Recently I’ve watched two movies that had giant plot holes. I watched them because the premises were interesting and I have respect for the actors.
The One I Love, 2014, starring Elizabeth Moss and Mark Duplass, was about a struggling couple who go to a counselor, played by Ted Danson. He sends them to a retreat where he’s reportedly had tremendous responses from previous couples. Cool, I thought. I kept waiting to find out how he managed to create exact replicas of the couple. Not replicants, mind you, but REAL people who looked, acted, and sounded in every way identical to the couple in question. There was something about them hitting notes on a piano to get the precise sounds but that was it. Where and how did those identical people come from??? Crickets there. So, (spoiler alert) it turns out that the copy couple is trapped there and until they can cause an irreparable rift between the incoming couple, they are stuck in this retreat place. And evidently, there’s a force field around the joint. Right. Why the therapist trapped them, we never find out. When they escape and go back to his office, it’s been cleared out.
The film, Infinite, stars Mark Wahlberg. It’s about this man who has some remarkable talents and skills he never trained for. It’s a fascinating premise. What he believes are dreams turn out to be memories of past lives. I suppose that because it’s Hollywood we have to have an evil organization set to destroy the world. They can’t bear to be constantly reincarnated since they remember everything all at once.  So they want to kill everybody and everything. For some unexplained reason, they believe blowing up the world is the solution to their problems. Might they not end up on some other planet? In any case, the story fell apart for me. I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief. There were some pretty cool Aikido scenes though.
I’ve been watching a series called Goliath with Billy Bob Thornton and enjoying it immensely. But every once in a while, I have to pause. Wait, I think, if someone gets killed in a hit and run and the guy who hit her calls the police to claim he was an eye witness and recalls the make, model, and license plate of the vehicle, and we see the van being crushed in a junkyard… wouldn’t the junkyard require proof of ownership and don’t they have records of all their demolished vehicles?
Maybe not. But here’s the point of this ramble about movies. As a novelist, you cannot get away with holes like that. You have to show or explain every little action. Indicate in a believable way why something is the way it is. We can’t get away with anything. We have Beta readers and editors who will flag plot holes. No Deus ex machina, thank you very much. But it seems to be okay in movies. Why are people so willing to jump over those holes?
So, my question to you (because I expect to be corrected) is have you come across a novel where you slammed the book shut because you got dropped into a plot hole the author never got you out of?
Also, if you watched any of the above and got some important pieces that I obviously missed, I’d be grateful to be set straight.