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Hi. Unlike you, I'm Rob Lowe, and I love movies.
The fact is, I'd rather be watching a movie than doing this right now.
But let's pretend I didn't say that and just enjoy each other's company.
Thousands of movies are released every year.
That's a lot of stories,
even though according to screenwriting theory
there are only seven basic plots: overcoming the monster...
and the other six.
It's little wonder that stock characters,
familiar story beats, and convenient plot devices
have crept in over time.
Tonight, we celebrate the clichés that have made cinema what it is today:
struggling for relevance in the aftermath of a pandemic.
Over the next hour, we'll be looking at Tinseltown's habit
of using these handy cinematic tropes in...
Attack of the Hollywood Clichés!
We'll be asking questions like,
"Why do women being chased by large, scary dinosaurs
have to do it in high heels?"
As we build to some of my favorite clichés,
we'll be looking at some of the most dramatic moments in cinema.
Some of the most controversial.
Sister is teaching the mothers how to wash their children.
[Lowe] How other clichés have been raised to a form of high art.
[tires screech]
And of course, how Hollywood deals with sex.
And violence.
And where better to begin than with a familiar beginning,
from the world of romantic comedy, it's the meet cute.
That magical moment in movies when the love begins.
People watch romcoms to get high.
They wanna experience that first sensation of love
so that when they see those two people meet for the very first time,
when that moment, that spark,
that chemistry happens,
it feels so real to them
that they have that sensation in their body.
There's always some funny, contrived reason why you have the two people
who are gonna fall in love meet,
because it has to be interesting.
They can't meet the way regular people meet.
-Lady, keep driving. -[screams] Get out!
Some kind of embarrassing, comedic, unlikely scenario...
that brings the two together.
I live just over the street. I have, um, water and soap.
You can get cleaned up.
[Pugh] If that happened in real life,
you would throw the rest of your juice in their face.
You'd be like, "No, get away from me."
In five minutes, we can have you spick and span
and back on the street again,
in the non-prostitute sense, obviously.
[Lowe] Whenever two people fall in love in a film,
whatever the genre, the clichés of cinematic romance are ever present.
I hate the water, and I hate being wet, and I hate you!
Good!
They don't like each other, are engaged or married to someone else.
Jack, I'm engaged.
I'm marrying Cal.
There has to be a struggle to go through or else it would be boring.
[Lowe] Of course, this being the movies,
male strategies vary from annoying persistence to outright harassment.
Well, how about this for a coincidence?
A lot of films which are shown from the male point of view
feature what you would really call stalking.
You wanna dance with me?
No.
Why not?
Because I don't want to.
-Well, will you go out with me? -What?
-No! -No?
-Hey, pal, she just told you. -Why not?
Like in Twilight, when he climbs up through her window
and says, "I like watching you sleep."
Do you do that a lot?
Just the past couple of months.
Stalking is sexy only applies when it's men stalking women.
When women are persistent or stalking male characters,
they become the villain.
I just wanna be a part of your life.
And this is the way you do it, huh? Showing up at my apartment?
What am I supposed to do?
You won't answer my calls, you change your number.
I'm not gonna be ignored, Dan.
[Lowe] Every story needs a lead character who commands attention,
someone as unique, special, and one-of-a-kind
as the lead in every other movie.
Since all aspects of your protagonists have to be remarkable,
it's not enough for them to just have a job.
Whatever that job is, they gotta job the shit out of it,
especially if their job is the job: the cop's job.
-You think I'm crazy? -Yeah.
[Lowe] In Hollywood,
if you want crimes solved and the bad guys brought to justice,
top of the law-enforcement tree is the maverick cop.
Now, that's a real badge, I'm a real cop, and this is a real fucking gun.
The maverick cop is a badass, he doesn't listen to the chief.
You wanna play some bullshit cowboy cop, go do it in somebody else's precinct.
They are completely dysfunctional.
He's probably an alcoholic, terrible father.
You're my daughter, in my house, and you'll respect me, got that?
-Don't call me a fuck-up. -Why shouldn't I?
Mom calls you one.
They only care about the job.
No bullshit. You wanna kill yourself?
You know why I don't do it? The job.
Destroying everything in their path.
-[gunshots] -[alarms blaring]
[Lowe] Maverick cops keep coming,
but the poster boy for loose cannons of law enforcement remains:
Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry.
[Harry] You've got to ask yourself one question:
-"Do I feel lucky?" -[alarm blaring]
Well, do you, punk?
[Nicholson] Dirty Harry is a really toxic example of this cliché.
That film tries so hard
to put us on the side of this beaten-down cop
who really just wants to let go and shoot a bunch of people.
-[clicks] -[man gasps]
He exists by his own rules
and he does what he has to do to get criminals.
It's painted that the legal system is either incredibly stupid
or run by bleeding heart liberals.
What I'm saying is that man had rights.
Well, I'm all broken up about that man's rights.
[Lowe] Maverick law dictates that there's only two things
these cops care about, and they're both shiny.
[chief] Your badge and gun, officer.
[Ross] It's a key moment in films where the maverick cop
hands in their gun and badge, like,
"You are no longer someone who should be in this position."
We know, the audience knows, he's the only one who should have it.
You're making me do this. Give me your badge.
Just take a couple...
[Lowe] In recent times,
Hollywood has moved away from making maverick cop movies,
reflecting the disenchantment with police officers
who take the law into their own hands.
We are led to believe that they're gonna do the right thing
morally and ethically.
