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Why Plot Holes Matter (And Why They Sometimes Don’t)
Imagine you’re watching a movie at the theater. At one point, a character says something that subtly but directly contradicts a plot point from earlier in the film. Later, a different character who didn’t seem very important until now emerges from the ether conveniently supplied with tools or information that could have been a lot more helpful at the beginning of the story. Finally, our heroes reach the MacGuffin, the object or person that the film’s plot gravitates around, and as the climax reaches peak boil a thought suddenly springs into your brain: “Wait, didn’t they already have something that could do that? Why couldn’t they have just done X, Y, or Z instead of going to all this trouble?”
In a given theater audience, let’s say five out of ten people won’t notice these things at all. Three more of these audience members will be aware of some storytelling hiccups, but they’ll say they didn’t mind and still enjoyed the film. That leaves us with two more people, and while both will say that these discrepancies were significant flaws that tangibly detracted from the movie’s quality, one of those two will get very, very angry about them and will crusade against the movie to anyone unfortunate enough to ask them if they did anything fun this weekend.
Odds are good that you’ve been all four of these types of audience members at least once across the span of your movie-watching life. Even the most casual filmgoer will occasionally stumble upon a movie they find so enraging, that JUST DIDN’T MAKE ANY SENSE!! to such a degree that they have to rant about it. This is what makes plot holes, and the strenuous arguments they lead to, so frustrating for so many people. Not everyone watches movies for the same reasons or notices the same things. Not caring about a movie’s story defeats the purpose of seeing it in the first place, but dwelling on every little snag it hits kills the fun for you and for everyone else too. When are you making valid critiques when you bring them up, and when are you just being pedantic?
There’s an idea in academic writing that the quality of the prose will be indicative of the rigor and insight that lives at the core of the piece. This seems like it should be an easy concept to translate to film — the more consistent and coherent the plot, the better the movie will…
