The Dichotomy of Verisimilitude between Books and Movies
By Lawrence Martin
drlarry437@gmail.com
[Note: “Plato’s Podcasts” is the author’s invention, a format chosen to express his views. You won’t find this interview on any radio station.]
Plato: This is Plato’s Podcasts, for Radio Station WLOV in Cleveland, with another interesting podcast. Today I am interviewing Larry Martin, a retired physician who lives in The Villages, Florida. My interview is about his recent blog post, “The Dichotomy of Verisimilitude Between Books and Movies.” Welcome, Larry.
Larry: Thank you, Plato.
Plato: Give us a little of your writing background, please.
Larry: In my medical career I was a non-fiction writer, mainly about medical topics. Just before retirement, five years ago, I started writing fiction. To date, I’ve written seven novels and a bunch of short stories. It was a big learning curve, to go from non-fiction to fiction, but enjoyable.
Plato: OK, and you write movie scripts as well?
Larry: No, not yet. No scripts.
Plato: So, what’s with this blog title? I don’t want to sound stupid, but what the heck is “Dichotomy of Verisimilitude”?
Larry (with a slight chuckle). OK, I admit my title is pedantic, but purposely so, to get readers’ attention.
Plato: Or turn them away?
Larry: Well, I hope not. Anyway, it refers to the fact that movie scripts routinely misrepresent reality — that’s the verisimilitude –whereas most printed fiction does not. So there’s a big divide between the two, and that’s the dichotomy.
Plato: I see. Now, if you wanted a fifth-grader to understand your title, what would it be?
Larry. Umm, good question. How about this? “You Can Get Away With Unreal Stuff in Movies but Not in Books.”
Plato: OK, I’m getting your drift. Can you be more specific?
Larry: Love to. I’m in a critique group here in The Villages, called Wannabes, so-called because everyone wants to be a better writer. Great group, we read our stuff weekly, usually no more than a couple thousand words, and members offer their critiques. Almost all the fiction writing is what you would call realistic fiction, as opposed to fantasy. So if something is flat out wrong, or makes no sense in the real world, we’ll point it out. Almost invariably, the writer will recognize his or her mistake and change the passage.
Plato: Examples?
Larry: Sure. One story read in our group takes place in 1930s New York. The protagonist gets an infection, and the doctor gives him a shot of penicillin. Well, the writer is informed penicillin didn’t exist in the 1930s, so she recognizes her mistake and fixes it. Here’s another one. The protagonist is abducted by gangsters, given an anesthetic to keep him quiet, and is dumped into the trunk of a car. Two hours later he’s taken out, fully intact. Totally unrealistic. The anesthetic given would certainly have killed him in the car trunk. This is pointed out and the writer changes the drug. Now, it’s more realistic.
Plato: OK, medical stuff, but what else?
Larry: Oh, lots of other stuff. We have a retired marine, a retired police chief, retired cyber specialist, and other members with special knowledge. Everyone points out flaws in fiction that’s read, and the author makes changes. No one wants to publish an obvious error that will distract the reader. You would look stupid if you write, from a scene taking place in 1989, “Jill googled the internet to get more information.” Google and the internet didn’t exist in 1989, so that has to be changed. But often the mistake is more subtle, though no less glaring, such as misunderstanding how professionals and institutions work. Can I offer another medical example?
Plato: Sure, go ahead.
Larry: In the story as read in our group, Sam tries to kill his business rival Ben. Despite four bullets, Ben survives after major surgery, albeit on life support in the hospital. Determined to finish the job, Sam calls the hospital’s ICU, says he’s Ben’s cousin, and asks the nurse, “Is Sam going to make it?” The nurse replies, “He’s on life support, but the doctors think he’ll pull through. We’re hoping he can get off the breathing machine in another two to three days.” Sam asks for visiting hours, thanks the nurse, and hangs up. Do you see a problem here?
Plato: Well, I assume the nurse wasn’t allowed to give out that information to Sam.
Larry: Right. Totally unrealistic, unless your goal is to portray the nurse as either incompetent or in cahoots with Sam, but that was not the plot line. The passage just shows some ignorance of basic hospital procedure.
Plato: So, what’s this all got to do with the movies?
Larry. It’s very different in the movies, and here I include streaming series on television, very popular these days. With the Covid-19 pandemic, my wife and I have watched a lot of streaming shows, and I am amazed at the insane inaccuracies and plot holes in these scripts. Stuff you’d never get away with in a novel, at least not if it’s subjected to a critique group or editorial review.
Plato: I’ve seen some of those shows and have myself wondered about the plots. What has bothered you?
Larry: In the Netflix series The Politician there are several glaring plot holes. I’ll give you just two. A high school student tells everyone she is under treatment for cancer, and gets sympathy for this diagnosis. For various reasons her school friends are skeptical. They manage to get a blood specimen from her, which they send out for analysis. The results come back, “no cancer,” and the story takes a new turn. This is nonsense. No such blood test exists. Put that in your prose writing and you’ll get an earful.
Plato: And the other one?
