The Pedantry Is Revolting

The Graun has a look at the history of pedantry. Surprisingly it is sympathetic. However, you can't help but be a but non-plussed by this:

In a letter to Saturday's Daily Telegraph, Dr Ross Watkin of Chipstead wrote [of the shower scene in Psycho]: "Someone should have told Hitchcock that a dead person's pupils are widely dilated. The final shot of the murdered Janet Leigh on the shower floor showed normal-size pupils. It quite ruined the film for me ..."

Plenty of things can ruin a movie for me -- the words Stephen Sommers in the credits, for example, or the presence of a colon in the title -- but the size of someone's pupils has never been much of a factor.

I think the spotting of movie mistakes like this tend to fall in to two categories: those which are related to the expertise of the spotter and those that are the product of the spotters obsessive need to spot something wrong. The example above falls in to the former definition, it has to be noted that it's a Doctor making the observation and on-screen errors that fall in to your area of expertise are bound to cause a niggle. The difference between the two is that Dr. Watkin had his suspension of disbelief broken, whereas disbelief was never much part of the reason for watching the movie for the other spotter. At least you get that feeling looking at a site like Movie Mistakes. For instance Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is listed as having 267 mistakes, probably about 2 per minute, which, if you really spotted all of them, would be annoying. However most errors are of the order of:

Continuity: Jack walks past the dock master, behind Jack the desk is on a wagon and the handle is leaning on the left side of the desk. Also the feather quill on the desk is leaning towards the back of the desk. When Jack walks away and takes the sack of money, the handle of the wagon isn't leaning on the desk and the feather quill on the desk is leaning forward towards the front of the desk.

It takes a special sort of person to notice that sort of thing. Actually for a couple of weeks I did try this. You can watch a movie in such a way that it's more about the process of the movie being made than anything that's happening emotionally on the screen. At the end you know a lot about the movie and you can guess a lot of things but you don't really know the story or have any idea about the motivation or lives of the character. It's a completely empty way to watch a film but it's easy to do and also gives you a lot of facile insights into the movie that no-one else will have except all the others who do this (they can then chat about it on the Internet).

Sometimes it's just better to accept the whole than pick out the imperfections of the parts that make it up.