someone explains how a weapon works, I've noticed in a recent viewing of the movie that people forgot the explanations of the gadgets he has. In Blade they have a James Bond / Q like conversation between the characters to say "this weapons does X against vampires" and sets the weapon for later on in the movie and people forgot about it.
I watched "The Mothman Prophecies" and quite a lot of the movie was up to interpretation and there was many small things in the film that you might overlook e.g. there is a scene in a mirror where the reflection in the mirror is out of sync with his movements, suggesting something supernatural is occurring and he hasn't realised it yet. While I love the movie, there is very few movies like that.
If you watch movies before the 90s. A huge number of movies will have characters communicate efficiently and often realistically.
actionfromafar
Current movies have Reed-Solomon error correction (repetition of concepts, names and explanations) built in so the stream receiver (human watching movie while still holding smartphone in hand) can recover from missed data (scenes).
recursive
Maybe some people like that. I have no idea how common this is, but if everything makes sense, I find that kind of boring. I like to have at least a little bit of ambiguity or mystery to chew on.
troupo
> People expect an info dump and everything explained to them. I remember watching Captain America
People don't have an expectation of that. The number one rule of movie making used to be "Show, don't tell".
With the rise of streaming this changed. People "watch" movies while chatting on their phones, doing home chores etc. A lot of movies in the streaming era spell everything out because people no longer watch the screens.
bitwize
My favorite is Con Air (1997). As they're marching the prisoners onto the plane, a warden explains to a colleague who everyone is so we know just what a dangerous crowd the protag is in with/up against.
"That's So-and-so. Drug and weapons charges. Took out a squad of cops before he was finally arrested."
"That's Such-and-such. They call him The Butcher. He eats his victims after he murders them."
"That's the ringleader. Runs the whole drug trade along the entire west coast. Anybody crossing him has a death wish."
Then Nicolas Cage's character, the hero, comes out. He gives a toss of his luxurious hair (must've been smuggling Pantene in his "prison pocket"), everything goes slo-mo, and I swear to you, a beam of holy light falls on him like he's Simba from The Lion King.
"Who's that?"
"Oh, him? He's nobody."
ashtakeaway
If we succumbed to everyone's complaints we'd have a much more dumbed down version of everything. Consider if you had a concussion on the right temporal lobe and had hypergraphia as a symptom of the resultant temporal lobe epilepsy. I'd write everything I'd want to write regardless of who complains. Philip K. Dick was one such person.
eslaught
It depends on what you care about. If you're writing purely for yourself, then by all means, go ahead and do so.
I've found there's a balance to be found in listening to others vs yourself. Usually, if multiple people give you the same feedback, there is some underlying symptom they are correctly diagnosing. But they may not have the correct diagnosis, or even be able to articulate the symptoms clearly. The real skill of an author/editor is in figuring out the true diagnosis and what to do about it.
In the communication example, this means rooting conflicts in the true personalities of the characters and/or their context, so that even if they sat down to have a deep chat, they still wouldn't agree. E.g., character A has an ulterior motive to see character B fail. Now you hint at that motive in a subtle way that telegraphs to readers that something is going on, without stopping the action for what would turn into a pedantic conversation. At least, that's what I'd do.
everdrive
Yep, I totally get it, and my initial observation was made when I was maybe 17 or so. Sometimes these topics do get put into movies, such as the sequence in Shazam where they test his newly-found powers -- but even that was played more for laughs and was really just an entertaining way to acknowledge that much of the audience probably never heard of Shazam.
hammock
That doesn’t answer why we don’t do it in real life, for people like parent commmenter who actually are interested in it
closewith
No, you need to be able to potray humans well enough to convey their motivations, goals, emotions, etc without explaining it. Anybody can explain a character, but that's not interesting to read.
amundskm
Answering questions fully and honestly means being vulnerable, and depending on a lot of societal norms, being vulnerable is frowned upon. Most people don't let themselves be vulnerable with anyone, or if they do, its only a few very close people that trust absolutely.
everdrive
>and depending on a lot of societal norms,
I'm not sure I can accept that it's just social norms. It feels like a human universal. I really like honestly, and I often bend to social norms and avoid these kinds of topics. But for years, I falsely assumed that other people were like me: if we could just be past the initial fear everyone would be so happy to be able to speak so openly and honestly.
And unfortunately, this just is not the case. From what I can tell, for many, many people they just don't want to go there; they don't want to offer real answers to questions; they want the questions un-asked, or they want to answer with a socially-please lie, or a joke, or anything that changes the topic. I don't think we've been taught to be this way. I think we are this way.
amundskm
I said societal norms because I do think it depends culture to culture. Danes are famous for being incredible forthright and blunt while the Japanese are often seen as being circumspect.
In the US there is an incredible difference in what is allowed to be talked about in the midwest vs the west coast. I don't know about other regions as I have only lived in the two, but I would assume they differ as well.
Like many things different societies can be graded on a gradient.
card_zero
Well, yeah. We don't have to field criticism all the time. It wouldn't do any good. That's why there's a concept of privacy.
erikerikson
You're not alone in your preference
rubicon33
A share a similar frustration as you, that it seems “people” don’t care about / never question things, but for me it’s really about one big question:
Why the f*ck are we here? Why does ANYTHING exist? What IS this reality?
How “nobody” (very very few) people are trying to figure this out or are bothered by the question and open to talking about it blows my mind mind.
