Is how movies and TV deal with conflict changing how we deal with it in everyday life?

Most movies and TV shows annoy me. Not necessarily because of the acting or dialogue or the plot structure or plausibility or the direction or production values or the cinemaphotography or almost anything else. No, a movie or show can be good, even great on those scores. What bugs me more is the script and in particular how they treat conflict. And it may potentially affect how we go about resolving disputes between us as individuals all the way through to countries choosing war over negotiation. 

First up, I’m not talking about resolving a conflict through the use of overt violence; the movies and TV excel at shoot-’em-up solutions to conflict. I’m talking about how most dramas treat interpersonal conflict. It’s when two people, for example, are speaking to each other, their voices begin to rise, clearly in conflict and then after a bit of argy-bargy — maybe 20 or 30 seconds — one of them storms off after landing a ‘clanger’. The span of argument is barely a few exchanges, in some cases. That clanger might be some ‘bombshell’ revelation, some dark secret finally revealed that we’re supposed to take as a game changer — though we don’t get to find out immediately because they’ve stormed off. You would have seen this countless times. (I find myself talking back to the characters, mouthing “cop out”, “pathetic”, “weak”, “gutless”.)

Rather than arguing it out, going back and forth, the writers — forever obsessed with drama — will have one person drop that clanger and then exit stage left, often melodramatically, supposedly leaving the audience gobsmacked. And wanting more. It’s often used as a cliffhanger, designed to have the audience figuratively on the edge of its seat, ‘desperate’ to find out what happens next. TV scriptwriters do the gobsmack because the studio wants you back next episode. If it’s American even more so because almost invariably American series take twice to four times longer to tell a story than do British or Australian series. But, I digress. Getting a player to throw in the towel and do the walk out, all guns blazing after dropping some killer line, which the other player can’t respond to, is deliberate. It keeps the show’s rating up. There’s just no interest in resolving anything in the short run.

How often do you see two actors nutting out a problem, going over an argument, back and forth, until they sort it out, prepared to take the time to listen to each other? It just doesn’t happen, does it?

And you know why? It’s boring. Drama always trumps resolving something in the now, which can often be painstaking. You have to set aside the time and be willing to listen to each other, to love each other enough, care for each other enough to take the time to resolve it.

To the extent that life imitates art, how do movies and TV series influence how we resolve conflicts — or don’t? In the real world, it takes time. Something the movies don’t have. TV series could, but they generally don’t, as far as I can tell. I don’t watch enough TV series to know; maybe you do and maybe you can share ones where the players do take time to nut things out. I’m open to the possibility that out there somewhere there’s a show or two where that happens, where the writers have eschewed the dramatic for the often slow process of reasoning out a problem? I’d be surprised though. In movies, just about no chance. 

So what are we left with? Movies and TV shows are influential. Millions of us watch them. We learn from them. It’s not just that children mimic their favourite characters, adults do too.

So, my question is: are movies reinforcing behaviour that sees conflict as something you walk out on? That the killer one-liner and the walk-out is the how-to-do conflict? Maybe that sitting down and hashing it out is just too slow for people and that it is easier to just ditch the relationship? The 24/7 news cycle certainly doesn’t help. The news moves on to something else when it runs out of ‘blood’, so to speak. I suspect mainstream news reporting doesn’t want conflict to end. It’s their bread and butter. Worse still, the 15-second grab of two decades ago, is barely three seconds now. It’s as if we all have the attention span of a gnat! Perhaps we do, after all. Which means we couldn’t possibly deal with conflict in an actual conversation longer than a cup of coffee!

 I’m interested to know your experience.