The reality is, that doesn't appear to be the case
with a lot of police officers.
It is something that should be rethought by filmmakers,
TV producers, and it is being rethought.
[Lowe] But the maverick cop hasn't taken an early retirement.
On TV, there's room for clichés
to be worked into three-dimensional characters.
Kate Winslet's Mare of Easttown
has a complex internal life, but don't worry,
she's still a cop who drinks hard,
bends the rules, gets suspended...
Gun and badge.
...but still gets her man.
-[gunshots] -[grunting]
Hollywood loves a winner,
but not every character in your story can be a hero,
unless it's set in the Marvel Universe, which only 96% of movies are.
Some characters are so destined to lose
from the moment they walk on screen,
that they might as well turn up wearing a coffin and get it over with.
You're a secondary character in a film.
Thanks, John.
[Lowe] You've got a dangerous job.
You're planning on calling it a day.
Tomorrow I'd like you to--
-I'm resigning tomorrow, Frank. -What?
[Lowe] Big mistake.
Al!
[dramatic sting plays]
[Schamus] Dead man walking,
American cinema loves to cue
people who are going to die by making sure we know this is their last job.
They're about to retire, right?
I got three more days, I wanna make the most of it.
Maybe there's a retirement party planned for you later.
How about a speech?
[King] And you've just got one more shift to do.
[gunshot]
[Lowe] And there are other classic ways
to guarantee death is just around the corner.
One way, you'll hear a character talk about his family,
about his aspirations...
And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits.
If they start reflecting on what they gonna do next... dead.
Often in war films as well, it will be the G.I. or whatever,
gets out a photo of his girlfriend...
and it's probably been in his pocket for a while. Big mistake.
-Please. Please. -[dramatic music playing]
-[bells tolling] -[Lowe] So once you're dead onscreen,
your funeral will be attended by loved ones
and a solitary figure who, for some reason,
stands and stares from a long way away.
It also allows the director to get the wide shot of the ceremony.
But The Fast and the Furious takes it to another level.
While Paul Walker watches a funeral from a distance,
Vin Diesel is watching Paul Walker watch a funeral from a distance,
from a distance.
Of course, once the funeral is over,
the grave site is the perfect setting
to show a character's fragile emotional state.
-[dramatic music playing] -I love you.
[Forrest] Hey, Bubba. It's me, Forrest Gump.
[Lowe] And also a handy way of explaining where we are in the plot.
I remember everything you said and I got it all figured out.
[Lowe] Ed Harris does both.
And just in case you're not sure who he's talking to...
There's something I've gotta do, Barb.
...the filmmakers carved it on the headstone for you.
"His wife."
But it's not always just talking going on in the graveyard.
Looks like there's one extra stiff in the cemetery this morning.
One of the things I love most about cinema
is the way it transports you from your everyday life
into an entirely fictional fantasy land like Narnia, or France.
-[French folk music playing] -The French have a word for clichés,
but in cinema, one of the most clichéd cities is Paris.
But how can we tell we're in Paris?
Because the director makes sure
we can see the Eiffel Tower through the bedroom window.
The loft window.
The train window.
From the balcony.
Through a clock.
Unfortunately,
that means the Eiffel Tower is on the top of every invaders' to-destroy list.
Actors love working with props
because like all good co-stars, they never hog the scenes.
And they're usually paid less.
An everyday seeming prop
can make even the most godlike figure seem like a regular Joe.
Admit it, this grocery-bag baguette combo I'm holding
has made me seem 26% more relatable.
I haven't bought or eaten bread in over ten years.
The bag is only a cover
to stop me from inadvertently absorbing the carbs through my skin.
All movie stars insist on it.
Often, lead actors have to come across as regular Joes
who do their own shopping,
and a highly visible baguette sticking out of the bag is parfait pour la job.
It can also be ideal for hiding behind.
The intensity of the performance
is matched only by the quantity of the bread.
Still warm. It's the best bread I ever tasted.
[Lowe] What a professional.
One expressive prop that actors love is the apple,
despite it having a shocking 19 grams of sugar.
Tell me when you got enough so I can spit this shit out.
Eating in a scene definitely is the cocky move.
It's kind of like the ultimate "I'm here and I don't care."
[Lowe] Defending the Starship Enterprise.
Killing off an enemy army.
Or snacking between meals while meeting a superior officer.
Lieutenant Commander Galloway.
[Lowe] An apple is the clichéd way of saying,
"I'm too cool for school,"
while lowering cholesterol and promoting gut health.
The way your movie is cast
depends on what kind of story you're telling.
Some stories require a director to thoughtfully curate
an ensemble of subtly different personality types,
and some movies just need a big guy who kills people.
[gunshots]
Cinema likes to tell us that the individual
can take on the system,
and one way it tells us this is possible is via the one-man army.
You can see this right back in the sort of Robin Hood,
Errol Flynn films.
You can see it going right through the Western genre.
You see it, arguably, in James Bond.
It changed in the '80s
when your bodybuilders came into fashion. Arnold Schwarzenegger, most famously,
Stallone, they all of a sudden didn't really look like blokes we knew.
They looked superhuman.
When you get Stallone behind that weapon of mass destruction.
Twenty men being blown to smithereens.
Totally satisfying experience in carnage and destruction,
with an absolute disregard for human beings,
um, which you want in those movies.
I think the invincibility and the indomitability
of the '80s action movie macho hero
became the key for them becoming franchises.
And then Die Hard came in,
a film that starts out relatively realistically.
