I think it’s something of a rectangle/square situation. It is possible for a Moment of Recognition to be a GSM; however, not all GSMs are Moments of Recognition.

I’m still confused about whether there can be multiple GSMs in a single movie. If there is more than one main character (R+J, The Shining), do they each have a GSM? If the title has a lot of information in it (The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring), is it a GSM each time the character figures part of it out?

As such, they identify the Moment of Recognition in a great variety of narratives (getting examples from the book would require digging it out of a stack of boxes right now, but I certainly recall the authors’ fondness for the Moment of Recognition). Do you suppose the Ghost Ship Moment should encompass only ham-fisted or clumsy versions of the trope, or appearances in pop narratives, or is GSM just a good catchier name for the general Moment of Recognition?

On the topic of GSM: Love the simplest definition! The main character catches up with what the audience understands is an obvious truth. This allows for the “genre awareness clause” as well as titular acknowledgement and situational discovery! Admittedly, this more broad definition would hinge considerably on an assumption of what the audience *should* know going into a movie.

One of the earlier examples is illustrative: In “The Shining” we know this is a horror film. That’s pretty much a given regardless of how much you know about the story. So the CLASS A GSM would be the first moment the lead characters realize they’re in a horror story. That moment is debatable, but I think Danny on the tricycle with the two girls gives brings you a solid GSM if you consider him the lead.

But what it you know “The Shining” is a ghost story? Well, Danny’s still works as a GSM. But if you consider Wendy the lead, hers truly would have to be when she’s running all about the Overlook and seeing the ghosts. (Because even when Danny is injured by the scary woman, she’s still thinking of a practical solution: 1.) There’s a crazy lady in the hotel and 2.) Jack did it!)

So the difficulty does arise when you try to ascertain what the expectations of the audience should be, unless you set up all GSM’s as an equation.

1.) If “The Shining” is a horror movie, Wendy’s GSM is when Danny is injured. She comes to the understanding the audience has had from the beginning

2.) If “The Shining” is a ghost story, Wendy’s GSM is damn near the very end of the picture.

As stated many times, the more “formulaic” the screenplay, the easier a concrete GSM. In “Mannequin”, your expectations are managed early on to expect a mannequin to come to life – if not by the title/trailers, then by the plot itself. When Kim Catrell starts yapping incessantly, McCarthy reaches the audiences level of understanding.

I do believe there are different classes of GSMs and I’m looking forward to reading everyone’s further definition of the term. But again, I’m hoping the root is kept simple: “The main character catches up with what the audience understands is an obvious truth.”

However, this does raise the hilarious – and by hilarious, I mean deeply uncomfortable – possibility of locating a Ghost Ship Moment in a holocaust movie. “Wait, they’re going to put us in CAMPS?” And this in turn points to a potential weakness of the new system, because the GSM in Schindler’s List is not the moment when the main character realizes he’s in a holocaust movie, it’s the moment when he makes eye contact with Ben Kingsley, and says “You know, I should make some sort of… some sort of list…” The moment in a movie where the main characters catch up with the title of the movie has a very specific flavor, and deserves to have a label. Maybe we need to distinguish between a “weak” and a “strong” GSMs, the idea being that every film has a weak GSM, even if it’s at the very start of the film, but only films like Ghost Ship or Snakes on a Plane (or, say, Don’t Tell Mom – The Babysitter’s Dead) have strong GSMs too. Cases where the weak and strong GSM don’t fall at the same point would probably be very interesting, if any exist.

We could also posit a theoretical anti-GSM, in which information provided by the title of the movie turns out to be patently incorrect. Like if you had a movie called “Murder – in Space!” where it turns out that all the astronauts actually died of natural causes.

“The Ghost Ship Moment is when the main character of the movie realizes what genre he/she is in.”

Horror is the easy example. When the pretty girl realizes there’s a killer on the loose, that’s the GSM.

In Columbo, there is no GSM, because Columbo is a detective. He EXPECTS to be in a mystery. On the other hand, a lot of Murder She Wrote involves Jessica stumbling into a murder investigation. Those ARE GSMs, because even though it ALWAYS HAPPENS, it’s always a surprise when she has a mystery to solve.

So by this new definition, Miracle does NOT have a Ghost Ship Moment, because the players know they’re in a sports movie to begin with. They don’t know the ending that we know, but the genre is never in doubt.

Jurassic Park’s GSM is when the dinosaurs ESCAPE, because that’s when the characters know they’re going to be in an action-adventure film.

Spider-man’s GSM is when he first starts to fight crime, because that’s when he knows he’s in a superhero film.

Romeo and Juliet’s GSM is when Romeo learns Juliet is dead (fake dead) and resolves to kill himself. (Or MAYBE when he kills Tybalt, because that’s when the love story starts to turn bad, right?)

In The Rock, the GSM is when Nicolas Cage learns there’s a hostage crisis, because that’s when he realizes there’s an action movie going down.

