Suspension of disbelief comes with the territory when we enter a cinema. Action heroes always emerge unscathed from a hail of bullets, while everyone in a musical, even the passersby, will know all the steps in an apparently spontaneous dance routine. But what of the behavioural eccentricities restricted to the screen? The Riverdale actor Lili Reinhart wondered this week if it is only in the movies that people splash water on their faces to suppress rising panic. And there are other examples …
• Submerging yourself in the bath and staring dreamily up at the ceiling. Who does this? Natalie Portman in Black Swan, along with most other women who have ever taken baths in movies.
• How many times have you shut the mirrored bathroom cabinet to see someone behind you in the reflection? It happens so often on screen – in Prom Night, Orphan, V For Vendetta – it’s enough to make you transfer your toiletries to a drawer.
• Mirrors are a magnet for unrealistic behaviour. How many times have you punched one in a rage? The answer is: all the time if you’re a movie character.
• Who keeps scrapbooks any more? Only the movie psychopath, who knows that the scrapbook will clear up any ambiguities when it is discovered in a drawer in the final reel. Recent culprits include the hostage thriller Berlin Syndrome. Seven is a special case: along with the killer’s newspaper clippings, there are 2,000 notebooks for the police to thumb through. That goes for photo albums, too, recently used in Hereditary: it wouldn’t have been the same if Toni Collette were scrolling through the cloud.
• What do Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People, Naomi Watts in The Ring, Sigourney Weaver in Alien and Johnny Depp in Sleepy Hollow have in common? They all sit bolt upright in bed after waking from a nightmare.
• Only in movies do people keep their bodies chastely covered after sex. “When people are wandering around before or after making love, and they’re decorously covered with sheets, it’s always seemed phoney to me,” said James Ivory, who wrote Call Me By Your Name and was incensed that its director, Luca Guadagnino, came over all coy.
• And if you don’t swagger around town with your badass friends in a perfectly straight line (Straight Outta Compton, Fast & Furious 7) or dash past airport security personnel without getting shot with a stun gun (Love Actually) or own a car in which your face is lit from below at all times (every film with a nocturnal driving scene) then don’t feel too bad – it only happens in the movies.