Bruce Willis seems like an ordinary bloke.
Drop it, dickhead. It's the police.
Hang on, John!
[Newman] But then, by the time of part five,
basically, he could take Superman down in part five.
The skills are being physically very capable,
more than normal human beings.
They tend to be very much the strong, silent type.
The one place where the one-man army will speak up
is immediately after or just before killing somebody.
We're married.
[O'Hara] The master of the form is Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Consider that a divorce.
Sure, your main character can run around firing guns
and bazookas at every school bus like the hero they are,
but if they wanna earn our respect,
there comes a time when they'll have to throw down those firearms
and pick up their fists...
with both hands.
[Newman] Throughout the silent era,
characters on screen had to express themselves physically
because people got bored with the intertitle.
They laughed at the flowery prose.
So, what you get was lengthy fight scenes.
Officially, the first staged fist-fight for film
was the big fight on top of and inside a train
in The Great Train Robbery.
[Lowe] Fast forward 100 years or so,
and we still have guys beating up on each other
on moving trains, just in slightly more expensive suits.
Something that I've loved seeing in the last ten years
is fight scenes getting more gritty and gross to watch.
[man grunts]
The other kind of fantastic, I think, cliché,
that makes it more manageable for us as an audience
is when all of the attackers come out one by one.
[grunting]
In Oldboy, in the amazing scene in the corridor,
you're placing your attention on one kill at a time.
It's kind of very related to video games, I think,
where this idea that you might have all the skills
and you're punching through, but it just never ends.
[Lowe] The master of these "take a ticket and wait till you're called" fights
is the legendary Jackie Chan.
So Jackie Chan was my favorite.
The reason he was so popular is he went against cliché
and became the hero who gets beat up the whole movie.
It's absurd what he's doing,
and it's without wires, and it's death-defying.
I feel like he's the person
that has had the most influence. And it's all in camera.
[Lowe] And Jackie Chan's influence can be seen in movies ever since.
Now you have fist fights that, um, defy physiology,
physiognomy.
If you hit somebody 50 times and they get back up again,
what is at stake?
What is finally gonna kill them?
[Lowe] The evolution of big-screen punch-ups
has seen the move more and more from the balletic to the ballistic.
[Pugh] It's that hand-to-hand combat
where they're smacking each other's hands so fast,
that if you want to see what's going on, you have to slow it down.
[Newman] And then later on, the recent rise of movies like The Raid...
which are just nonstop fighting.
You can actually have a story that is just people fighting.
[Lowe] From one type of intense physical action to another...
Wait, Tarzan!
[screams]
[Lowe] Sexy times and risqué nudity
have been a Hollywood mainstay since,
well, pretty much forever.
In early cinema, while studios pushed the boundaries
of taste and decency,
there was a growing pressure to clean up their act
and not present women as being so free and promiscuous.
Take off your clothes, get in here, and tell me all about it.
In the early 1930s, you had things like Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face,
who slept her way through the layers of this giant New York bank.
-Have you had any experience? -Plenty.
You had these Mae West characters
who were living it large, drinking, smoking, whatever.
When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better.
[Lowe] After a series of scandals in the early '20s,
the press declared Hollywood morally bankrupt,
and a new code of conduct, written by a priest,
was championed by Republican stick-in-the-mud Will Hays.
[man] Reputable producers signed up Will Hays
to clean up the picture business...
That prohibited any sexual depravity from being shown on screen.
The vulgar, the cheap, and the tawdry is out.
[Lowe] By the '30s, the Hays Code imposed strict rules
dictating what movies could and couldn't show, mainly couldn't.
[Richard] One of the actor's legs had to be on the floor.
How are you supposed to fuck people with one leg on the floor, I don't know.
[Lowe] But filmmakers soon found ways to bend the rules,
and the cinematic cliché of sexual illusion became de rigueur.
How do you suggest the act of sex without actually showing it?
Is it raining outside?
There's a storm outside, so there must be a storm in your heart
and possibly other regions too.
[Jonathan] You would go from them in a sleeper cabin on a train
to the train entering the tunnel.
The first few times that happens, of course it's joyful,
because those who know, know,
and those who don't aren't offended or troubled by it.
[Helen] In the 1960s,
the big studios had lost their grip on all of the cinema chains.
Independent cinemas had begun to sprout up
and they were bringing in exciting new films from Europe,
often which had exciting and forbidden things like boobs.
[in Swedish] I'll never forget you, darling Kerstin.
As more European films were visible to the American audience,
Hollywood realized,
"If we're gonna compete, we have to get rid of the Hays Code."
[Lowe] The solution was an age-based film rating system,
which put sex back on screen,
much to the dismay of people aroused by shots of trains entering tunnels.
Sex in films is never really very convincing,
but at the same time, it has its own stock set of clichés.
[Pugh] The music will be building,
bodies will look amazing at all angles.
Bras rarely ever fall off, and you'll both finish at the same time.
It's so passionate.
[Lowe] Today, on-screen sex may only be a right click away,
but there's still one shot Hollywood movies don't show,
whatever the money.
It's that intensity, the build of music, the build of passion.
We all know what's gonna happen, we don't need to see the next bit.
[Lowe] So movies are once again forced to fall back on suggestion.
A hand gripping the sheets, a hand on a steamy window.
Or even fire being blown out of the end of a spaceship.
A happy ending...
is always guaranteed.
Who wrote this?
Need a character to express surprise? Give them a drink.
What's a hard-on, Daddy?
