Life Imitates the Art of the Cliche

“Are you all right?”--a question asked of someone who has just been shot, mugged, bushwhacked or otherwise traumatized--is apparently unchallenged as the most inescapable cliche of the movies today.

But there are others. Writer Maury Green holds that a close second is “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Indeed it is ubiquitous. It most often occurs in supposedly smart dialogue between a man and a woman: He: “Your place or mine?” She: “What’s that supposed to mean?” As if she didn’t know.

Green recalls that he once heard it delivered four times in a single TV show. The show had four writers, he says, and each writer evidently put the line in once.

John Degatina observes that “Are you all right?” is not limited to action movies. “It’s like a fungus on all types of movies and TV shows; not just police-action dramas. For example, a couple lose their only child, and a half hour later the man asks his wife, ‘You OK?’ She should hit him with a frying pan, and say, ‘Of course, you idiot.’ Instead, she smiles bravely and touches his hand.”

J. Schwartz of Marina del Rey concedes that “Are you all right?” is foolish, but no more so than real-life cliches. “How about the man whose hat has been knocked off by a thrown snowball. He turns, sees the perpetrators (small boys) running away, and shouts ‘Come back here!’ How about the fellow passenger on a train or bus who sees that you are sitting on a newspaper and asks, ‘Are you reading that?’ ”

David Kolpacoff of El Cajon says, “Are you all right?” may be an absurd cliche, but he can testify from personal experience that it is exactly what people ask when you’ve been injured and are in no condition to evaluate your health. “In my case,” he says, “two car accidents and a construction mishap. I guess it replaces, ‘Where does it hurt?’ ”

Kolpacoff questions my judgment about another movie cliche--the wanton destruction of automobiles in chases. “There is no more graphic symptom of our wasteful society than the mass demolition of what appear to be brand-new cars in action movies,” I wrote.

“Come, now,” Kolpacoff says. “Isn’t that a little overwrought? Given that the movies are entertainment and that a certain portion of moviegoers love the demolition of fifty-thousand dollars worth of Fords and subsidize this by buying tickets, it can’t anymore be called waste than a fireworks display or the money that, say, went into the lavish costumes in the ‘Wizard of Oz.’ ”

A poor comparison. Fireworks are manufactured for the sole purpose of being exploded. That is their function. Destroying them is the fulfillment of their purpose. Costumes are made to be worn, and if they cannot be worn after the movie for which they’re made, they too have fulfilled their function.

Automobiles are made to transport people from one point to another--in comfort, in luxury, safely, at high speed, in style, in self-realization, in pride, economically, or whatever other way the owner wants to go. They cost from $8,000 to more than $100,000 each, and they are expected to last several years.

To demolish several such objects merely to provide a momentary thrill for moviegoers is waste, and nonetheless so because it is paid for by the moviegoers. Surely the Chinese, who have few cars, must see this wholesale destruction as wasteful, and quite unlike their own explosion of fireworks.

Speaking of chases, I am corrected in my recollection that in “The French Connection” the bad guy gets away from Gene Hackman after a chase in which Hackman races his car along a street paralleling a train route, “banging into other cars, missing pedestrians by inches, shattering his car against a concrete pier and otherwise wreaking havoc.”

“No, he didn’t (get away), Jack,” writes Alene Harris. “Gene Hackman shot and killed ‘the guy’ as he (the guy) ran down the steps of the elevated platform.”

John C. Kruize corroborates: “At the end of the famous car-subway chase the bad guy doesn’t get away. Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle catches up with the thug (played by Marcel Bozzuffi) at the base of the stairs leading up to the train platform, and shoots and kills him.”

Yes, I’m all right.