Dog-Shit Cookies: When Unnecessary Details Make Things Worse

One day, a teenage boy asked his father if he could see the newest R-rated movie in theaters.

The father said ‘No.’

The boy asked ‘Why?’

The father said ‘I’ve seen it; there is a scene of obscene violence, it will ruin the message of the movie for you.’

The boy said ‘But I’ve seen violent movies before, how is this worse?’

The father said ‘I’ll tell you tonight.’

That evening, the father pulled a dozen chocolate chip cookies from the oven and set them on the counter. ‘I made these using grandma’s recipe’ he said. ‘They’ll taste exactly like the ones she makes.’

The boy reached out to grab one, but the father stopped him. ‘There’s one catch. I added a pinch of dog shit to the batter. They cooked at 450*, so any bacteria is dead and they’re safe to eat, but you’d be eating them knowing that there’s poop in every bite. If you eat every single cookie, I’ll let you go see the movie.’

The boy was stunned ‘Why would you do that?!’ he asked, incredulous.

‘To make a point’ the father said ‘that one small detail, while technically safe, can ruin an entire experience.’

***

Kinda weird, right?

When I was in 5th grade (~2004), I made the mistake of watching the mini-series “Helen of Troy” (2003). It was a dramatic retelling of the story of Troy and the Trojan horse and Odysseus and Paris and all that jazz. Despite being familiar with the legend, I didn’t find the series particularly good.
And, somewhere in there, Helen was raped by one of her suitors.

That evening, I complained about it to my dad – that an otherwise mediocre story got cratered by unnecessary abuse – to which he responded with the above allegory.

If you asked me at the time, I probably would have told you that his story seemed a bit heavy handed and that I didn’t fully grasp the meaning behind it.
But now that I have a review website and my hobby is to tell you if a movie is or isn’t worth watching, I have a particularly rare opportunity to explain how and why specific details in a movie can be so detracting from the overall experience.

So let’s talk about the big three: nudity, cursing, and violence.
There are plenty of movies that are rated ‘R’ for any of those three alone, or a combination thereof.
And there are plenty of movies where those things fit just fine.

The entirety of the “John Wick” series is made of cursing and a truly impressive amount of violence. That’s practically the tagline for the trilogy. But here’s the thing: the John Wick series doesn’t pretend it’s anything other than violence and cursing. It’s a series that lays out its intent and stylings from the get-go, then gets going with them.

Similarly, in “The Interview,” there was a lot of cursing and many adult jokes, so when a crowd of topless women showed up, it didn’t feel out of place because the style of humor had already made it plenty clear that it was a bawdy flick that had no intention of being wholesome or family friendly.

Then we have turd-blossoms like “Stuber,” where there were very few jokes, sexual or otherwise, and then we were suddenly confronted with a very large, naked man, because the scene took place in the changing room of a male strip club. Not that it needed to – the conversation that scene focused around could have happened elsewhere, or the male strippers could all have been dressed in fuxedos (sic) or whatever. Nudity never came up again, no one referenced why we had to see a penis, and the character whose penis it was never returned. So why, other than shock value in a movie that was incredibly bland, did we need to see that?

And, to a smaller extent, “Anon” (2018) and “Logan” (2017) did something similar too. Both of them had ‘R’ ratings for various reasons, and both also included contextually-irrelevant scenes of bare-breasted women. Those women being naked didn’t add to the scenes, they didn’t improve the storytelling happening at the moment or develop the main characters. They were just there, in a way that didn’t mesh with any of the rest of the movie.
Now, I liked “Anon” and “Logan” both, but those unnecessary scenes stick out in my mind, not because I like breasts, but because they were so clearly out of place.

Here’s my point: when telling a story, your details need to fit. They need to be contextual.
A topless woman fits perfectly into the world of James Bond, a violent fight scene is right at home in the Bourne series, and make-a-sailor-blush cursing is expected dialog from Deadpool.
If your story isn’t particularly violent, yet you decide to include a scene of graphic dismemberment, it doesn’t add to the way the story was told, or how we feel about the characters. An inject like that is simply the story-teller childishly saying “Ha! Look what I got away with showing!” in the middle of an ‘R’ rated movie that already earned that rating for other reasons.

If the director’s goal was to get me to remember their work, then congrats, I do.
But it also makes things stick in my memory in a bad way too.
You have a limited amount of time and screen real-estate to tell me your story. Don’t ruin it with a tray of dog-shit cookies.