It's almost hard to find a comedy that doesn't have some variation
of the spit take in it.
They used to call me anal girl.
A spit take is something that doesn't happen in real life,
but you're gonna buy it just because it's so fun to watch.
[Lowe] The spit take tells the audience they've just seen something shocking...
Jeez, you smoke too?
...and is guaranteed to give any scene an added spray of slapstick.
-What's this? -Welcome. Oh!
[groans]
-Ma'am. -Whale what?
Welcome.
[yells]
Sorry, did I scare you?
I didn't mean to. I'm merely introducing our next cliché:
The jump scare, which is--
[yells]
[Schamus] Val Lewton was a filmmaker who ran a low-budget unit
at RKO Pictures,
and he helped raise a whole generation of filmmakers
who knew how to use mood to really get to you.
In Cat People, our heroine is being tracked,
creating a sense of terror.
And of course the final hiss arrives.
-[engine rumbling] -[hissing]
Yet it's revealed that it's actually a bus' brakes
as it pulls up, and the sequence ends that way.
[Lowe] This was the first time anyone had used a false scare in cinema,
and the technique became known as the "Lewton Bus."
Now the jump scare comes in many forms:
Things trying to get through closed windows.
People throwing themselves against fencing when you're having a hug.
And full-length coats.
[gasps]
Don't worry, it's not real leather.
Given that the first false scare ever
was from a bus in a film called Cat People,
it's ironic that the filmmakers' most clichéd one today is...
-[screeches] -[screams]
...the household cat.
-[cat screeches] -[gasps, then groans]
Cats are evil, and the cliché about them being scary
is one of those clichés that's completely based in fact.
[Nicholson] Cats are just lurking around the house hiding in closets.
[screams]
So they can scare a person.
[Lowe] And their malevolence isn't even limited to planet Earth.
[gasps]
Cats are great for this,
because they are beings who exist with us in our domestic spaces
but who couldn't give a shit whether we live or die.
[yelling]
[Lowe] If you happen to live in a pet-free environment,
there's always an option to make people jump with a mirror.
[shower running]
A mirror scare is one of the greatest clichés in all of movies.
[dramatic sting plays]
They always work,
because the idea that you're alone and you shut the medicine cabinet,
and then suddenly there's something behind you is terrifying.
[Ross] In American Werewolf in London...
[screams]
...it's an amazing moment. It's great fun, though,
that they can take something mundane and give it that jolt, you know.
You're not real.
Every time we see a mirror,
or see somebody in a bathroom, we're worried.
We are our most vulnerable in the bathroom.
It's a very private place. I think that that's easy to exploit.
[gasps]
You can also do fake-outs with that.
You can put somebody into a bathroom
and you can build tension.
You don't have to have anything happen.
[man screams]
[Lowe] When you do hear someone scream in a movie,
chances are it could be our next cliché.
But you probably didn't even realize it.
[screams]
The Wilhelm scream is a scream that was recorded originally in 1951.
The guy's walking through the Everglades, then the alligator grabs his leg
and he goes: [mimics scream]
[screams]
Fast forward a couple of years later,
and some sound editor is looking for a scream
because poor Private Wilhelm is struck by an arrow.
[sergeant] Wilhelm!
Yeah, I'll just fill my pipe!
[screams]
Out comes-- Or let's say, overlaid on top of him
is the Wilhelm scream.
[Lowe] Wilhelm's scream began to show up in Hollywood
whenever a character was shot, pushed, or obliterated by large plastic ants.
[man screams]
But when it was heard in a galaxy far, far away,
it became an insider joke.
[screams]
It pops up in Star Wars,
then George Lucas, Steven Spielberg,
and everybody gets in on it.
[screams]
It's an industry joke. Uh, Tarantino uses it...
[screams]
He's not using that by accident.
That's him absolutely tapping into the cliché of the sound.
[man screams]
There's something about the pitch of it,
and it's strangely kind of reassuring
that even in scenes of mayhem, you will hear the Wilhelm scream.
[screams]
It's such a ridiculous in-joke now.
We need a new scream, in my opinion.
Hollywood likes to think of itself as a paragon of equality,
but apparently if you look closely,
using a microscope, which was invented by a man,
there are occasional minor differences in the way men and women are depicted.
[roars]
The Smurfette principle refers to the lone woman
on a testosterone-infused adventure
who ensures the filmmakers tick that diversity box.
[Smurf] Hi, Smurfette!
[Lowe] The term originates from the iconic Smurf world,
where Smurfette is the only lady in a land full of Smurf dudes.
[Smurfs whooping and whistling]
This is a trope you'll see in everything, from kids' cartoons...
What are you doing? Get down.
I'll teach that boy a lesson.
...to The Avengers...
I'm always picking up after you boys.
...to any kind of action film.
["Cherry Bomb" playing]
It is the most cynical construct in a movie
where they'll stick a woman in there to have the guys ogle her.
What?
Or they'll stick in a woman to look at the guys askance
and tell them how immature they are.
I don't understand the physics of how my toes hurt.
[laughing]
Children. I work with children.
[Lowe] Whether you're a token female, or leading lady,
chances are you'll find yourself running to or from danger
in high heels.
[roars]
[Stock] You've automatically given a handicap to the women.
They can't run in these heels, but they don't discard them.
Even in recent films,
they're still staggering around in the middle of the road.
The idea of women running in heels
goes back to the issue of Hollywood glamorizing women
to the point which is completely impractical.
