Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION - Posts Tagged "research"

Not long ago I was watching an old Clint Eastwood movie at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. A strange film, mainly remembered now as the flick which introduced both Michael Cimino and Jeff Bridges to the world. Anyway, there is a sequence rather early in the story, in which Eastwood and Bridges and confronted by two hit men wielding revolvers with silencers screwed to their barrels. As I sat there, stuffing fistfuls of popcorn into my mouth, I rolled my eyes to the extremely ornate ceiling of the movie theater (it looks like an ancient Egyptian tomb) in disgust. Why? You cannot attach a silencer to a revolver. That is to say, you can, but the act is pointless. The noise of a revolver is emitted from area around the cylinder, in other words out the sides of the weapon, and not through the barrel, as in, say a 9mm or .45 pistol. So, in effect, you are silencing the wrong part of the pistol. Silencers on revolvers, though common on television and seen even in a couple of old James Bond movies, are simply an example of lazy-ass production design by people who couldn't be bothered to do research, or whose idea of research was watching, well, old James Bond movies. When you consider how much money goes into making a film, how many people are employed on them, and how many of those well-paid employees have no other job than to get the little details right, it's aggravating as hell. To me, anyway.

This got me thinking, as I drove home, queasy from the trash bag of popcorn I had just washed down with a bucket of Coke, about how there are, in fact, no such things as silencers. Not, at any rate, in the way they are depicted by Hollywood. A silencer's true name in the trade (by which I mean the intelligence community, the military and law enforcement) is a "suppressor." The reason for this is that guns are so goddamned loud that to actually silence them would require a device about the size of a fire hydrant, which also weigh nearly as much. (It must be remembered that even a small-caliber pistol is essentially a miniature cannon.) A suppressor, as the name suggests, reduces the amount of noise a gun makes when it goes off; it does not eliminate it completely. That "thwit!" noise you always hear in movies when somebody plugs somebody else with a "silenced" pistol is pure fantasy. A suppressed pistol is at least as loud as balloon bursting and possibly as loud as a small firecracker. Maybe the CIA has a super-duper grade of suppressor that is no louder than a handclap in an enclosed space, but even this device suffers from a shortcoming which exposes yet another aggravating mistake encountered in film. The bottomless silencer.

Assault on Precinct 13 is an early John Carpenter movie in which the bad guys wield submachineguns fitted with suppressors that hardly make a sound. Since this plot element, is key to the story, it can and should be forgiven; however, in the flick the baddies use their guns like water cannons, and at the end of the film they are just as eerily quiet as at the beginning. In real life, even the highest-grade military-level suppressors lose their efficacy with increasing speed as each bullet moves through the device. This is because the baffles which absorb the sound decompress further with each explosion, which means after just a few shots the suppressor is so much dead weight. Put another way, "silencers" get noisier the more they are used, which means using them like squirt guns is not an option.

Hollywood is replete with technical advisers of every sort, so it crazes me still further how often detective shows and cop movies blunder on other details of this kind. For example, not too long ago I saw a forensics show in which the techs were dusting a doorknob for fingerprints. Doubtless a few cases have been cracked in this manner, but for the most part, in my day anyway, crime scene techs didn't bother dusting doorknobs. By the very nature of what they are, knobs are so smeared by thousands upon thousands of overlapping prints that getting usable ones impossible, or damned near. (Ditto the button panels in elevators) In the same show, which is to say the same series, a guy gets knocked unconscious and, after waking up, shakes his head and recounts all the events leading up to the moment he was kayoed. In reality, nobody hit hard enough to get sent into dreamland will be able to remember anything for about a half an hour before the lights went out. In fact, in real life, people who claim to have been knocked out who tell police they can remember every detail beforehand usually become suspects from that moment forward, because the cops knowthey are lying.

Police. Is there a profession, except for doctor or lawyer, which has more representation on television and in film? And yet the writers, or the production designers or the technical advisers on these shows, are always blundering on simple details. Like having detectives given the rank of "sergeant" (because it sounds tough) but having no supervisory responsibilities. Or having lieutenants and captains investigate cases personally, like Capt. Jim Brass on CSI. Lieutenants and captains don't investigate shit. They supervise others. And those others, those detectives, never just work one case. Every homicide detective in a big city has multiple outstanding unsolved murders on his caseload. They juggle all of them simultaneously.