Larry: One of the male characters, a U.S. Senator, is having affairs, while his wife lies in the hospital, where she’s been for three years. In a coma! Let me repeat. She’s been in a coma for three years. One day she suddenly wakes up and, wouldn’t you know it, she looks great. No tubes, no weight loss, hair coiffed, just perfect. She puts on her clothes, goes out to make a speech about her plans. Crazy! If this scene was read in our group, we’d tear it apart.
Plato: Do you have any examples not, well, not medical?
Larry: Yes. The Netflix series Ratched is the fictional back story of Nurse Mildred Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. In that 1975 movie Ratched is portrayed as a cold, heartless tyrant. The Netflix series depicts her bizarre career before Cuckoo’s Nest, and has lots of plot holes. Here’s just one. Ratched is determined to hurt a young man living in a Catholic nursing home. He has PTSD following a horrendous crime he saw her brother commit, and she wants to make sure he cannot testify in court. She somehow manages to take him from the nursing home to a hotel room. There she drugs him, ties him to the bed, and does an icepick lobotomy — through his forehead.
Plato: So she’s not a medical doctor. That’s the plot hole?
Larry: She saw it performed once, but that’s not the big plot hole here. Ratched returns him to the nursing home, but now he’s a vegetable, wheelchair-confined and unable to talk because of the lobotomy. Yet, no one ever notices the hole in his head. The nuns never question Ratched as to what happened while he was away. Nada. It turns out they don’t even know her name, yet she somehow got him out of that nursing home. Totally unrealistic.
Plato: Far-fetched, I admit, but not impossible.
Larry: Right, but if you wrote that scene in a novel, you’d have to explain what the man looked like when Nurse Ratched brought him back to the institution, what the nuns thought when they saw he couldn’t walk or talk, what inquiry they pursued, and so forth. Your critique group is going to demand of the writer, ‘Hey, what about that hole in his head?’ So there’s two holes in this part of Ratched. One in this guy’s head and another one in the plot.
Plato: Is this dichotomy a new phenomenon?
Larry: Not at all. You can google “Plot Holes” and come up with dozens in the movies, going back decades. Much less so in printed fiction, hence the dichotomy is long-standing. And if they appear in a book made into a movie, it’s likely the movie will just be more exaggerated.
Plato: I sense you’re leading up to some example.
Larry: Yes, I do have one in mind, the 1982 movie The Verdict, starring Paul Newman. It was based on a 1980 novel of the same name, by Barry Reed, an attorney.
Plato: I do remember that film. Newman played a down-and-out plaintiff’s lawyer.
Larry: Good memory! His name is Frank Galvin. Galvin’s client is the sister of a young woman whose heart stopped beating during childbirth four years earlier. The wrong anesthetic was given, and she’s now a vegetable, kept alive on a breathing machine. It’s a case of clear cut medical malpractice. The lawsuit is against two doctors and the Catholic-owned hospital in Boston, brought by the patient’s sister. The film is considered one of the top courtroom dramas. Five Academy Award nominations.
Plato: You don’t agree?
Larry: I admit the acting was good, but the way the case is portrayed is a gross exaggeration of the book, which itself messes with reality a little.
Plato: How so?
Larry: Newman’s character, Galvin, is an alcoholic, ambulance-chasing attorney. He has no clients, no prospects. Yet he was once a highly competent trial lawyer, graduated 2nd in his law school class. He gets the malpractice case as a gift from his friend and former teacher, who tells him it’s a slam dunk. Can’t lose. In the novel, Frank hires an elderly Black physician as his expert, but only meets him the day before the trial, without any prior deposition, and without revealing the name to the defense attorneys. That’s totally unrealistic for how the legal process works. Experts must be identified ahead of time, to give opposing counsel a chance to interview or depose them.
Plato: But you said the book is by a lawyer?
Larry: Yes, given that it came out decades ago, I have no idea what went down at the publisher, Simon & Schuster. Reed clearly crafted an unrealistic scenario. The writing is pretty good, so my guess is everyone who reviewed it was ignorant of legal reality, or just didn’t care.
Plato: But the movie is different?
Larry: Yes, the script goes much further into legal unreality. There is no sister in the book. In the movie, Galvin never even meets her until a week before the trial. He does not discuss a generous cash settlement offer with her but instead rejects it out of hand for his own peace of mind. David Mamet, who wrote the script, stretches legal unreality for dramatic effect, and of course, gets away with it.
Plato: You’re saying an alcoholic attorney wouldn’t do those things?
Larry: Frank Galvin is sober when he does all of them. Yet his actions aren’t consistent with reality in the legal profession. If he was truly demented, you might have a plausible explanation. Yet as the movie unfolds we see he’s actually a smart, hard-working attorney, which totally belies all the unreal prep stuff I mentioned. Also, during the trial, the judge attacks Frank and won’t even let him question his own medical witness! In the novel, the judge is definitely biased against Newman but does allow him to finish questioning his expert.
Plato: So here it’s not just plot holes, but simply unrealistic fiction.
Larry: Yes, that’s a good way to put it. Unrealistic fiction, much more blatant in the movie than in the novel. A di-chot-o-my of ver-i…
Plato: …similitude. Yes, I get that.