However, under this new definition, some of my examples in the post wouldn’t apply. I’m going to have to think about this.

I’m sure there must be a term for a moment in a narative where the character finds out something that the reader/audience has knowledge before but I wouldn’t always call those a GSM.

Take for example every episode of Columbo. You, the audience, knows at the start who did it, Columbo proves it or works it out over the course of the show.
Is it a GSM when he works it out? I don’t think so.

!m!

I definitely understand where you’re coming from, wanting to look at the movie in a vacuum, as if there’s no posters, no trailers, no DVD packaging to give the central premise away. But sadly, being completely spoiler-free isn’t an option in a lot of cases. My girlfriend says that when she say T2, she honestly didn’t know Arnold was a good guy until he started protecting John Connor, but she’s an exception.

@Gab – You, madam, are raising some excellent points. I’m gonna address ‘em in two parts.

Re: Romeo and Juliet, the issue is, “Can a GSM be something a character DECIDES, not something a character LEARNS.” It is totally true that in almost all the examples cited, the character realizes something about their situation (“The world really is going to end in 2012!”), and that’s the GSM. But… I’d say in Ghostbusters, when Bill Murray proposes, “Hey, let’s go into business for ourselves,” that’s a GSM. Everyone in the audience knew the movie was about people who fight ghosts. When they embark on this plan, it’s the GSM.

Another example: in Weekend At Bernie’s, the two guys go to their boss’s house to discover him dead. The GSM is a little later, when one of them proposes, “Why don’t we just pretend he didn’t die!”

Or in Fight Club, the GSM is when Brad Pitt says, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” Once again, a character comes up with an IDEA, not gains knowledge about his situation.

I realize I’m maybe expanding the definition, but I feel okay about this. The GSM is all about the audience knowing more than the characters. So if you know the character is going to make a momentous decision or have a life-changing idea, that’s fair game.

So I’m still maintaining that R&J has a GSM. I say MIGHT, because now I’m thinking that maybe in cases where the audience receives partial information it might not count. For instance, American Beauty reveals at the very beginning that its main character will die. So theoretically, Kevin Spacey dying is the GSM. And yet, I feel like it violates the spirit of the thing. We don’t know HOW and WHY he will die, which is clearly the mystery a lot of the movie hinges on. So Lester’s death isn’t a GSM, so much as a revelation. It completes the plot, not tells the characters what we already know. (And of course, Kevin Spacey never really LEARNS he’s going to die – he just dies.)

And let’s go back to Fight Club – the first thing we see in Brad Pitt holding Ed Norton at gunpoint. Theoretically, this establishes a GSM for the rest of the film, which works its way back (forward) to this scene. But the scene is so cryptic that it doesn’t reveal much. It’s a tease. Similarly, we know the relationship in Romeo and Juliet is going to end poorly. But we don’t know HOW. So Shakespeare isn’t exactly giving the game away when he foretells their deaths.

And in a similar category, I don’t think the Shawshank Redemption has a GSM. Yes, we know someone is going to be “redeemed.” But we don’t know how, so this hint of how the movie is going to end doesn’t reach the level of GSM. It’s a hint, not specific knowledge about the plot.

So I don’t know, I’m on the fence. A part of me says that WE know Romeo and Juliet are in a tragedy, they don’t. When Romeo goes to buy the poison, that’s a GSM – he makes a decision to do what we knew from the beginning he was going to do. But another part of me says that if there is a GSM, it’s them meeting and falling in love. Everything after that, we can only guess at, even if we know part of how it ends.

Of course, I’ll remind everybody here that the GSM is really about horror movies, big dumb action movies, sci-fi movies, etc. Movies that are about something unlikely that the characters never in a million years expect will happen to them. I enjoy trying to apply the concept to other movies. But it’s not unexpected that things becomes murky when you go into radically different genres.

I’d argue that the GSM in _R&J_ is the Prince’s speech at the end, when the families LEARN about the suicides and such. The two main characters don’t discover that they commit suicide, they plan it out themselves and do it. Juliet’s actual suicide isn’t a GSM for Romeo because he offs himself before she wakes up, ergo he dies without knowing the truth (in the original version- we’re ignoring Bas Lurman, here) (although that change did bring a whole new dynamic to the end…); and her killing herself upon finding him is just an event, and it isn’t based on irony- he’s really dead. I suppose her discovering him DEAD as opposed to waiting (and breathing) could be a GSM, but it’s kind of pushing it for me: I don’t really think it’s ironic, it’s just uber sad (or tragic, haha). But I’m also iffy on whether any of that counts as a GSM because I feel like there is still a back-and-forth in the definitions ^up there^ between whether it has to be a main character experiencing it or not for it to count. If it must be a main character, I’d say _R&J_ has none, nor do a lot of Shakespeare’s other tragedies. Like _Othello_- I’d argue the main character isn’t Othello but Iago, and he (duh) knows full well what’s going on as he’s manipulating everybody. The dramatic irony in _Othello_ comes into play (HAH!) at the end when the survivors figure out his plot- so does it still count as GSM? Or _Julius Caesar_, which is about Brutus, but the dramatic irony centers around the title- supporting- character because he insists on going out, even though he was warned about the Ides of March and his wife had scary scary dreams and such. The GSM there is, “Et tu Brute?” (basically- as soon as he realizes they’re about to stab him). Point is, Willie sometimes puts the dramatic irony in the lap(s) of supporting characters, so do those instances still count as GSMs? And no, I’m not saying it’s always that way- _King Lear_, _The Merchant of Venice_, the dramatic irony does center around the main character. Others, too. E.g. every time there is gender bending.

