Recently while watching an episode of Lost, my logical-to-a-fault husband was irritated by the following premise:
There was some sort of time-warp doohicky going on and Desmond's consciousness was going back and forth uncontrollably between the past and present. A physicist in the present instructed Desmond to find him in the past so that he could help, which he did. The physicist then informed Desmond that the reason he was flitting back and forth was that he had no anchor, nothing he really cared about in both times to anchor his consciousness. Thus, he needed to convince his ex-girlfriend in the past to give him her phone number so that he could call her 8 years in the future to prevent his consciousness-traveling from killing him. She gave him the number and didn't move for the next 8 years and he called her. All is well.
Okay, so Pete (the aforementioned husband) was really not fond of this premise. Frankly, I see what he means about how it doesn't make sense. But Lost is that kind of show. I mean, this program is full of crazy shenanigans, including a magic healing island inhabited by polar bears and deadly monsters made of smoke, as well as a community of "natives" who are clearly up to no good and apparently unlimited weaponry and ammunition, despite complete isolation from the outside world. So flaky time-travel story lines are really just part of the fun, in my opinion.
But here's the thing. Today Pete is watching 300, a movie which I have not seen but a few fleeting minutes of, but which appears to be the moving tale of a group of young and handsome warriors who enjoy doing battle in their capes and briefs. Now their adversaries are decked out in full head-to-toe armor including helmets and chain-mail and all the other awesome battle-wear, but the Cape-and-Panty-Brigade is nevertheless able to move thru them with due speed, slitting their throats like it's all in a day's work.
'Splain, please. It seems a bit inconsistent to be skeptical of one illogical TV premise and accepting of the other. Or am I missing some critical piece of information that makes the two incomparable?
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1 comments:
Well, you've missed a bit of the Lost premise that was the source of my irritation. This was presented in the context of being a sciency "explanation" of the weird shenanigans with Desmond. The scientist said something about the distinction between variables and constants in an equation as if this was supposed to somehow relate to Desmond having to call his girlfriend in order to stop his consciousness from hopping through time (she would be his "constant," something there in both the past and future... seriously, that's the premise). My reaction was, "!?!?" I thought this was a pretty silly bit of t.v. reasoning.
In 300, however, the whole movie is something of a comic book. It's all very stylized, and I accept the various kinds of unreality, like the lack of armor and such, as part of the stylistic visual presentation. The source material itself is such that it is not presenting these elements as things needing to be explained.
In Lost, this "constant" talk was presented to the viewer as an explanation of this weirdness, and I felt it made poor use of real mathematical concepts. It is different when a movie makes use of some invented kind of sciency force or whatever, and maintains consistency throughout the movie with the description that was given. I'm fine with that kind of thing (it's an element in almost any superhero movie). I'll willingly suspend my disbelief for a good story. I get irritated when movies are internally inconsistent, or when they misuse real science (or, mathematics) in a particularly egregious and irrational way.
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