Larry: Another difference between books and movies is often the scenery. We see the scenery in the movies, of course, but can only read the description in a work of fiction. One can lie, the other better not.
Plato: And I assume you have a good example?
Larry: Yes, from a very popular 1959 movie. I’ll change the script to a prose paragraph, as it might be written in a synopsis for a novel. Now, pretend you’re in my critique group.
Plato: OK, I’m listening.
Larry: Here’s the short paragraph.
“In 1929 Chicago, two men impersonate female musicians and travel with the All Ladies’ band by train to Miami Beach. There they check into a plush resort that has hired the band for its nightclub. The hotel setting is magnificent: wide beach, the ocean, and in the distance the low peaks of the Miami Mountain Range.”
That’s it. What do you think? Any critique?
Plato: Uh, Larry, there are no mountains in Miami.
Larry: Bingo! Go look at Some Like It Hot, with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon. The last half of the movie takes place in Miami Beach, but all those scenes were shot at the Hotel Coronado in San Diego. And it’s all California topography.
Plato: But aren’t movies routinely filmed in places different from the setting? I know for a fact that Key Largo was not filmed in Florida, Casablanca was not filmed in Morocco.
Larry: Yes, of course, but in those films, and many others, it pretty much doesn’t matter. The backdrop of Key Largo is not the Smoky Mountains, and the outdoor scenes of Casablanca are not obviously some other city. The scenery in Some Like It Hot is so clearly not Miami, makes me wonder what the producers were thinking.
Plato: So your point is that the movies get away with this, but if you describe it in a novel, it would be called out?
Larry: Yes. Another streaming series we watched is Away, about the first human mission to Mars.
Plato: I saw the first episode. Very interesting.
Larry: Interesting, but unrealistic, the way people are portrayed on the first Mars mission. But that’s OK, they could also be portrayed that way in a novel. Just don’t write that the spaceship’s commander calls her husband and daughter on earth from a million miles away, and they have free-flowing conversations with zero time delay.
Plato: Yeah, I did notice that. There would be a delay in transmission, wouldn’t there?
Larry: Absolutely. Depending on the distance from earth, from several seconds to several minutes in the early part of their trip. One other thing. These space flics love to show the spaceship traveling through space, with the background soundtrack invariably a low engine roar. But if I wrote in a story, “the only sound in space was the low roar of the ship’s engines,” someone is going to call me out. “No, no, Larry. There’s no sound transmission in space.” And then I would fix it. But in movies, it’s not a problem. You get away with it. This is a common situation, a dichotomy of verisimilitude.
Plato: Why do suppose there is this difference between print fiction and movies?
Larry: For starters, there’s just lower expectations for video than for books. A movie audience really doesn’t have to think about anything. It’s kind of effortless to watch a movie as opposed to reading a book. The producers of Some Like It Hot just assumed the audience wouldn’t notice, or if noticed wouldn’t care, that they were looking at San Diego and not Miami. Viewers of Away may not know or care about time delay in space talk. But readers notice these things, and care about accuracy.
Plato: Are you saying they are two different audiences? Don’t people who read books also watch movies, and vice versa?
Larry: That’s true, of course. It’s just that when we read, I think we’re more focused on the details than when we sit watching a movie. When something doesn’t make sense in a movie, you don’t have time to stop and go back to reread a passage, to see if perhaps you missed something. Yes, I know you can reverse a DVD or even a streamed video, but that’s more cumbersome. In a book, it’s easy to stop, go back, thumb through the pages. In a movie you just keep going, so scriptwriters feel they can get away with unreality. And they do. By the time you question something implausible or impossible, you’re in a new scene. In a book, the reader turns the pages. In a movie, the scriptwriters turn the pages for you.
Plato: But don’t a lot of movies have plots that are based on unreality, like all of the Harry Potter movies, or Lord of the Rings, a lot of what we call fantasy?
Larry: Absolutely, and I’m not talking about fantasy, alternate universes, or movies that make no pretense of making sense, like The Matrix. One of my historical Civil War novels has 1918 German submarines going back to the Civil War via a time machine, to help the South fight the North. This is called a conceit in fiction, and is perfectly acceptable. My comments are about fiction that is supposed to be realistic. A woman in a coma for three years simply isn’t going to be in perfect condition on awakening. If you’re a plaintiff’s attorney, you’re not going to wait until the very last minute to meet with your client or depose your expert witness. If you’re in Miami your backdrop is not the mountains.
Plato: Any other explanation for how things are portrayed so differently, between movies and books?
Larry: Yes. A biggie. Time and money. Movies are expensive to make, involve a lot of people. Actors, actresses, set designers, and so forth. If some aspect of a scene ends up totally unrealistic, even if it’s recognized as a mistake the producers are unlikely to spend big bucks to re-shoot it. For a writer, it’s much easier to fix a plot hole before the book is published. So, yes, time and money favor fixing print mistakes, but not ones made in video.
Plato: Is there a solution?
Larry: Yes, definitely, but it’s personal. I need to start writing scripts! Could be a lot of fun.
Plato: Well, good luck with that, Larry. And thanks for the interview. To our listeners, tune in tomorrow for another fascinating podcast. This is Plato from Radio WLOV, signing off.
