Why Are People So Handy in Movies?

You may have noticed that in films, and on television, it seems as if anyone and everyone, at need, suddenly becomes exceedingly proficient at carpentry, plumbing, electrical work and more specialized activity such as auto repair as well. Thus does, for example, Randy Dupree burn down part of his hosts' living room, and then (as we see in a montage, of course) in very short order restore it beautifully in spite of his not having been identified as practiced or even learned any of the relevant trades or crafts, and indeed the whole premise of the story his being a lazy, unfocused fool incapable of holding down the most mundane job for any length of time.

One would never know from such material that people take years to learn the trades of carpenter, plumber, electrician before they can do them professionally, and spend a lifetime mastering them (and that auto repair today is not what it was in 1955). Instead one would think them things that "everyone does" as a matter of course, the more in as, in contrast with many other misrepresentations of reality that get much more attention (such as the ceaseless caviling about Hollywood casting attractive people--at least until recently) this one gets almost no acknowledgment whatsoever from the commentariat. Still, it can seem telling of a great many things about Hollywood. Not the least of them is the ignorance of a great many of its writers and other "creatives" about the large and small things of life (don't buy that crap about how much "research" they do), which is profound enough that they don't know how ignorant they are, and this state continuing the more easily in this state because of just how much they simply write from other fiction they have seen rather than going on actual knowledge or experience of the world. This would seem to be reinforced by their propensity to conjure up omnicompetent figures, because of how unlikely skills are convenient for the advancement of their less than half-baked plots, and the too little acknowledged reality that so much creative activity is wish-fulfillment for them--and if they are at all successful, their audience--not least in regard to how capable they really are.

Still, it seems to me that this is far from all that is going on here, and there are at least two more aspects of the matter worth mentioning. The more obvious is that Hollywood presents such tasks as tasks "anyone can do" simply because they don't think much of them--not simply because of their ignorance of what goes into a piece of well-executed carpentry, for example, but plain and simple social snobbery. We live in a society which, tirelessly offering meritocratic justifications for extreme inequality, holds that occupation can be reliably correlated with intelligence (a priori the doctor is "smarter" than the nurse, let alone the janitor), and those who "work with their hands" rank lower on that scale than those who "work with their brains" (as if those who work with their hands didn't need their brains to tell their hands what to do!), such that those who work with their hands would be doing something else "for a living" if they were really intelligent--and their work not requiring great intelligence, "anyone" able to do it, especially from the standpoint of those who think in terms of skills in terms of prowess rather than learning, such as their social betters, who, if they can write software or sit behind a desk barking orders can surely do what a carpenter or plumber can do. (That Hollywood's writers' jobs have them working on sets full of stage workers whose practicing the relevant crafts is indispensable to the productions they work on does not disabuse them of such stupidities says a lot about how little interest they take in even their immediate surroundings and the people in them--identifying upward, with the Big Name Producer they hope to be rather than the working people whose lot they share.)

The other aspect of the matter, connected with this but subtler, is the way in which our Hollywood writers present "auto-subtopia" as the human norm--"everyone" a car owner living in a large, detached, home. Those who have cars and houses of that kind are obviously not all masters of the relevant skills, but there is somewhat more opportunity for them to learn something of those skills, and room for illusions about how much they have learned, than is the case with people who do not own vehicles, and live in apartments, especially rental apartments. The statistics indicate that such persons are a small minority of the population in the U.S. (one-sixth of the population), but small numbers are not the reason for their marginalization here. Rather it is that they are marginalized socially--people who live in apartments, especially when they do so not as people transitioning between one phrase of life and another (young people who have left their parents' home but aren't yet settled in one of their own, "divorced dads," etc.), or the occasional resident of a really luxurious city penthouse, but people who have known no way of life but car-less rental apartment living tending to be urban and relatively poor and therefore of no account so far as society and its "artists" are concerned. So it went in the pandemic, when the do-nothingism government favored and got hit the transit rider and the apartment dweller particularly hard. And so it goes in the crap that Hollywood smears across our screens.