Wait, You’re Doing WHAT?

Here’s the scenario. You locked the door to your house carefully when you went out. You come home after dark and find the door mysteriously cracked open and darkness within. What do you do?

That depends, it seems, on whether you’re a real sentient being with an IQ above 80, or a character in a suspense novel or movie. In the former case, you probably back off and call the police. In the latter, hang on, we all know what comes next: you’re about to do something transparently stupid.

There are beloved tropes in any genre fiction. Police dramas have the alcoholic detective with a tragedy in their past. Romances have the couple detesting each other when they meet but going through a situation together that melds them in the end.

And the suspense genre has Patently Stupid People.

What would we do without the woman who ventures into a dark cellar, hears a noise, and calls out, “Is anybody there?” Because for sure someone’s going to step out into the wavering beam of her flashlight and confess, “Yes, I’m here, I meant to kill you but decided against it, sorry about that,” and they’ll share a good laugh together. Not to mention the fact that there may be a perfectly good light switch available in said cellar, but she doesn’t turn it on. (Nobody turns on lights in these sequences. Even the police prefer flashlights to lamps. It’s like the Scary People have an anti-electric superpower or something.)

I yell at the characters. “Don’t open that door! Check behind the shower curtain!”

Of course, I have the benefit of having been around the literary block a few times and know there’s probably someone lying in wait in the haunted house, there’s a knife-wielding maniac hiding under the bed, the killer you just shot isn’t actually dead at all. The characters don’t know they’re in a story. But still—how truly stupid do you have to be to earn a place in these movies and books?

And they’re even given clues. When something dreadful and scary is about to happen, the author slows things down, tucks you in to a feeling of blissful security. (In movies, the background music gets quiet. I wish the background music in my life was that accommodating. You’re with me, right?)

Who hasn’t seen this scene at some point or another: a character is being chased, trips, and falls? Most of us might scramble to our feet and keep running. Our character, however, stays down, crab-walks backward, and screams at the pursuer not to kill them. Or just screams, period.

Why, oh why, are people in suspense books and movies so stupid?

There are probably a lot of answers to that question, but the one that resonates with me is this: even when we’re yelling at the character to not do the stupid thing, there’s part of us that really is there with them, doing precisely the same stupid thing. Consider our dreams, the places where our subconscious sets the stage and deals the cards, the places where we work out our own most primitive terrors. Think about how we behave there. “Not always completely rational” is an understatement.

From time to time I dream that I am in danger and cannot manage to call the correct number to get help. The dream has morphed with technology: whereas once I kept dialing the wrong number and had to start that circular motion over and over again, more recently it’s been about not getting my message across to Siri.

But all I do in the dream is keep trying to reach a number I’m clearly unable to reach. Do I try something else? Run, hide? Use my vaunted IQ-above-80 to establish this isn’t working, time to try something else? Of course I don’t. I keep trying the damned number, and usually wake up in a panic.

If my dream had been a story, you’d have been yelling at my character: “Get away! Don’t let them catch you!” I’d be, in fact, one of those Patently Stupid People.

And maybe that’s okay. Maybe we spend our days and our lives doing smart things, using our reasoning and our brains and our creativity to respond appropriately to whatever the world throws at us—even, sometimes, danger. But in our hearts we’re still the little kid we once were, scared of the dark, knowing that monsters are always lurking in the shadows. When we dream, it’s that little kid inside who fights our battles, scared and bumbling and vulnerable. And maybe it’s that little kid inside these characters—who do things we think are obviously counterproductive when they’re in danger—that is reminding us of the shadows we once knew, the ones were wrought with terror.

G.K. Chesterton has written that “fairytales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairytales tell children that dragons can be killed.” And, indeed, most suspense novels and films end well: the Scary Person has been killed or imprisoned, justice has been done, swords can be sheathed. Our Stupid Characters has been rescued or, in spite of everything, manages to rescue themselves.

Maybe confronting our own fears of the dark, of the unknown, of the mysterious through the actions of other people helps us understand those fears, helps us make friends with that terrorized little kid inside each of us, helps us shore up the rational appropriate responses to danger we need for survival.

And maybe, just maybe, yelling at the book or the television is our assurance to that kittle kid inside that we have their back.