But novelists are hardly exempt from these mistakes, either. In the horror novel The Relic, a New York cop working security detail at a museum on a Friday night finishes his shift, but is eaten by a monster on his way out the door. Nobody notices anything even happened to him until Monday morning, and even then, when he doesn't show up for work, nobody is particularly alarmed. What the fuck? Policemen don't go home when their shifts end; they return to their station house for roll call, inventory their squad cars, do any outstanding paperwork, change clothes. A cop leaves his detail and never shows up at the station house, the whole freaking NYPD would be out looking for him. In that same novel, an FBI agent is described as working alone and wearing a flashy red vest. In real life FBI agents almost never go anywhere alone; they work in pairs, like Mulder and Scully, and no FBI agent in the history of the Bureau has ever worn a red vest. Ever. Ever. J. Edgar Hoover once had a clerk fired for wearing a red vest; agents wear conservative gray or dark blue suits. And they refer to themselves as specialagents, not agents.

Some blunders in film and fiction, like the silencer on the revolver, have become so ingrained that they have acquired a certain legitimacy even though they are nonsense. Stories in which Mafia dons speak like Oxford dons are incredibly common. Again, what the actual fuck? Show me a Mafia boss in this country who can speak two sentences without betraying the fact he dropped out of 9th grade and I'll show you a penguin that can fly. Mobsters make a worse hash of the English language than tweenage girls Snap-chatting at the mall. Granted, one or two have been articulate in their own rough-spun way -- Paul Castellano comes to mind -- but none of them can refrain from saying "fuck" for more than half a sentence, which kind of spoils the intellectual effect.

Oh, and on the subject of the Mafia -- nobody uses the word "don" except journalists. The heads of crime families are called "boss" or, in the familiar, "bo." And the Families are not, as a rule, hereditary dynasties. Leadership is not passed from father to son, except in rare cases where the son is of high rank and viewed as capable of doing the job -- and even then such a move can cause resentment, which in Mafia circles is expressed with car bombs. As for the scene in The Godfather (both the book and the movie) where one of the bosses says he pays his people extra so they don't get involved in drugs -- huh? what? Mafia soldiers do not get paid by their bosses. Quite the opposite. The Mafia is a pyramid scheme. Money flows up, not down, and there are no exceptions to this rule.

Certain writers are repeat offenders in the category of sloppy research. The most notorious is probably Stephen King, who has freely (and cheerfully) admitted his failing in this area. But I can never read a book of his which features spooks, cops or soldiers without cringing. Referring to the butt of a pistol as a "handle" is egregious, as is calling a weapon a "carbine rifle" (sort of like calling a car a "sedan-coupe") or referring to a CIA agent as, well "a CIA agent." (CIA people are called "officers"; "agents" are the foreigners who work for them.) And no, "terminate with extreme prejudice" is not and never has been official terminology in the cloak-and-dagger set. When you hear this phrase in a movie or read it in a book, you can be damned sure the writer did his research on Netflix. As much as I have mocked Tom Clancy over the years for his personality failings, jingo patriotism and terrifyingly naive belief in the power of bombs to settle arguments, he was, by and large, a fucking trouper when it came to cracking the books.

As for war movies and war novels, man, I am not even going to touch that right now. I can't, or this blog would be longer than the Oscars.

Contrary to what you may think by this point, I don't want to come off self-righteous here, for I am certainly not without sins of my own in this area. The best short story I ever wrote, "Roadtrip," originally contained a sequence in which a woman shot a police officer with a silenced revolver. Only many years after I'd penned it did I realize my mistake. Likewise, in another short, "Shadows and Glory," which made the rounds on the literary prize circuit back in the early 1990s, made a cartoon blunder in regards to some historical details about Nazi Germany. And these mistakes were hardly unique. I can think of at least three more works of mine which make easily-avoidable errors, without even trying. But the embarrassment these errors caused did make me keener not to repeat my errors, and I wish to hell that movies with budgets large enough to finance small wars, and writers who can afford to hire entire universities to do research for them, would pay a little more attention to details. Because in my experience, it's the details that sell the story.

Otherwise, the next time I'm at a movie I might choke on my popcorn, and what an enormous loss that would be to us all.