5

Blue Dresses Mean Big Power

The "girl exploring an unknown and hostile world" is a common starting point for stories. Picture a wide-eyed girl getting out of a taxi in the big city and getting immediately robbed when she stupidly trusts a stranger with her suitcase. It happens every six seconds in real life and even more often in movies. It happens so often that Hollywood needed to come up with a visual cue to let viewers know that THIS particular woman is the predator, not the prey. And somehow they decided on "blue dress."

4

Heartbroken People Want Ice Cream But Have No Bowl

It's not unusual for people going through a breakup to turn to comfort foods. It's probably why most people in an Arby's are crying. But in movies, this somehow always ends up being ice cream. And very specifically, ice cream straight out of the carton. TV and film have decided that no one looks sad eating a pizza or fries, but there is real tragedy in scooping ice cream out of its original packaging. How did this happen? Ice cream is the happiest food in the world. It's so wonderful that we don't even mind it being sold from noisy vans driving through our neighborhoods by men who are so obviously ritual murderers.

The quintessential example of boy-troubled girl whose only friend is ice cream is Bridget Jones:

Universal Pictures Pictured: Every broken heart in any movie or TV show.

And while this cliche does apply more to women than men, it's not completely gender-specific. When Chandler on Friends went through a bad breakup, he turned to the carton. He would have liked to deal with it through strippers, liquor, and sarcasm, but his male friends weren't there. And with only the girls to comfort him, he was forced to fix his heartache the lady way: ice cream. To be clear, the show wasn't so much subverting the gender angle as it was making another "Chandler is such a girly fruitcake" joke. Remember, it was hard to walk three feet in any direction in '90s pop culture without running into someone calling a guy a homo.

Warner Bros. Television "Nice ice cream, Chandler. Could you BE any more girly? Ha ha ha! Ha ha! Ha ... ha. S-sorry, Chandler."

On the only other show about white professionals who hang out in New York, How I Met Your Mother, Lily also deals with her feelings by shoveling ice cream into her face. She makes the trope her own by using a wooden spoon.

20th Television "Ha ha, like the kind you'd use for cooking! That's not an ice cream spoon, you goddamn idiot! Ha ha! Ha ... ha. S-sorry, Lily."

3

Characters With Shiny Glasses Are Scary

An oddly specific way directors let you know someone is a real villain is to give them shiny spectacles. Glasses themselves give little away. A badass might wear sunglasses and a nerd might wear ordinary ones, but as soon as a bit of light glints off them, you can be sure they're evil. It's especially common in anime, where all true evil hides its eyes behind weirdly reflective eyeglasses.

TXN It's as if they're always looking directly into the light of 1,000 exploding babies.

It seems weird, but it's actually an old convention. Hitchcock might have been the first to use it back in 1954, in Rear Window. Somehow, the first time you see the neighbor's glasses reflecting light, you know he's the villain. I mean, look at this evil asshole:

Paramount Pictures Evil!

2

Bad Guys Play Pool

Pool is a rather ubiquitous game. Someone in your family probably has a pool table in their basement. Statistically, someone in your family also has a box of children's teeth that they kept from when they worked as an ice cream truck driver. It supports our point, which is that whenever you see someone playing pool, they're a bad guy. The world's most ordinary parlor game somehow became the hobby of killers and badasses in every movie.

In My Cousin Vinny, Joe Pesci walks into a country bar and beats one of the men there at pool. In our world, this kind of thing happens all the time, and we would never expect the loser to immediately attempt murder. And yet when exactly that happens in the movie, no one is surprised. Not even Vinny. Of course the man tried to kill him -- he's a billiards player! In a movie! It's weird, right? It's a universe in which everyone who plays pool is a murderer and the game itself makes them want to murder, but bar owners are still putting them in their bars?

20th Century Fox Pool table control is for whiny liberals. The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a pool table is a good guy with a pool table.

In Terminator 2, Arnold Schwarzenegger walks into a bar fully nude and jacked beyond reason. And if he walked into a bar with only a dartboard, things would have been fine. But he walked into a bar with a pool table. They took one look at this terrifyingly powerful lunatic and instantly decided to kick his ass. As usual, it didn't go well, but the story always starts the same: criminal assault by pool player.

TriStar Pictures Terminator 6 reveals that the war began when a human hit a jukebox with pool cue.

1

If Your Nose Is Bleeding Or You Have A Cough, You Are About To Die

Everyone has had or will get a nosebleed at some point in their lives. They can be caused by anything from altitude to nose-picking to cocaine to punches. The point is, we know you were picking your nose, and all you need to do is jam a tissue up there for a few minutes and move on with your day. Unless you're a character in a movie. Then you're so, so about to die.

The instant and enduring classic The Butterfly Effect had to show that Ashton Kutcher had Punk'd himself (this joke brought to you by the year 2004) by time-travelling too much. You see, his chrono powers were taking their toll on his body, killing him from the inside out. But instead of showing that with a dinosaur bursting out of his chest or having him transform into Napoleon before flickering out of existence, they gave him a simple nosebleed. Because in a film, a little blood from the nose is as instantly lethal as a chest-bursting time raptor.

New Line Cinema What we're trying to say is that a lot of bad decisions went into making The Butterfly Effect.

Even non-terrible films like Pan's Labyrinth might use a nosebleed to tell us how dead people are. The movie is a tornado of eyeballs and goo, and it's not clear what the rules are or what happens at the end. Until you see Ophelia's nose bleed. Then you know, without question, that girl's dead.

Warner Bros. No medicine on Earth can bring back a movie character from a nosebleed.

When Naomi Watts watches the cursed video in The Ring and she's doomed to die in a week, the movie lets us know this isn't some hoax or prank or hallucination. They give her a nosebleed to make it clear that YES, she's about to die from the curse of a very real ghost girl murderer. And when she manages to escape the curse, the movie can reassure us it worked by having her nose stop bleeding.

DreamWorks Pictures You see how handy it is?

If you don't have the budget for all that nose blood, you can also mark your characters for death with a cough. Coughing, as you may know, is quite ordinary in real life. In fact, it's so ordinary that we literally treat it with candy. But in a film, a cough is certain doom. If you see a character coughing for any reason other than being bad at weed, the editor might as well skip right to their funeral scene. As soon as a cough left Nicole Kidman's lips in Moulin Rouge, you knew she was dead. And you were confident Doc Holliday was going to win every gunfight in Tombstone because once he coughed, you knew that was going to be his cause of death.

For more tropes that probably need a break, check out 18 Baffling Tropes Hollywood Can't Stop Using and 6 Absurd Action Tropes You Never Noticed And Can't Unsee.

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