This one has been bugging me for some time now. And I suppose it follows up on Ed's recent list of movie conventions. Monsters in movies - from dragons to dinosaurs to aliens to snakes - behave so ludicrously, especially when they're in pursuit of people, that I long ago stopped being terrified, and adopted an attitude of impatience, tempered with disgust, whenever I see their scaly/slimy/monstery figures onscreen. In particular, I can't stand it when they roar for no particular reason. Why? Let's find out, shall we?
Let's start by thinking a little about the behavior of predators. Say you're traipsing by a water hole in the Okavango Delta. You get thirsty, so you lean over to get a drink of cool, delicious water. Suddenly, with a tremendous splash, out comes a great crocodile, with sharp teeth bared. You look awfully tasty to him. What does he do next? There are two options, but the answer depends entirely on whether he is a movie monster crocodile, or a real-life one.
Option One (Movie Monster Crocodile Outcome): He looks at you with his squinty, evil eyes, rears up, and roars at you at the top of his lungs: ROAOAOAAAARRRR!!!!! You, who had been paralyzed with fear merely by the sight of the crocodile splashing out of the pond, take opportunity of this roaring interval to turn and run into the jungle. The crocodile, thoroughly enjoying his full-throated roar, waits until it's quite done, and then notices - oops! - you're getting away. So he starts menacingly plodding after you, oh-so-intent on catching you. You weave in and out of trees, and he deftly follows/knocks trees over, until finally at the last minute you make some quick turn that he can't negotiate, and you're safe! The crocodile looks despondent as you continue to run away, and lets loose a great sad roar: ROAOWAAAhahaaaaaoohmmm(sniff)!
Option Two (Real-Life Crocodile Outcome): He chomps on your leg, and drags you under the water until you die. Then he eats you.
In real life, a crocodile would invariably choose Option Two. Movie monsters always - always - choose Option One.
There are two related problems with Option One. First, movie monsters haven't grasped the idea that, in general, chasing is not a good plan for predators. Unless you're a cheetah, the most effort you want to expend is a short burst to get your prey. Better yet, just hang out, hidden, until something happens to walk by or get a drink of water, and then - snap! - chomp on them. Chasing takes a lot of energy, and most prey have evolved to be quicker and nimbler than you.
Second, the monsters don't get that all that chasing wouldn't even be necessary if they'd JUST KNOCK IT OFF WITH ALL THE STARING AND ROARING! If they're close enough to roar in your face, they're probably close enough to eat you already.
Pointless roaring plus chasing equals lots of hungry nights for movie monsters and their offspring. It's really the roaring that kills me. There's not an animal in nature, I'm willing to bet, that winds up and roars at its prey first rather than chomping at it. Roaring and hissing are warning or communicative sounds. They're not particularly helpful for hunting.
Imagine some Cro-Magnon dude, walking through an ancient European forest with his spear, when look! Over there! A deer! Steathily he approaches, with spear cocked, until he comes within a few feet of the doe. He gets in position, and then.... "AAAARRRGGGHHH!!!! HEY, DEEEERRRR! WHOOOOOOOP!! I'M GONNA EAT YOUUUUU!!! HOOHOOOOO!!!!!" And so the chase is on! The deer wins, of course, because it's really fast. Try to explain that one back at the cave. "Aw, honey, you should've heard my intimidating whoop! That deer looked SO scared before it took off into the woods." " We can't eat intimidating whoops, dear. Go get us some berries."
Movie monsters don't understand how unhelpful a giant roar can be. Impressive, yes. I'm sure all the escapees tell great stories in front of their fireplaces about how impressive and guttural that roar was; how piercing those eyes that kept staring at you; and so on. The point being, these people are sitting comfortably in their homes, instead of being processed by your digestive system. Think substance over style, my monster friends.
I don't know where this trend began, but my guess is Jurassic Park. All those dinosaurs wandering around, back from extinction, and what do they do with their second chance at existence? Waste it on hissing and roaring at the few helpless humans they actually come across. Followed by fruitless chasing, of course. Ugh. Maybe that's why they went extinct in the first place.
The true problem, of course, lies not with the movie monsters themselves, but with their computer-image-generating creators. I think they do a horrible job, by and large, of conceiving and executing terror/evil when it comes to monsters. I think they don't realize that the visual details of the monster are the least important part of terror inducing. I picture them sitting around their tables, or iPads, or iTables, saying, "You know what's scary? Fangs. And scales. And slobber. Let's make something that's made out of nothing but fangs and scales and slobber!" Which is fine, as far as it goes - those things can be scary, after all.
But once they've designed their fearsome thing, they find themselves making two irreconcilable requests of the audience: Be Very Afraid, and Admire My Monster. They want you to put yourself in the shoes of the onscreen character, but they also ask you to sit back and dispassionately examine every scaly inch of their creature that they worked so hard to create. You can't have both. The Rear Up and Roar maneuver attempts to bridge the two opposing requests, but that's like getting fans of Brahms to agree that Wagner's programmatic use of orchestral music doesn't detract from the intrinsic beauty and worth of the music itself - ain't gonna happen, you know?
And so we wind up with this contrived monster convention that serves no purpose but to attract attention to itself and away from the emotion of the moment. It irks me.
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3 comments:
This is incredibly irksome! As soon as you mentioned it, I realized how ridiculously prevalent this phenomenon is. It reminded me of another movie monster trend that is definitely less irksome than the slobbering and roaring monster, but is also fairly unrealistic. It is the easily thwarted monster.
In this scenario, after the monster has roared at the hero and chased him about the jungle, the hero hides in a cave/tree root. The monster takes a few swipes at the hero, roars into the hole and ambles off defeated. I watched a Nature show recently where a polar bear waited for a seal at an ice hole for days. Waiting seemed like a pretty good strategy.
I heartily concur. And I'm betting this roaring convention is as old as fiction itself, predating the fakey monsters that have populated movies since Jurassic Park. I'm sure King Kong did a ton of unecessary roaring, though I've never seen that movie.
UPDATE:
So, I just saw Wolfman last night, with Anthony Hopkins and Benicio del Toro. Apparently winning Oscars doesn't stop your characters' monsters from behaving stupidly. They reared up, they roared, they were easily thwarted (thanks Emily!).
I also was reminded that monsters don't roar at everyone, nor do they let everyone escape; they can be pretty good at eating minor characters/extras, as well as designated "Monster Prey" major characters. So I suppose I was a little too concerned with their complete inability to catch prey. Their inane roaring tactic only comes into effect when they're pursuing a hero or a pretty girl.
Also, I was informed by my science advisor that predators generally fall into one of two categories when it comes to eating stuff: pursuit and ambush. So I should have been clearer that some animals do indeed move about in going after their prey. I continue to stand behind the proposition that roaring is lame, and that medium- to long-distance chasing is a bad adaptation.
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