It was about 2 o’clock on a Saturday morning, and I had just gotten home from a gig playing drums at a local nightclub. I fixed myself a snack and settled in on the couch to watch a little TV before going to bed.With my satellite TV package, viewing options are limited that time of day, so I scrolled through the channels looking for something—anything—besides that show called ‘Paid Programming.’ It’s on almost every channel after 1am. I hate that show. There’s no plot, they’re all reruns, and I always feel like they are trying to sell me something.
On my second pass through the sparse offerings in my early-morning lineup, I saw something that made me pause.
Somehow, I had surfed into a very familiar scene. But how could that be? This was a TV show I had never watched before, yet I knew the scene so well that I recognized it as soon as I saw it.
Spoiler Alert!
A man and a woman are positioned nearly face to face in a fairly close shot. Between them is an object about the size of a cigar box, wrapped up with duct tape and festooned with a tangle of multicolored electrical wires. Attached to the wires is a digital display that is furiously counting down the seconds in bright red LED numerals.
That’s it. It could easily have been just one frame from the scene, and even though I had tuned in just moments before, I could already feel the suspense as the timer approached zero. My reaction was instinctive; I had been there before.
And so have you.
To avoid disturbing my sleeping wife, the TV’s volume was low so I couldn’t clearly hear what the characters were saying, but their likely inane dialog didn’t matter. I knew was what was going on.
The two hapless characters in this scene were the protagonists in the story, and they were putting their lives at risk trying frantically to disarm, defuse, or otherwise deactivate the bomb that was connected to the timer.
That scene was one of an endless variety I call ‘Countdown to Impending Doom.’ It’s a theatrical ploy that’s normally used to inject some suspense into an otherwise lifeless stretch of plot.
Many times, there are two people involved in the scene to provide for the possibility of witty banter during the ordeal: “We’re about to die. Know any good jokes?” Or worse, and even more unbelievably, they get romantic: “We’re about to die. Oh, Baby!”
Banter is inevitable. Witty remains a remote possibility.
If it accomplishes its purpose, viewers are sucked right into the scene to experience the same terror the characters are feeling. Cheap drama and guaranteed suspense. The character at the center of the drama (commonly the hero or heroine) is helpless. There is nothing she can do, and there is little time to do it.
The pretense for this scene doesn’t even necessarily need to carry the threat of death. It could be as innocuous as a man who is stuck in traffic trying to get to the airport before his lost love leaves forever.In this case, it was life or death. The impending doom was an explosion that would have taken down an entire high-rise building full of people had the heroes failed to stop the timer before it reached zero. But no surprise here, they were successful. They saved themselves. They saved the building’s occupants.
More importantly, they saved the show’s producers the expense of blowing up a building.
In practice, the threatened doom rarely materializes. We like happy endings. When the timer reaches about one and a half seconds, the hero saves the day by cutting the wire, entering the correct password, saying the magic word, or getting to the airport just in time.
In the early days of filmmaking, there were no LED timers. Instead, you watched the burning fuse getting shorter as the guy in the white hat struggled to free himself from the chair he was tied to inside a shack filled with dynamite. This was one of the go-to countdown scenes in the cowboy movies.
In later years, alarm clocks were used as timers. Remember the tick…tick…tick of the time bomb? Except for the technology, the scene is essentially the same.
The bomb-and-timer scenario is probably the most cliché in this genre of scenes, but to make the concept work, there doesn’t need to be an actual timer, or even a bomb. Whatever the situation, there is a sense of urgency to complete a task before a rapidly-approaching deadline—whether explicit or implied.
If you’re familiar with old movies, you might have encountered a woman tied to railroad tracks as the steam locomotive came around the bend. Or maybe you shared a terrifying moment with the poor lad who was strapped to a log as it was dragged into a huge, noisily spinning saw blade.
In other stories, the hero may have been poisoned, and there is limited time to find an antidote. Or it could be a huge asteroid hurtling toward Earth. Will the nuclear-tipped missile be able to destroy it? Maybe you need to get off the island before the volcano erupts.
My shoelace is untied. Will I notice before I trip on it and do a face-plant into the pavement? I’m on the edge of my seat.
These are all examples of the ‘countdown’ ploy. There are countless more, and no matter how far-fetched the premise, we always play along in a self-induced state of mind called ‘suspension of disbelief.’ It is a concept that has saved millions of scenes in movies, TV, theatre and literature, and it’s about the only thing that can save most science fiction and horror movies.
When faced with a situation that is too fantastic to be believable, you simply pretend you don’t know any better. With many people, it’s automatic. They know it’s fiction, so they blindly accept anything that is presented to them. They go with the flow. It is more difficult for some of us. We have to consciously overlook the contrivances and inconsistencies.
If I see a half-eaten sandwich in one scene, it’s hard for me to ignore that same sandwich in the next scene with only one bite missing.
Without the audience fulfilling that expectation and playing dumb, many scenes just wouldn’t work. It serves to mask the outlandishness of a multitude of situations. In the case of our bomb scene, your job is to believe the situation is possible, that the main characters could die, and the show will have to be cancelled, putting hundreds of people out of work. Now you’re on the edge of your seat.
“Countdown to Impending Doom” scenes require only two elements: an imminent horrible event (doom), and a limited amount of time to forestall the event (countdown).
But, to make the scene believable, you usually need that third element: an audience that is willing to ignore how unlikely the situation is (suspension of disbelief). You are that third element. You become part of the story. It’s interactive. Without your participation, it all falls apart.
