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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Lazy plot setups. Main example: if someone coughs for no reason in the first 10 minutes, they DEFINITELY have a terminal illness that will be revealed shortly.
Similarly, there is only one reason for a woman to vomit in a movie.
Especially frustrating because vomiting isn't even guaranteed with pregnancy! 20-30% of women make it through with no morning sickness, and then out of the 70-80% who do feel totally nauseous, not everyone actually vomits!
A necessary evil, though I agree very spoiler-y. People don't respond well to left-field plot-relevant details. So when you have a story to tell and a limited run-time to tell it, you don't get time to linger on atmospheric-but-not-plot-relevant details, and you have to include a satisfying level of foreshadowing. The result is that those foreshadowing details don't get time to "breathe".
This seems to go either one of two ways, depending largely on story pacing and overall quality: either it's derided as predictable, or lauded as "tight". It's a tricky, and largely subjective, line to walk.
Im honestly not super bothered by it. Why have an actor cough if it doesn't mean something?
I think it comes down to different approaches to writing. One is to only keep what's absolutely necessary to the plot. Done well, this can result in a tight narrative, but done poorly it can be way too predictable.
Another is to add little details that, while not necessary to the plot, may make the world/characters feel more real. Done well you can get some believably human characters, but done poorly it just feels bloated.
I think it can be done well, but it's often done poorly. Like a closeup of a character coughing is pretty obviously going to mean something later, it's so predictable as to be boring. IMO, a good Chekhov's Gun is something that surprises you at first but makes sense when you remember it later, or at least something where you have to keep guessing when it's going to come up. The viewer should feel clever for picking up on it. Knives Out is a great example of this being done well many times over.
Yeah, they're always needs to be a checkovs gun for things