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Why Movies Want You to Think You Can Fit in that Air Duct on your Wall

Stephen T. Harper
10 min readMay 14, 2020

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3 Dumb Movie Tropes that fill us all with rage and won’t go away.

Photo by Marcelo Marques on Unsplash

If you meet someone who you really hate right off the bat, there’s a very good chance that he or she is your soul mate.

Do you ever wonder if Romantic-Comedies are thinking it all the way through when they give us advice like that? Or if Courtroom Dramas are really 100% certain that…

…if you simply yell at someone who is about to get away with murder while they are on the witness stand, they will very likely confess on the spot?

Ideas like those are called “tropes” (from the Greek “tropos” meaning “I’m not going to give this too much thought”).

In the case of movies, a trope is a visual or thematic shorthand used over and over again for decades until audiences become so familiar with an idea they just accept it as true.

Some tropes are useful and meaningful, conveying timeless truths about love, courage, and throwing epic parties when your parents aren’t home.

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Stephen T. Harper
Stephen T. Harper

Written by Stephen T. Harper

Cogito ergo…um… wait, I know this one, just give me a minute…

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