[Lowe] With fast editing and a leather outfit from a fetish store,
your heroine can become even more cartoonishly depicted.
Where I do take issue is when a character decides
what I need if I'm gonna fight a bunch of people is high heels.
Like Catwoman. You cannot fight in those. You'll break an ankle.
It takes a female character who's a badass action hero,
and it makes her phony.
Another pet peeve. Sex scenes with bras and fighting with heels.
No, I'm not doing it. Not doing it.
[Lowe] Time for another of Tinseltown's stock female character clichés:
the manic pixie dream girl.
Blah, blah, blah, blah!
I make a noise or I do something no one has done before
and then I can feel unique again, even for a second.
She is always extremely pretty, she's always "quirky"...
I gotta go bury this hamster before the dogs eat him. Wanna help?
-Having a weird pet. -[yells] Rat!
[Ellen] That's a classic manic pixie dream girl trait.
This is Rodolfo, he's a ferret.
I am probably best known for coining the phrase manic pixie dream girl,
and I coined that phrase in an article that I wrote about a movie
called Elizabethtown.
And in Elizabethtown, there is an unusually pure example
played by Kirsten Dunst.
And she is manic in the sense that she talks and talk and talks.
I'm so happy we're here having this conversation
at 3:00 or whatever time it is.
It's such a great time. Everyone's sleeping but us.
It's nice to have a conversation with you and that you're really listening.
Then dream girl, this idea that it's a male fantasy
that we can be depressed, we can have nothing going,
and this woman will find us
and she will set about giving our life meaning.
I'm not used to girls like you.
That's because I'm one of a kind.
She shows him how to have fun
and he offers her absolutely nothing in return.
It's a very, very potent fantasy for men that there's one woman out there,
one magical woman out there that will save you.
Often around two thirds of the way into a movie, the writer realizes
there's still a lot of story to tell and not enough time.
But it's okay. Just like in Beverly Hills,
you can simply cut out any flab you don't like using scissors.
Enter montage mode.
Well, when we first started talking about montages,
it would be about Eisenstein, and the Battleship Potemkin,
and just ways of cutting together images from different angles...
[dramatic music playing]
...that taught us that a movie was not something
you shoot straight ahead like you would if you were sitting at a play.
Battleship Potemkin really introduced audiences
to editing for the first time, and what you can do with editing.
[Lowe] This technique caught on,
and quickly grasping the new cinematic language,
filmmakers began montaging their brains out.
[narrator] Apartment buildings, factories, forests, ocean liners...
They're shorthand, really, montages.
Getting across quite a lot of story in a short space of time.
Groovy.
[Lowe] With the arrival of one famous sequence in the '70s,
the montage began punching above its weight.
The training sequences in Rocky are the gold standard of training sequences.
I don't think anyone has ever beaten a training sequence,
a hard-at-work sequence, than Rocky.
[Lowe] By Rocky IV, 31.9% of its running time was montage.
Almost a third of the film.
The rest was mainly him hitting someone.
[Bogutskaya] The fact that movies can make us really feel
the work that goes into making something seem very beautiful and very effortless,
is, I think, an underappreciated cliché.
-[man] ♪ We're gonna need a montage ♪ -[chorus] ♪ Montage! ♪
The greatest of all montages is in, of course, the South Park guys'
Team America: World Police.
♪ You need a montage ♪
[Edelstein] What's brilliant about that
is that not only is it sending up the cliché of the montage,
but at that point in the story, we do need a montage.
[sirens wailing]
[Lowe] Little in the movies gets the pulse racing
quite like a car following another car really fast,
but not quite fast enough to catch up.
Ever since the white-hot adrenaline rush of 1903's Runaway Match,
action films have turned again and again to the car chase.
In the hands of a skillful director and skillful stunt drivers,
and in the right script, it can be the defining moment in the film.
[engine revving]
You know, Bullitt, of course, it is, it's the defining moment of that film.
[Lowe] Over the years, finding new ways to pump gas on the car chase
has been a challenge for all movie makers.
The French Connection is a car chasing an above-ground subway train,
and every squeal, every can that gets hit,
every woman pushing a baby carriage...
it makes your stomach drop at the potential for catastrophe.
[Lowe] But what's really under the hood of a classic car chase?
The first thing I think of when I think of car chases
is, like, shot of the handbrake...
car skidding around the corner.
That always has to be there.
There are carts and all types of debris just flying everywhere.
A place where a car shouldn't be, put the car there.
Going down stairs, or you find something to...
[John] Car chases are really hard to write
because you're describing looking this way,
turning, things smashing, and you're looking for, like,
what's slightly new you can do about it.
Go has, I think, actually a really good car-chase sequence in it.
His car is stuck in an alley in a really interesting way.
[Lowe] Car chases have such wide appeal that whole franchises are based on them.
The Fast and the Furious started out in the world of illegal racing,
but its car chases have been genetically modified
into some of the most ambitious sequences of all time.
The car chase is no longer people on a road going very fast.
It has to be dropping out of a plane.
[dramatic music playing]
Cars jumping out of giant buildings.
Computer generated imagery nowadays means that miracles are cheap.
The physics have completely disappeared.
So now Vin Diesel can jump from one car
and save his girlfriend mid-air and survive.
You know that there are no physical consequences
to what you're seeing, so nothing seems at stake anymore.
[Lowe] But other recent films haven't gone for CGI techniques,
producing nerve-jangling sequences the old-fashioned way.
[Daniel] Baby Driver's subverting the cliché of car chases.
