Plot holes in reality

By far the most tedious complaint about any given movie today is that it has “plot holes.” Technically, a plot hole is a contradiction or discrepancy in the actual storytelling that makes some part of the story logically impossible. These are not necessarily insurmountable—plenty of good movies have plot holes. But, in the way that the democratic spread of a technical concept always makes it stupider, the popular understanding of plot holes is that 1) they totally ruin entire movies and 2) consist of any unexplained detail in the story, no matter how minor.

This last point is key. Modern movie audiences both need everything spelled out for them and don’t pay attention, so even leaving out characters traveling between two points is sometimes called out as a plot hole. I wish I were making this up.

It occurred to me this morning while reading comments on the latest episode of an Unsolved Mysteries-type podcast that the plot hole has a close cousin in popular conspiracism—the “anomaly.”

Basic dictionary definitions of anomaly emphasize deviation from norms or expectations. Statisticians and scientists routinely talk about anomalies in their data, i.e, results they didn’t expect or that contradict the findings of similar research. But, as with plot hole, anomaly has a broader, looser, darker popular meaning. Read discussions of any recent event that has a conspiratorial angle on it and “anomalies” will pop up not as outlier data or unexpected details, but as trace elements of coverup, alteration or fabrication by Them, and evidence of hidden truths. This usage of anomaly is not coincidentally well suited to insinuation.

Both plot holes and anomalies may be minor unexplained details. The difference is that plot holes exist within the limited worlds conjured by storytelling or filmmaking and, unless the author invents an explanation as a patch, are simply mistakes or information too unimportant to bother about in the first place. An anomaly—as understood by the internet type scrubbing through footage of, say, the Charlie Kirk assassination one frame at a time—admits of explanation because it occurred in reality, limitless and limitlessly complicated. One only has to do good-faith research.

But, in actual practice, calling something an anomaly usually just creates permission to discard valid evidence because it isn’t perfect, to speculate and point fingers, or to venture entirely into a theory the conspiracist has already settled on. X is unexplained or unexpected, therefore A, B, and C.

Just an observation—perhaps more later. The aforementioned podcast episode was disappointingly weak for a generally good show, so this will probably be on my mind for a while. More than usual, anyway.

Addendum: An anomaly in written accounts or eyewitness testimony will usually be called a discrepancy, with almost identical results.