From: jtn@nutter.cs.vt.edu (Terry Nutter)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: Prince of Thieves wrongos
Date: 8 Sep 92 16:51:40 GMT
Followup-To: rec.org.sca
Organization: The Rialto

Greetings, all, from Angharad ver' Rhuawn.  Lord, I'm going to do it, I'm
going to post on "Robin Hood".  And I seem to be in a particularly perverse
mood today, as I'm going to disagree with both Aryk and William.

Aryk said:
 
>What's the point?  It's fiction!
> 
>One of the joys of writing or producing fiction is that you can have
>manhole covers when you want them, and executioners can use anvils,
>and you can call the Seljuk Turks "Turks". If you're going to go after
>that sort of thing, you can knock Bill Shakespeare for having clocks
>striking in ancient Athens.

Remember the film "The Graduate"?  Dustin Hoffman's intro to the big time?
At the end, there's a scene where he's running across the Golden Gate
Bridge.  From what I've been told, to get a better shot, they reversed the 
directions of traffic on the two levels of the bridge.

From a cinematographic point of view, it was absolutely the thing to do.

But they say that when the film showed in the Bay Area, and that scene came 
on, entire audiences bellowed, in perfect unison, "No!"  They took one look, 
and they _knew_ that wasn't anything that happened on _their_ bridge.  It 
completely broke the mood, and destroyed the plot tension at a critical point.

Fiction is delicate.  The web can be easily torn.  What you can do depends
a lot on the _kind_ of fiction you are doing (do you expect your audience
to take it as realistic, or is it patently a game?), and on the level of
knowledge your audience is expected to have.  In general, if you want to
use any kind of realistic setting (present, past, or future) to tell any
kind of realistic story, it is a bad idea to violate what your audience
knows to be true.  Shakespeare could get away with clocks in Athens for
a number of reasons, not least that your average Elizabethan was not a
classicist.  Also, he wasn't always into realism.  (Do we remember _The 
Tempest_? _Midsummer Night's Dream_?  You're not _expected_ to believe
them.)

It's particularly egregious when there are simple plot alternatives: put
dad's assaulters on horseback; have the sewer empty into a body of water;
and so on.

I think William's nits would be sensible -- if we were expected to take the
story realistically in the first place.  (Hey, somebody actually wants me
to believe in that witch?  I'll pass....)

But here's where I disagree with William.

>I disagree. "Prince of Thieves" is fiction, not fantasy.

I don't think so.  I think it's fantasy pure and simple.  It's just bad
fantasy.

>The truth is, I just thought it was a bad film, and I derive perverse
>pleasure from finding faults in it. That is the point... As to Brian

I know the feeling well.  For instance: I don't know whether Sherwood was
a deciduous forest or a coniferous one, but I'm fairly certain it wasn't
purely deciduous at one point and pure coniferous about a mile away....
Talk about lazy screw-ups.

But this is already more bandwidth than the subject deserves; I'll crawl
back in my hole now....

Cheers,

-- Angharad/Terry