Often the music is subservient to the imagery,
the imagery is driving what you're writing to,
in that they're both literally, like, together.
[energetic rock music playing over earbuds]
With Baby Driver, it felt like a dance the way that they move the car
and the way they photographed it, it was beautiful.
The synchronization between the movement of the car chase
and the songs, it felt more like a musical than it felt like a car chase.
[Lowe] Hollywood does not have a great track record
when it comes to intelligent portrayals of race.
Something that I am perhaps the first cisgendered white man
brave enough to acknowledge in public.
Call me a trailblazer, heck, call me a savior if you must.
It's not for me to say, more for you to think.
Early representations of the white savior may have been well meant...
Miss Jean Louise, stand up.
[Lowe] But from today's perspective...
Your father's passing.
...can be seen as the cinematic Band-Aid for white guilt.
The white savior is a narrative where a white person comes along
and saves a Black person from their struggle or suffering.
What makes you think colored people need your help?
-Why do you care? -Minny.
Maybe you just wanna get Aibileen in trouble.
The Black characters are tools for the white people to become better
or, like, more fully show their humanity.
If you go back to, you know, The Nun's Story with Audrey Hepburn,
she is literally standing there as this white nun
telling Black women how to wash their children.
Sister is teaching the mothers how to wash their children.
That was probably the most egregious examples of this.
[Lowe] The white savior has appeared in many guises since then,
even as recently as this Oscar winning tale
of a white man saving a world-class jazz pianist.
Gentleman says that I'm not permitted to dine here.
No, you don't understand. He's playing tonight. He's the main event.
I'm sorry, but it is the policy of the restaurant.
[Jones] Green Book won Best Picture in the same year
to add insult to injury that Black Panther was out and BlacKkKlansman were out.
So if you're interested in stories about Black people,
then there they are right there.
[Lowe] The yin to the white savior yang can be seen in Disney's 1946 movie
Song of the South, depicting life on a plantation
just after the abolition of slavery.
Its central character, Uncle Remus, has become synonymous
with our next cliché,
the magical negro.
The Uncle Remus character is there to sort of help this young white boy,
who lives on the plantation, and he tells him these stories.
--without a song jumping right out of it.
♪ Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay... ♪
[Jones] This is another old trope of the "happy sambo."
These terms are racist and I'm using them in inverted commas.
[man] Hollywood turns out for the 20th annual presentation of awards.
The guy that played Uncle Remus in the Disney version,
James Baskett, became the first Black man to ever win an Oscar,
although it was not a proper Oscar, it was like an honorary Oscar
because they didn't feel that he was competitive enough
to be in the Best Actor or the Best Supporting Actor categories.
[Lowe] The term was popularized by the director Spike Lee,
who identified that this offensive cliché usually came with mystical powers.
You often don't know where this character came from,
why they're there, they just kind of exist to offer guidance or wisdom.
Don't worry about the vase.
What vase?
That vase.
I find the magical negro trope very unrealistic,
because I personally don't feel like helping white people
with their problems on a day-to-day basis.
[Lowe] The John Coffey character in The Green Mile
is a simple uneducated man
wrongly convicted for the murder of two white children.
On death row, he puts the time that he has left on earth
to the best possible use: reassuring white folk.
Hello, boss.
[Jones] It's set in a prison,
and then it's got the white guard being forgiven
for executing a Black man for a crime he didn't commit
by the Black man,
which is just such obvious kind of reassuring,
soothing fantasy for white guilt that I find it impossible to watch.
[Lowe] The magical negro cliché was even taken to its ultimately divine conclusion
with Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty.
I'm God.
Morgan Freeman plays a magical negro exceptionally well.
He was a magical God negro, like he is the God of magical Negros.
Man, Morgan Freeman has redefined the magical negro, I think.
[Lowe] And in The Legend of Bagger Vance,
the magical negro perhaps achieves his highest purpose:
improving a white guy's handicap.
I could've killed you out there.
Oh, no, sir, see, I set myself directly in front of you.
Judging by how you was hitting them balls, that's where I'd be out of harm's way.
[Aisha] One of the things that's just so offensive about it,
that movie's set in the '30s
when lots of Black people were getting lynched,
uh, the KKK was everywhere,
and yet this character played by Will Smith
is just concerned with Matt Damon
getting his swing perfected on the golf course.
It's just you, that ball, that flag...
Actors gotta get a check just like everybody else.
I've done jobs I don't wanna do.
I don't think Will Smith is at home re-watching The Legend of Bagger Vance.
Some white person somewhere in, like, Ohio is re-watching it,
so I hope they're enjoying it.
[Lowe] Why bother dreaming up a convoluted plot line
when a cliché guaranteed to drive any revenge narrative can simply be...
You killed my father.
[Lowe] Whether it's a classic Western...
You killed my father!
...or even an arachnid-based blockbuster.
You killed my father.
[Lowe] John Wick, on the other hand,
doesn't quite need as much incentive for his killing sprees.
[in Russian]
Animals in movies often seem to sense things
their human stars they're sharing the screen with don't.
Could it be they're somehow more intelligent than we are?
No, half those idiots still shit while they walk.
But they do have an almost supernatural nose for danger.
God's creatures:
The Geiger counter of the supernatural.
There's something wrong.
[Lowe] If something spooky's going on, they'll be the first to let you know.
Horses, tap once for the dead,
three times for the undead.
[neighing]
See? He knows.
[Lowe] Worried about your son being the prince of darkness?
