Tropes: Stuffed in the Fridge

Tropes are all around us, on TV, in books, film, and video games. They  allow us to compartmentalize concepts so that our brains don't have to waste too much processing power over-thinking certain ideas, which is both good and bad. After all, when two guys show up with bad Italian/Brooklyn accents in nice suits, our brain tells us that they are gangsters and we don't have to over think it. The authors, directors, and character actors of the world would tell us this is a good thing. After all, these two goons will probably be killed off in the next scene by our hero and the audience doesn't need twelve minutes of back story to understand that Goon #2 joined the crime family after his mother's store was tragically lost in a fire and he had nowhere to turn for money but the crime boss that ran his old neighborhood, thus embroiling him in a life of crime that has caused part of his humanity to wear away even as he still regrets the terrible things that he has had to do, and all the while all he wanted to be was a baker. (Consequently, I think I also just wrote the biography of the Cake Boss.) See, even writing all that down in a semi-sarcastic manner took up more time and attention than might really be deserving of a character that will get a total of thirty seconds screen time. Tropes allow us to enjoy a story without getting bogged down in the minutia of what we are missing. Because otherwise, you get The Song of Ice and Fire, and we all know how long it takes George R.R. Martin to write one of those books.

However, tropes aren't always great either. After all, the Italian American League might have a problem with Goon #1 and Goon #2 being typical Tony Soprano-like figures. Not all Italians are in the mafia, after all. Similarly, not all women exist just to be tragically killed and left in household appliances... What am I talking about? I'm talking about the trope called "Stuffed in the Fridge," which is when a hero's loved one, usually a wife/girlfriend is killed in a gruesome manner and then left around for the hero to find and tragically cry over. This cliche than gives the hero something fight for and becomes an easy way for the audience to compartmentalize what drives the hero to do the extreme things he is forced to do. Now, technically this trope can apply to any family member: mother, father, brother, sister, wife, pet dog Skippy, etc. However the dead character is more likely to be a woman and the hero character is more likely to be a man. If you don't believe me, check out Gail Simone's website Women in Refrigerators for a complete list of women in comics that have been killed off for no other reason than to motivate the men in their lives to do something.

This is going to take a lot of boxes of baking soda.

The trope itself comes from a now famous Green Lantern comic, where the villain, Major Force, kills Kyle Rayner's girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt, and literally stuffs her into a refrigerator so that Kyle can find her mutilated body, like some two month old pastrami left in the back of the fridge. Like I said before, tropes have their places and they aren't all bad, but there is something particularly negative about this one. First off, it is lazy writing. If you want to motivate your characters than put a little more thought into the process that, "pissed-off over dead girlfriend." Secondly, it uses women characters as nothing more than cheap props who live and die at the whim of their male counterparts. Whenever a writer needs a quick motivating factor there always seems to be some vanilla girlfriend/wife character hanging around to kill off. I mean otherwise that character would just get in the hero's way, wanting him to settle down and be domesticated and all, because everyone knows that's all women want... right? (That was sarcasm folks) Basically the trope puts the female character at the beckon call of the male hero. She's not there to be a fully formed character, but a pretty face on a photograph that is clenched angrily in the righteous fist of our burly man-hero, as he wrestles with desire for vengeance and his guilt over not being able to save his bland, pretty, vaguely characterized love interest. This is a trope and a way of thinking that is all too, unfortunately, common, especially in comic books.

Maybe that's why I am enjoying the irony of Agent Carter. (Wait, did he just switch into doing a television review?) Peggy Carter, or Captain America's girlfriend, is proving very much that she will not be so quietly stuffed into some womanly appliance. The irony of the show is that it is the big strong hero, Captain America, who is in fact dead (well she thinks so anyway,) and it's his death that is one of the driving factors in Peggy's personal crusade. In this instance the hero is gone, (he may not be stuffed in a fridge but he is in a place that's plenty cold,) and it's the "unimportant," girlfriend character that is left to do the ass-kicking. It's a parallel that was made pretty stark in the last episode, "Bridge and Tunnel," where the entire show was interspersed with snippets of the fictionalized Captain America Adventure Hour radio serial, featuring a typical damsel in distress character that only exists so that the fictionalized fictionalized Captain America can save her from those 'damn Nazis.'