I can’t even begin to count the number of scenes I have ruined by my failure to play along.
All questions of plausibility aside, the countdown device is so versatile, it can be used for a short scene in a TV show, or it can be stretched to become an entire movie plot. In fact, you could name the movie, “Countdown to Impending Doom.”
I watched an action movie recently that was essentially a continuous series of countdown scenes, loosely strung together around a thin plot. It was entertaining, but there wasn’t much real substance.
There are many variations employed, and as we have seen, it doesn’t always have a bomb. But if it does involve a bomb, and it was made after the 1960s, it will almost certainly be the red-LED time bomb. Some directors may use a blue LED to throw you off. Don’t be fooled! That bomb is just as unlikely to explode.
Right about now you’re thinking: could the more modern LCD display be used for a timer? In theory they could, however, they simply are not very photogenic. Nothing beats the bright red LED to project a sense of urgency. Set the scene in a dimly lit room, and the attention-commanding red glow will keep you tense no matter how many seconds remain.
The countdown-to-doom premise is only one of many ploys used by writers and directors to give the audience a thrill or evoke other responses, or simply to fill time.
As cliché as the countdown premise is, there is another thrill-inducing theatrical device that pre-dates the use of the time bomb, and has been used far, far more: The Chase Scene.
The Chase Scene, in its endless variations, has been used everywhere and it can be as simple as the good guy chasing down the bad guy on foot. Or maybe the bad guy is chasing the good guy.
But no variation of the chase is as ubiquitous as the car chase scene. This thrill ride can involve one car, two cars or dozens of cars, and can include airplanes, boats, bicycles, horses—anything that moves—in any combination.
We are readily drawn into the chase scene because we have all been there, even if only in fun. Unlike the completely improbable bomb scene, chases happen in real life many times every day all over the world. That doesn’t mean that the theatrical scenes themselves are always believable.
You have probably witnessed the following scene many times:Spoiler Alert!
During an investigation, a cop spots the suspect across a busy street, and instead of trying to sneak up on him, the cop immediately shouts, “Police!” The suspect runs. Every time.
That gives the bad guy a huge head start. Why? The story itself didn’t need it. Most likely the director just needed to fill some time, so he simply created the opportunity for a chase scene, while simultaneously providing some much-needed action and drama.
A character in a show I watch makes that mistake regularly. It’s clear he knows better, because each time he does it he asks out loud, “Why do they always run?”
I think that question is directed at us, the audience. He is essentially breaking the fourth wall by acknowledging to us that he knows it’s a silly thing the director keeps asking him to do. That makes it harder for me to participate. My job is to ignore it even while the character is calling attention to it.
He might just as well have given the camera a derisive eye-roll. I’m doing my best to believe. The cop is urging me not to.
But chase scenes always work. Everyone has been chased, and everyone has chased someone else. We all know exactly how that feels. We don’t usually have to suspend our disbelief.
By contrast, most of us have never been blown up.
As an audience, we are here for one reason: to be entertained. We want thrills, drama, excitement, suspense. A bomb scene delivers. And sometimes it is even appropriate in the story line, but there are so many options, it doesn’t have to be the patently unbelievable red-LED scene.
Here is my favorite example of a clever, original bomb scene. It’s a highlight from an episode of a TV series from the mid 20th century, set in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War.
The show was technically a sitcom, but it commonly dealt with socially sensitive and controversial material. The situation in this episode was very dramatic. Every move they make in this scene is slow and deliberate, and there is suspenseful music playing in the background. We’re all on the edge of our seats.
Spoiler Alert!
An unexploded bomb has landed in the center of the compound, and it could go off any second. The show’s stars, army surgeons Hawkeye and Trapper John, are attempting to disarm the bomb.
Some distance away, safely behind a pile of mattresses, Colonel Blake is shouting instructions to the doctors through a megaphone. They have already removed the bomb’s cover and isolated a small bundle of wires leading to the fuse, when the colonel, reading the next step from a manual, says, “…and carefully cut the wires.”
Snip! Trapper cuts the wires just as the colonel adds, “But first, remove the fuse…” Hawkeye and Trapper look at each other, the bomb begins to hiss, and without saying a word, they turn and run for their lives.
They traveled only a few yards away from the bomb when it pops open and launches a swirling cloud of communist leaflets into the air. It was only a propaganda bomb. There was no real danger all along.
That is one of the greatest bomb scenes ever filmed. It has suspense, humor, and a twist.
The next time you come across a bomb scene, pay attention and ask yourself, “Is this the stopped-at-the-last-second-red-LED version, or was there something that made it original?” Did the writers write? Or did they simply copy and paste?
The two surgeons from my example were the best doctors in all of Korea, and certainly the most indispensable members of the field hospital team. Any other personnel in the camp could have been easily replaced had something gone horribly wrong.
If you find yourself wondering why the doctors were chosen for this extremely dangerous task, instead of someone more ‘expendable,’ then you have forgotten to suspend your disbelief. If that’s the way you’re going to be, you should only be watching documentaries.
Or cartoons, unless you have a problem with a crate containing an Acme Roadrunner Trap being delivered to a coyote in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
I can usually enjoy a TV show or movie and play along with the improbable circumstances, but, unfortunately for my wife, I can’t not notice them. But I don’t have to comment on them.
I choose to.
When my wife and I watch TV together she’s always yelling at me, “DON’T RUIN IT FOR ME!”
Scott Wright ©2019