Simply cast a pack of Beelzebub-sniffing baboons.
-[howling] -[screaming]
But in Hollywood, evil's worst enemy is man's best friend.
The role of the dog is to warn you.
The role of the dog is to say there's something not quite right here.
-[whining, barking] -What's the matter, E Buzz?
[Lowe] From unseen ghosts...
What are you doing?
...to wannabe vampires.
And it's not just the supernatural.
A sensitive pooch can also sniff out earthly evil.
[barking]
Ted Bundy, you've been busted.
[growling]
Of all the things it's dangerous to be in movies--
Henchmen, stormtrooper, a cop two days from retirement.
--right up near the top of the list must be gay or lesbian.
You know, Hollywood gets a rap for making its gay characters expendable.
Listen to me!
[Lowe] One of Hollywood's earliest exploitations
of gay and lesbian relationships...
I have loved you the way they said.
...was The Children's Hour, an unsympathetic account
of two teachers, Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine,
who are accused of a lesbian affair,
which leads to one of them committing suicide.
But while Hollywood may try to highlight the issues of LGBTQ characters,
it does kind of seem to kill them in the process.
At times when it's touching on the actual misery
or torture of gay people, I think it's actually okay as a cliché.
So for instance, in Brokeback Mountain,
it's not a love story, it's about persecution
over many, many years.
And so when that death finally occurs,
it's actually logically dictated by the film.
[Lureen] He was only 39 years old.
Well, award season does really love a biopic about a dead gay person.
They love a film where someone dies tragically.
Yeah, I can attest to that because I played a gay character
in Can You Ever Forgive Me?
And the character I played, Jack Hock, did die of AIDS.
You did fuck your way through Manhattan. I mean...
I'd like that on my tombstone.
So yes, that is obviously true.
[Lowe] In fact, around 40% of LGBTQ characters nominated for an Oscar
don't make it to the end credits.
A great way to put a character in peril is to rely on the tech and the tech fails.
In Mission Impossible, when he's climbing that building,
you're like, "Cool."
But then you think,
now you're on the outside, and that tech fails...
And so now you immediately have drama.
[Lowe] Who hasn't scaled a building and forgotten to bring a glove charger?
Though most big tech fails are more down-to-earth.
[engine grinding]
We've all gotten into a car and turned that thing and it didn't start.
[grinding continues]
A few years ago, everybody got a cell phone.
This is my last communication-- Oh, the battery died.
[cell phone battery beeping]
The tech has to fail for the story to be engaging and for us to be like,
"What will they do next?"
[Lowe] Whether it be cutting-edge climbing technology,
a car, or a cell phone, the tech fail always signals danger.
[screams]
Angry and seated at a desk? Then do the angry desk sweep.
Shit!
[Lowe] Has a maverick cop foiled your master plan for making billions?
Are you a world renowned neurosurgeon with busted hands?
Or a high-flying military lawyer up against a five-star general?
Thank you for playing "Should we or should we not
follow the advice of the galactically stupid!"
[Lowe] But what the hell, kick a chair while you're at it.
Maverick cop Jake Gyllenhaal has a real challenge with this desk.
His stuff just doesn't go anywhere.
No wonder the keyboard gets a beating.
Every hero needs a villain to go up against.
It's taken us a while to get around to him,
but he's been expecting you, Mr. Bond.
If your hero is good-looking,
this means the clichéd bad guy has to be the polar opposite,
and the filmmakers usually make it easy for us to spot who they are.
Allow me to introduce myself.
I am Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
We make them other than us. We make them ugly, disfigured.
Some scar to say that they're evil, even if they're a lion.
Murderer.
You're telling a story, you're telling the audience
that your character has been involved in nefarious activity
and probably physical violence in the past.
--and fulfill your destiny.
The disfigured villain goes way back.
Back to silent film. You have, obviously, Lon Chaney
in Phantom of the Opera,
with the hairpins stretching his nostrils out.
The problem with that sort of characterization is the fact that then,
in real life, it translates to people
who have those physical disfigurements
being seen by other people as dangerous, as scary,
as someone to shun.
Certainly that equating of disfigurement in some way turning you into a psychopath
is incredibly insulting.
A lot of villains are more cultured than the hero.
You know, you'll have villains who talk about their love of Beethoven.
You don't like Beethoven.
[Mark] Loving the finer things in life...
You don't know what you're missing.
...gives a sense that there is another side,
another side to them, which enhances the fact that they're, you know, evil.
I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
They're often British.
That tends to be a real subcategory of villains.
In Hollywood, they thought that an English accent
was a shorthand for sophistication.
Do you intend to cooperate with us? I'd like a simple yes or no.
If your baddie had an English accent, then the hero was dealing with something
that wasn't just plain brutish.
There was something else behind it.
Somehow casting an English actor, because we're cheap,
and you can say the dialogue,
and you can say gibberish dialogue with great conviction.
History, tradition, culture, are not concepts.
These are trophies I keep in my den as paperweights!
The monologue is a cliché because it's the stuff of drama.
Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design.
It's the writer allowing the audience to understand where this character comes from
and why they're doing what they're doing.
I had a villain's monologue in the final sequence of Logan.
I'm giving this verse about why I've done what I've done
and killed his family, all this.
I realized we needn't stop perfecting what we eat and drink.
We use those products to perfect ourselves.
And halfway through my monologue...
he kills me, deservedly.
There comes a time when every movie simply has to stop happening.
And that time is known as the end.
