More for the Idiolexicon Files

[akirlu]

The Shovel Broke - The point in a work of fiction (often a film) at which the willfully suspended viewer's disbelief comes crashing earthward and cannot be re-levitated. Hal tells the full story here, but the basic idea is that fictioneers are in the business of lying to you, creating bullshit, and then shoveling it back out of the way fast enough that it doesn't distract you with its stink. When the shovel breaks, the author is no longer able to get the excrement tossed back out of the reader/auditor/viewer's way fast enough, and so piles up and begins to smell, thus distracting from the immersive fictional experience.

I got a target for ya, but ya gotta be REAL patient - Yes, that is an action I endorse, and hope to take eventually, but circumstances are highly unpropitious at the moment. Comes from an old Bill Mauldin WWII Willie and Joe cartoon, in which one of our protagonists is whispering into his radio to air support, while crouched in a fox hole over which a massive enemy tank is squarely parked.

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

I loved the Willie and Joe cartoons when I was a kid, and can visualize this one.

Other favorite punchlines (likely misremembered):

"I can't get any lower my buttons are in the way."

"A man just ain't worth a dern without a good hot cup o' coffee."

And, the one my dad had a hard time explaining, "Ol' cooshay avec is back in town."

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

This would have been before "Lady Marmalade" I'm guessing?

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

So in Smurfahontas, when the re-embodied gyrene is out on his very first patrol on an alien and hostile planet, and has no responsibilities except just standing there, and within SECONDS goes walkabout to smell the flowers and collect plot coupons, that's when the shovel broke for me?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Uh, yeah, I guess. Whatever you're on, I hope it isn't mutagenic or anything...

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

aw, come on  That big 3-D sci-fi movie a couple of months ago with the big blue noble savages being rousted by the evil corps and military to get at the unobtanium, and the recycled crippled marine goes native and out ♥s the cold intellectual double-domes.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Never saw it.