Carter even gets her own, "Refrigerator" moment, when she discovers her roommate dead in bed with a bullet straight through her temple. It was a pretty textbook example of the trope, as well. The gruesome yet pointless death of a person close to the hero, meant to serve as nothing more than a motivating factor to further that hero's guilt/anger and story, except that in this instance, the hero is a woman. Unfortunately the person who was "Stuffed in the Refrigerator" was also a woman.

Feminism

I will admit that, Agent Carter, isn't perfect. After all Peggy Carter is so busy being brilliant and infallible that she has almost no flaws to speak of as she outsmarts every sexist man in her office. She is not a hero like Tony Stark, who can be arrogant, or Peter Quill, who can be kind of an idiot at times. For better or worse, because she is Marvel's first leading lady, she has to be better than human, which is both commendable and a little sad. I mean, from a 2015 perspective it is pretty easy to be on Carter's side as she is faced with a brand of 1940's sexism that is so blatant it would make J. Jonah Jameson feel ashamed. After all, we may waggle our finger when Carter's boss makes her do filing work or get everyone a cup of coffee, but we still don't bat an eyelash when Black Widow is put in a skintight cat suit. Yet, it is hard for me to be too harsh on the morals of Agent Carter. After all, they may not be perfect but at least she isn't occupying space behind the milk carton in the back of Captain America's ice-box.

It's a Trope: Morse Code

There is even a version of Morse in the (now dead)
Star Wars Expanded Universe called Mon
Calamarian Blink Code. Leia is better at it than Han.

Welcome to the first installment of a new series I am going to be doing involving noticeable tropes in TV, movies, and books that have always bugged me. I want to explore them, where they came from, and how based in reality they actually are. To start off this series, I decided to tackle one thorn that has really been sticking in my side since childhood, Morse Code.

I was once again alerted to the trope of Morse Code while watching Interstellar, a movie which I have already said enough about, but there is one thing that I left out of my review. The crux of the plot revolves around Matthew McConaughey communicating with his daughter via Morse Code, and seeing as how the move takes place at least sixty years in the future in a world that has been almost desolated by climate change, and has no standing army and barely any government, I have to wonder how many people in that future actually know Morse Code? Yet for the purposes of Interstellar, the Morse Code usage is one of the more believable aspects, as the message is actually being sent by an artificially intelligent robot, via McConaughey, which I can (at least) believe has a program from Morse Code translation somewhere in its databanks. It is also being received as one long continuous and repeating message, which means McConaughey's daughter has the time to open an old Morse Code book and translate every dot and dash there is. However, the use of Morse Code in other media, especially when we talk about science fiction always seemed less plausible to me.

For official purposes, Morse Code was retired as an International Standard of Communication in 1999, and in 2007 the FCC even dropped their Morse Code proficiency standards for amateur radio operators (which was the last group that seemed truly enthusiastic about actually using it.) Some navies, including the United States Navy, occasionally uses the code for signal lights, but learning it is not required for most US military personnel. Obviously the language peeked with the invention of the telegraph, but I can't imagine its ever going to experience such a time of popularity again. Thus, when Captain Kirk uses Morse to communicate with Scotty, I find it a little hard to believe that, in the 23rd century, they are both fluent enough in what is, essentially, a dead language to be able to relay any meaningful message to each other.

"It's seems as if we're getting a message for the Americans in old Morse Code"
"Aren't we in the Iraq Desert under siege by technologically superior aliens?
Where did we get an old telegraph from? And what is the likelihood that any
of our survivors would have the technical proficiency with Morse Code to
even understand the American's complex battle plan as relayed by dots
and bloody dashes. That's just absurd."