Joker_vD
Eh, that's actually pretty realistic. Remember that scene with Luke trying to lift X-Wing from the swamp? He applies the Force, the ship actually starts going up, and then he just straight up stops and says, "Nah, that's impossible, I give up". Totally baffling when you think about it, and yet totally realistic.
milesvp
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.
_def
I think I've sort of come to this conclusion which gives myself more inner peace but I haven't exactly gotten better at communicating my thoughts, hence it feels like others often assume I'd "play" as most do, but in fact I'm not but just a bit weird and introverted. Any tips on this?
keiferski
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.
collinmcnulty
That comment is on a post by this same author, whose beat is that you can decide to make changes in your life whenever you want to. So definitely a lot of connection between the two ideas
JohnMakin
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!
amirhirsch
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.
stackedinserter
But people still love movies where everyone is an idiot, like Jurrasic Park or Interstellar. I wonder if it then translates in their real life decisions.
saghm
I haven't seen Interstellar, but to be fair to Jurassic Park, there's literally a character who tells everyone else that the park is a terrible idea, even if his "scientific" basis for it isn't very coherent. (He might still be an idiot in other ways; I haven't seen it in a while, but I think it's an overstatement to say it's about everyone being an idiot rather than some specific people with enough money to find enough other idiots to execute their vision).
xd1936
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".
dfxm12
I tell my managers "no". I tell them why: this process doesn't scale with the team, the security policy forbids it, this is the fifth project you've given top priority to this week, etc.
They say, don't worry, just do it. I'm at a point where saying no doesn't matter, so I have to consider if I should even bother.
coldtea
In software companies priorities mean nothing, they're there to check a checkmark that "we also have prioritization". Anything they want to have will be "top priority" even if they have 50 "top priority" deliverables this release.
What actually prioritizes things is actual friction: from stuff actually taking time to make, to things falling apart and needing time to repair, to employees unionizing and refusing endless overtime.
And anything else (scalability, policy, etc) is also irrelevant, when it comes to "the customer/CEO/higher manager wants this". People are not actually hired to make the product better, or to follow policies. They work to do what the company higher ups want them to do - the rest is up to them to try to fit under those contraints.
freehorse
Not just in software companies ime.
sys32768
My mother's side of the family was from the Midwest.
Super polite, agreeable, but almost impossible to nail down with clear communication as to how they felt or what they wanted.
During reunions with that family, it was nearly impossible to get them to say where they wanted to go out to eat.
stronglikedan
> it was nearly impossible to get them to say where they wanted to go out to eat.
Some people just don't care, like me, and can find something to eat just about anywhere. I also dislike choosing where to eat, so my rule is that the pickiest eater gets to choose, and I'm never the pickiest in a group.
tuna74
If you clearly state what you want you end up taking responsibility for that. Say you want to go to X which is a 40 minute drive away and when you get there it is full. Then you will here "Well, you wanted to go here!" and it will be your fault.
packetlost
I'm also in a Midwestern city and see similar things. I once saw a project manager at a Fortune 500 that literally fabricated statistics about an ongoing project I was on to please management.
I've found that not being afraid to say no or opine on things has been very effective in my career.
memfd
Sometimes it is not conflict aversion as much as, and maybe i am speaking for myself here, being unsure if the opinion/judgement you have and are about to express is valid or if this is a real bad misread. Maybe conflict aversion is a form of short-sighted kindness
kayodelycaon
I’ve often been the only person in the room willing to confront things directly. (I don’t like doing it but unresolved issues just get worse.)
What a person says about people who are not there is telling.
When it’s not outright malicious, it’s usually fear. It’s something they don’t want to happen that stops them from saying it. (Depending on the situation it may be entirely justified.)
Kindness does exist. There’s plenty of times you don’t want to upset somebody else for their sake.
There’s nothing wrong with conflict avoidance being the default. It only becomes a problem when it stops you from conflict where it’s necessary.
lachlan_gray
I think what you're describing is a form of conflict aversion, where the (tiny) conflict is what would clear up your read, or the group's attitude on something, for going forward. Short sighted kindness is a nice way to put it
imgabe
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.
kykat
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.
arjie
A decade or so ago, after an interview that didn't go that well, a candidate reached out asking for feedback. I gave him some algorithms and data structures advice and where to read what and stuff like that and he responded really positively then reached out to me months later to tell me he went and learned all the stuff and got a job at some now-famous startup (Airbnb? I don't remember). I was early in my career back then and was happy for him. Now, if I were to do that I'd be like "Damn, this guy is capable of taking the feedback and actioning on it. I should have somehow found a way to hire him!"
Haha, I hope he's doing well wherever he is :)
Razengan
It's about "investment": People spend a lot of time, consciously on purpose or implicitly as a matter of consequence, on making up their plans & preferences.
They've been building up mental velocity to whatever they're going to do.
When you give them a contradictory opinion or advice, you're asking them to discard that investment and abruptly switch directions.
Instead of asking them to drive off their mental road and into the dirt or turn around, offer them something akin to a rail track that they can gradually/subtly switch onto.
Figure out the right "prompt" for them :)
NebulaStorm456
I gave an advice to my friend who is doing a startup. I told him it probably won't work out. But we continue with our own line of thinking because the outcome totally depends on reality. Also, my friend can tack on lot of ifs later on (if only this and this and this had happened, I would be successful) to "prove" himself right. It might be possible that with no decisive outcome favoured by reality, we would both continue to be right in our heads.
vunderba
To put it a bit more succinctly - the sunk cost fallacy.
crazygringo
> 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.
aidenn0
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...
> 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.