CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--Have you ever noticed that when a suspect in a TV crime show says "I swear" to the detectives, it is a subliminal signal that the guy is telling the truth? It's actually a little weird when you think about it.
Don't hardened criminals lie to the cops as often as they tell the truth? And if they are used to lying, then presumably they will try to lie as effectively as they can, which would mean that they ought to finish a lie by saying, "I swear." After all, it's what gets people freed on a television show.
But in a TV drama, that "I swear" functions as a signal to the audience that the poor misunderstood wretch is that unlikeliest of cases, a person of interest who is actually telling the truth.
It's become a standard -- and lazy -- cliche. It's also a cue in the script that at least one of the detectives will immediately develop doubt and turn his attention to some alternative suspect.
There must be some secret ritual for those being admitted to membership in the Writers' Guild, a rite in which newcomers are shown the sacred parchment where the writerly cliches are inscribed -- "DON"T VIOLATE THE 'I SWEAR' PRESCRIPTION! IF YOU DO, WE WILL ALL HAVE TO THINK OF DIFFERENT CLUES TO PUT INTO OUR STORIES."
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Back in the days of black-and-white television, the bad guys were bank robbers or train robbers or sometimes small time gang members. Dragnet showed a few bunco artists and check forgers. There weren't a lot of TV characters dressed up in middle-eastern garb and toting Kalashnikovs in those days. There were the odd Russian spies, but that made sense in an era when the Soviet Union existed.
So what are today's television writers inserting into their scripts as the bad guys? Two words:
Dope peddlers
Terrorists
OK, so that was three words, but the description is pretty accurate. If you include serial killers as a sort of domestic terrorism, the description is even closer to the mark.
Taken together, these bad guy stereotypes can be attributed to a couple of things. The first is that there are a lot of programming hours to fill. It's not surprising that (to borrow the old witticism) there is hardly enough mediocrity to go around. But the second reason must needs be attributed to the lack of imagination among producers. I have to think that professional TV writers could find other plots besides drug dealing and middle eastern terrorism, but somehow the producers and networks figure that the old plots are the best plots. The audience is pre-prepared for such stock villains, and it doesn't take much to construct a script:
- a) Jones is a drug dealer.
- b) We have to catch Jones in the act.
- c) Let's set up a buy.
- d) "You have the right to remain silent."
As to terrorism as a standard plot point, it's not at all surprising in this post-9-11 world. Writers cater to our communal desire that such events not be repeated. Watching a fictional terrorist ring get taken down is, at some level, similar to the idea of catharsis that the ancient Greek dramatists sought after.
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But why do television writers and producers so habitually pick drug dealers and importers? Besides a simple lack of imagination as an explanation, there is another reason. From the standpoint of structuring a script, this approach saves a lot of explication. The writers and directors treat drug dealing as something that is so bad that it doesn't have to be explained or understood. It just is. There is no need to go into the inner motives of the dealer. There is also no need to write lines explaining why the police should be particularly motivated to stop the dealers.
It is a societal understanding that drugs are bad, and drug cops are good. If there are a few seconds of script time to fill, it's enough to have one of the policemen explain that his brother or nephew died of an overdose, and he won't rest until the drug war is won.
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Reality says differently. The so-called War on Drugs has been going on for about half a century (since Nixon's 1971 speech) and it has been worse than a failure. It has been a disaster financially and socially. It has jailed Americans by the hundreds of thousands. Yet presidents Clinton, Bush II, and Obama are understood to have partaken of at least marijuana -- along with a substantial fraction of their fellow Americans.
I was listening to NPR on the way home the other night while the subject of drug wars and drug treatment was discussed. The best counter-example to American policy right now is Portugal. At a time a couple of decades ago when approximately one percent of the Portuguese population was taking heroin (equivalent to maybe three million Americans), the country's leaders decided to try something different. What did they have to lose?
So Portugal decriminalized [in-portugal-drug-use-is-treated-as-a-medical-issue-not-a-crime] drug use. It held onto rules against dealing, but gave up on spending money to fight drug use as a crime. It also put a lot of money into offering alternatives such as methadone and buprenorphine. You might say that Portugal took the American policy and turned it on its head.
The result over the past decade and a half is that HIV rates went way down, the fraction of untreated addicts went way down, and the country seems much happier with a decriminalized system. There are still addicts, but they are in general more functional as members of society.
How about if American television writers and producers started slacking off on using drug dealers as convenient whipping boys and started exploring the notion that American drug policy is on the wrong track?
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By the way, California has pretty much made it clear that we are not interested in going back to the war against marijuana. We legalized recreational use. But notice that the city authorities are still wrangling with how to marginalize the dope shops. They seem to want to pretend that regulation will keep marijuana out of the hands of teenagers.
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One more scripting cliche: "You've got to believe me!"
This line is equivalent to "I swear!" This plaintive cry is generally spilled by somebody who is telling an unlikely story. He was all alone reading the Bible at 5 PM when the crime occurred, a crime for which he had motive and opportunity. Or his gun was in his car when both were stolen a week ago -- he has been meaning to file a police report, but his aged mom's illness has kept him distracted. And we've got to believe him.
Oh well. The stressed scriptwriter on deadline can put "You've got to believe me" in the suspect's mouth, then develop a quicky plot twist in which a terrorist drug dealer was the real killer.
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A few years ago, Scott Rice wrote and produced a series called Script Cops. It is a series of satirical pieces about bad scripts and bad script writers. One of the funniest is Cliche Misdemeanor which you can find (along with the rest of the series) on Vimeo. The overall conceit is that bad writing is a crime, and there are cops who fight such crimes. Is it true that most student films begin with an alarm clock going off? I don't know, but it's funny when the assertion is made by a uniformed script cop.
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From a more writerly point of view, there is Write Badly Well by Joel Stickley, who has managed to depict just about every bad writing cliche. "Begin your novel with the protagonist getting out of bed and seeing that it is raining outside, which perfectly mirrors his life." Should your story end with a twist? There are several years of postings in the archive.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