Even worse, when TV shows and movies do show people using Morse Code, anyone (in real-life) who actually knows Morse Code usually notes that the actors are usually just randomly tapping at a speed that is much faster than most users could interpret. It gets even less believable when the receiver begins reading the message as fast as he/she is receiving it. The fastest operator could send about 35 words per minute, and anyone who was masterfully fluent in Morse could decode a message in their head at up to 40 words per minute. Bear in mind that those records were set back in 1942, at the height of Morse Code usage. So it is completely unlikely that most people, (especially modern or future users) whom we assume only have basic training in Morse Code could even send more than 10 words per minute, let alone decode them on the fly.

Subversions of the Morse Code trope often come in forms of comedy. Most notably on The Simpsons during the episode Mountains of Madness, when Homer and Mr. Burns are trapped in a cabin together. Mr. Burns tries typing out a distress signal on an old telegraph machine, but the audience learns that the other end is connected to a telegraph machine in a museum. No one gets the message. Another notable subversion comes from the The Office (US) when Jim and Pam admit to attending a Morse Code class just to use the obscure knowledge to mess with Dwight in the episode, The Cover Up. In fact, (in my opinion,) the trope is often best employed as a subversion. A character takes time to tap out a long message and the receivers all stand around looking one another because nobody  knows what the hell it means.

Along those lines it could also be argued that when ever a character uses S-O-S, that they are actually not conforming to the trope. As S-O-S is the most common and well known use of Morse Code, with it being only three dots, three dashes, three dots (. . . - - - . . .) However, S-O-S has a lot of misnomers attached to it. For instance, it does not stand for "Save Our Ship," or "Save Our Souls," or anything. S-O-S was picked because it was determined to be the easiest code to use as a distress transmission, so easy that even a layman would be able to do it. Additionally, it is not really S-O-S, but actually S-O-S-O-S-O-S, etc... You were expected to send out the code alternating between three dots and three dashes as long as you were able. Thus, maybe you can make an argument that many TV shows and movies use it incorrectly, but it is still hard to consider it a trope, as it can be argued that S-O-S is more vernacular than any other Morse Code transmission, at least for modern humans.

Pointing a finger at Star Trek when talking about this code is easy. Even though Starfleet is a military-like organization it is still unreasonable to believe that Starfleet Academy teaches classes in a code language that is over 300+ years old, and based upon an alphabet of one language of one planet when a Federation that has thousands of member worlds and species. One could argue that, "maybe they are using an updated code," and that, "there are still some people in the US military today who still know Morse," even if they are a rare breed. The franchise does sometimes attempt to explain it away, most notably because Uhura is a communications specialist, or because two characters know the language from playing in an holographic program based on the 1930's. Regardless, Star Trek is not the first and not the last to perpetrate this sin.

Interstellar is just the latest incarnation of this trope, but I am sure there will be more. Whenever a ship loses communication or someone has to send a warning without talking it doesn't take much effort on the part of the writers to have their character drum on some pipes, wrap their fingers on a table, or blink in rapid succession. Tropes, by their very nature are a sort of "easy-out"for writers and audience members. Despite not knowing the code, most book readers, TV watchers, and movie goers understand what it is and what it is about. Morse Code, like other tropes, is a short-hand that writers and audience members agree upon, even if it is not always believable.

If McConaughey or Captain Kirk, or Mr. Burns want to communicate via dots and dashes, we will buy into it, especially in terms of our heroes. We want to believe that the heroic characters are better than us, smarter than us, have knowledge we don't have. After all, that's why their heroes. Besides what writer or audience member wants to sit through a five minute explanation of how two character developed their own language of knocking and scratching sounds from that time they spent together back in summer camp when they were both in grade school. Sometimes it's just easier to say... "Yeah, okay... Morse Code," because ITS A TROPE.