It's when all the narrative plates you've been spinning
have to suddenly weave together in a better metaphor than this.
It's time for the movie's climactic endgame,
and there are only so many forms that can take.
The shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho
with Janet Leigh is seen by many to be the inspiration for our next cliché.
And for locks on bathroom doors.
Hitchcock popularized this notion that it would be women going through
these horrific circumstances, and he set up this expectation
that women would play a central role in thrillers.
[Lowe] Eighteen years later, Janet Leigh's daughter,
Jamie Lee Curtis, played a role
which made her an icon of the cliché now known as the final girl.
The monster versus the final girl, Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween,
symbolically stands as the first.
She is the blueprint, the prototype.
The final girl is the one girl who doesn't have sex,
who's more innocent than her friends.
You must have a small fortune stashed from babysitting so much.
Guys think I'm too smart.
Because she's not having sex,
she's somehow miraculously more observant than all of her friends
and senses something wrong first.
If you want a really good final-girl movie,
you need to take a group of friends...
If you listen to the old timers in town, they'll tell you he's still out there.
They've all gone off on a weekend party somewhere.
You need to give them a spurious reason to go off
in different directions, and get up to any kind of mischief.
[suspenseful music playing]
That's another cliché, another rule: If you do the dirty deed,
you're gonna die.
One by one they are dispatched.
[cackling]
There's always a lull in these movies
where everyone thinks the killer might be dead.
Then it all comes crashing down and she has to prove herself again.
But she survives and she becomes the audience surrogate.
[woman screaming]
I think slasher films and all their clichés
would be completely dead right now if there hadn't existed Scream.
[Lowe] Scream turned the cliché on its blood-splattered head
by dispatching assumed final girl Drew Barrymore in its opening moments.
I think the Scream franchise really addressed the horror fans
and their knowledge of the clichés, and sort of turned it on its head.
What's the point? They're all the same.
Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl
who's running up the stairs when she should be going out the door.
It's insulting.
[Lowe] But the final girl has appropriately survived.
Today, she's better prepared.
Fuck your family.
[Pugh] We're now giving her power towards the end,
and we're making people scared of her towards the end.
Eat it, bitch!
She is sometimes more deadly than the people
that she's actually kind of fighting to survive.
And technically, has a much bigger body count
than any of the would-be "killers" in the movie.
I think it's kind of evolved as a cliché now
into almost a kind of a comfort-food finale.
Fuck.
[Lowe] Next up: that explosive movie cliché, the ticking time bomb.
[Hargrave] There's a bomb, and there's a ticking clock.
If the hero doesn't act, large amounts of people die.
So inherently dramatic.
-How much time left? -Twenty seconds!
[Edelstein] Doesn't matter what movie, when you watch the numbers click down,
your heart is in your mouth.
[Lowe] In its classic form, this cliché always comes down to the wire.
You think?
Cut the red or the blue, the red or the blue?
[suspenseful music playing]
It's one of the great non-action climaxes ever.
They look sexier now.
Often it's someone trying to hack in and stop the countdown.
[automated voice] Cerberus has been deactivated.
If it's your hero defusing the time bomb, you know he or she is gonna do it.
The fun thing for us is going,
"How close to one are they gonna take it, really?"
And it goes to one so many times.
[Lowe] The must-have at the end of a romance is the lover's mad dash
where one of the pair has a frenzied race against time and geography
to declare undying love to their partner.
Often, that will involve a last-minute lover's dash to the airport,
or to stop a wedding happening.
The Graduate's a classic one of that.
Oh, Jesus, God, no.
[Lowe] Having chased and convinced their other half of their eternal love,
their reward is a passionate kiss, usually in bad weather conditions.
[King] It's when you're so wrapped up in kissing the person you love
that you're not even aware of the terrible weather.
And I think that's what happened in Four Weddings and a Funeral,
was these two people having all these obstacles
not to be together, and finally, in the rain...
Is it still raining? I hadn't noticed.
Greta Gerwig, the director, did that for the end of Little Women.
She wanted that end-of-the-movie shot, and I remember chatting to her about this
and she was like, "I want it, I want it, I grew up watching it, and I want it."
If things have gone right, at the end, the audience is on the edge of their seat
wondering whether the good guy will win,
while knowing, with every fiber in their being, that he will.
Hey, why don't you pick on someone your own size?
The morality tale demands that the hero kills the villain.
The better the death,
the more satisfying the vanquishing of the villain is.
Someone falling from a great height has been a classic way
to finish your story.
Brilliantly done in Die Hard, of course,
and it gives them a moment or two to know that they're beaten.
It's a very satisfying moment for the audience.
It's to enable them to feel safe. You vanquish the villain so you feel safe.
[screaming]
[Garfield] And the more dastardly the behavior of the villain,
the more karmic justice we are praying for.
There's a blood lust that a great villain creates in an audience.
Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.
At the end of a movie, we want to have good overcome bad.
That's what drives that desire to watch a movie with great heroes.
That everything's gonna be okay and the world's not scary.
[Lowe] Until the contractually binding sequel brings them back,
the last few moments of the movie are for the heroes to bask
in their hard-earned glory before riding off into the distance.
Well, as I said at the start, I've been Rob Lowe,
and that's it for our look at Hollywood clichés.
Nothing for me to do now except jump on my horse and/or motorcycle
and ride off into the sunset while rock music and/or hip-hop kicks in.
But that would ruin my suit.
So let's just abruptly roll credits when I snap my fingers.
[electronic music playing]