3

Everything Happens for a Reason, Except for the Stuff That Doesn't Pertain to You

The Offenders:

The Matrix/Slumdog Millionaire/Forces of Nature/Bruce Almighty

An easy way for films to ensure that the protagonist ends up with the right love interest or that the right characters survive a disaster is to blame it all on destiny. Even films that don't blatantly mention fate by name still rely on chance encounters and pure luck to keep a story moving forward. The alternative would be a movie in which a bunch of bullshit happens with no relationship to the plot until it finally stops happening and credits roll. That's a little too close to life for anyone to pay money to see. A story literally relies on some kind of providence because that's the only way to get to the right ending. Unfortunately for an audience, that starts to look like a message after a while.

"She never would have become my wife's friend if I wasn't supposed to sleep with her."

Surrendering to fate works out so well in films, it's easy to understand why we'd try to apply it to reality. After all, it's comforting to believe that our lives are headed toward a happy ending. The problem is that there are two main differences between reality and films:

1) There is no ending in your life except when you die.

2) In the real world,

2

Awful People Will Someday Realize They Are Awful

The Offenders:

Return of the Jedi/Serenity/3:10 to Yuma/American History X

The only thing we love more than watching a movie villain die is watching a movie villain repent, and in the case of Darth Vader, both at the same time. Films offer us the gratification of seeing shitty people finally realize how shitty they've been and then start to feel bad about it, or, if they were being shitty on purpose, we at least get to see them fall from high-rises.

"I regret nothing!"

This reckoning happens with such frequency in film that we subconsciously start to expect it from our own lives. It feels like one of those rules life has to adhere to if it's ever going to make any sense. It's the foundation behind every occurrence in fiction of Peter standing at the pearly gates checking a list to see who's allowed in the club. While movies may not have invented it, they certainly perpetuated the idea.

Sadly, the depressing truth is that awful people will likely go on being awful forever. While we expect school bullies to have their comeuppance one day, or for arrogant people to finally feel some shame, these things rarely happen because life isn't actually that satisfying. Worse, not everyone operates on the same scale of ethics. There are millions of detestable people out there right now who can justify every miserable thing they do. Even if you had the opportunity to sit them down and explain why they are objectively shitty, they wouldn't understand your position, and there's also a good chance they would try to poke you in the eye. So even though we sit seething and waiting for coworkers, exes and eye pokers the world over to finally have the moment of introspection we've been hunting for since the fourth entry on this list, that day may never come. Sorry. So now the alternative is figuring out how to get them up to the top floor of a high-rise.

1

If a Relationship Can't Fulfill Every Need in Your Life, It's Doomed

The Offenders:

Blue Valentine/The Break-Up/Little Children/The Good Girl/The Notebook

We've discussed before how miserable movies are at doling out advice on finding love, but they're even worse at teaching us how to keep it. For any romantic movie that starts with a happy couple, it's almost guaranteed that they will be dating or married to other people by the credits. Audiences are only interested in the beginnings and endings of relationships, not all the tedious good times in the middle. The consequence, however, is that filmmakers are then stuck in the position of tearing a couple apart in the same movie where they're trying to point out the power of love. The solution: The newly found love in the story has to be superior in every conceivable way so that audiences will say, "Yes, of course, that's what a relationship is really supposed to be."

Real love only exists in torrential rains.

That sets a dangerous precedent for real-world relationships, though. No one is living out that lustful, unstoppable, consistently passionate version of love endorsed by films because we have to live it for a lot longer than 90 minutes and that would be exhausting. Real relationships are hard and ugly sometimes. They are filled with petty, asinine fights where people say regrettable things, but according to every movie about love, that's a sure sign the relationship is a few short scenes from ending in flames. We are not the Jacks and Roses from Titanic or the Noahs and Allies from The Notebook, because no one is. In fact, just about every couple is more accurately represented by the doomed relationships they abandon in the middle of the movie. According to film logic, you are the antagonist in your significant other's love story. We all are.

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