Stop Worrying About Plot Holes and Enjoy the Movie

Whether it be through religion or through science, humans spent thousands of years attempting to express their dominance over the unknown by categorizing it or labeling it, thus creating some sort of mastery over it. While this assertion of dominance could be applied to claiming that omnipotent beings are what caused various events throughout the universe or categorizing animals and giving them arbitrary species names, there’s a deep-seated fear of being forced to accept the fact that we don’t have all the answers. This can be witnessed when a parent is forced to give an impromptu answer to their child about why the sky is blue and their conjuring of a nonsensical answer, or when someone is so focused on the intricacies of a narrative’s semantics that they attempt to point out errors in such storylines. Despite there assuredly being instances in which a film’s narrative contradicts itself so severely that it negates the reality it has attempted to craft, you’ll find all movies much more enjoyable if you accept the fact that they won’t always provide you with all the answers.

No matter how accomplished or acclaimed a film might be, they are all subjected to viewers calling them out for their supposed plot holes. If it’s safe to talk near the waterfall in A Quiet Place, why didn’t the family just move there? If Obi-Wan wanted to protect Luke Skywalker from his father in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, why did he keep his father’s last name and bring him to his home planet? Why didn’t Rose try harder to make room for Jack on the floating door in Titanic? While all of these are valid questions, the answer to them all is, “Because the movie would have been worse that way.”

Despite how closely they might echo reality, all movies, TV shows, novels, comics, and video games are pieces of art and present viewers with abstract ideas. Especially with live-action art, the entire experience is meant to be consumed as a complete product as opposed to every detail about every component being analyzed and potentially ridiculed. When you look at the Mona Lisa, you don’t inspect each brushstroke and point out which ones were unnecessary or which areas needed a few more spots of paint. You accept it as a complete concept and ignore minor specific “flaws.”

Supposed plot holes might not be entirely relevant when judging a movie or TV show as a whole, but that’s not to say that all narrative contradictions need to be ignored. These stories need to craft a reality for the audience and, if they break that reality, the entire house of cards being built can come crumbling down. If a film has a series of plot holes or narrative beats that contradict the reality it sets up, it can be just as damaging to a film as poor performances, directors, dialogue, or special effects. Not only does the movie’s reality get destroyed, but the audience becomes inherently aware that they aren’t being immersed in a fictional world and they are instead sitting in a movie theater with strangers and watching their favorite actors pretending to fight mythical beasts.

Back to the Future is one of the most beloved films of all time, and it features a major “plot hole.” Marty (Michael J. Fox) travels back in time and encounters his parents in the ’50s, only to inadvertently alter history and he prevents them from dating one another. He ultimately sets them up and restores the space-time continuum, with some fans curious as to why the adult parents never point out how their son looks identical to the person who set them up as teenagers. One could make the leap of logic that the parents don’t really remember what the mysterious stranger looked like after all those years, with the film’s writer, Bob Gale, recently revealing that this was exactly his belief about the situation. While it is nice to have this clarification, not all storytellers should have to explain in detail why any ambiguity or abstraction in their story needs to be justified, so long as the final product holds up.

Plot holes exist for a number of reasons, with poor storytelling absolutely being one of the causes. However, it’s much more likely that these omissions from a story are due to storytellers wanting you to fill in those gaps yourself, as explicitly detailing everything about a film’s reality would surely bore the audience. This is likely the reason we so rarely see people going to the bathroom on screen or saying “bye” before hanging up the phone. Surely characters in movies and TV shows need to eat and sleep, but because we don’t see them do that, are we to assume it’s a plot hole that these characters couldn’t exist without sleep, and we didn’t see them sleep, therefore they never sleep? No, because a viewer approaching such a story on good faith can fill in those omissions using their own intuition.

In The Shawshank Redemption, how did Andy perfectly replace a poster in his cell after tunneling out of it? In Gremlins, how does a Mogwai know when it’s “after midnight” where they are at any given moment and undergo a physiological change when fed after the deadline? In Armageddon, why are oil drillers trained to be astronauts instead of training astronauts to drill into an asteroid? The answer to all of these questions is exactly the same, which is that these pedantic details aren’t worth worrying about once you’re willing to accept a degree of abstraction in art and your willingness to accept a story despite its shortcomings in how it defines its reality.

Do you get hung up on plot holes? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!