BUT BUT BUT!!! His histories, they were contextualized back then the way _Miracle_ was for its own contemporaries, right? _Miracle_ was about a widely publicized event that everybody knew the outcome of, and the elite and intended audiences of Willie’s histories would have at least had a vague idea of how things would go down because they were about former British monarchs. I think this ties into the question of how much the audience knows and from what. The audiences of _Miracle_ and _Henry the VIII_ didn’t know the plot because of the titles, but because the plots had already happened IRL around them (to an extent). And really, Willie’s histories and _Miracle_ are kind of iffy for me in that those don’t really involve dramatic irony, per say, so much as just a general knowledge of how the events are going to unfold.

And no, I’m not an expert on Shakespeare- I’ve just read the complete works over the course of hs and college, so some are fresher in my mind than others. As such, any debunking of my ramblings is welcome and appreciated.

And that’s all I have for now… Yup.

I see what you are saying about outside influence on the movie. I guess I’m trying to evaluate whether to take just the film as is for all the information you have as a viewer. These days, the marketing & trailers seem just as important at establishing the film in your mind as to what is going to happen.
I guess cause I write anyway, I’m coming from the point of view that the story is all that maters, and the audiences expectations are not really setup for a GSM, but I am now not sure.

Yes Snakes on a Plane is a huge GSM for all the characters, but is it when the first snake appears and kills someone or after that event? Hmmmm….

With ST2, I think there are actually 2 GSMs. The actual attack because Kirk is merrily on his way to investigate problems, had some garbled communications and a few odd things, but nothing that makes him know.
They meet the Reliant ‘It’s one of ours, everything it pretty normal.’ BANG!!! ‘No it isn’t!!!!’

Then the viewscreen reveal is another, I just thought it through again, because we’ve established during an earlier conversation with Khan, Chekov & Tyrell that Khan tried to murder Kirk and is an old enemy.
I was going to say that the viewscreen reveal could only be one if you were a ST fan, but the narative of the film essablishes who Khan is anyway.

It does make me wonder if a GSM even has to be a synergy between audience and character. If you have some earlier knowledge about it then, it can happen, but if you don’t know, then it’s just something happening to the character. No GSM.

I guess it’s also possible for some people during the course of the film to work out there is something afoot and some not too then when it is revealed to the character some people will get the GSM and others will not.

(MORE SPOLIER TASTIC ALERTS!!!)

How about this one in 12 Monkeys.

(Seriously, don’t read this if you’ve not seem 12 Monkeys it will ruin it)

Bruce Wills constantly has flashbacks from his childhood about a man being gunned down in front of him.
You get towards the end of the movie and he slowly puts on a particular diguise. At that point, the audience suddenlly realises whats going on but Bruce doesn’t, the GSM emerges. Bruce’s character hits the deck in front of his child self, GSM resolves.

I don’t think I’m done with this yet.

!m!

The Sixth Sense is also a good example. A twist is NOT a GSM. In fact, by definition, a GSM should NOT surprise the viewer. If you didn’t know it was coming, it’s not a GSM. (If there is a GSM in the Sixth Sense, it’s the late scene where the kid finally tells Bruce Willis he sees dead people. That counts if you say Bruce is clearly the main character.)

Where we disagree seems to be, you don’t think information you get from outside the actual film itself should count. For instance, you say there’s no GSM in Rocky, because the writer has no intention of letting the audience know in advance what the story is about. But I’d say the writer’s intentions are irrelevent. The large majority of viewers know that this is a movie about a nobody boxer who gets to fight the heavyweight champion of the world. When Rocky learns that too, it’s the GSM.

The thing about your definition is it seems to exclude a lot of movies I think have strong GSMs. For instance, Jurassic Park. The audience never sees the dinosaurs until Alan Grant does. (There’s an attack at the beginning, but you never see what’s doing the attacking.) You would argue that since the writers have not revealed the dinosaurs to the audience, there’s no GSM. But I’d say that everyone KNOWS there will be dinosaurs, just like everyone who went to Snakes on a Plane knows there will be snakes on that plane. Saying the first movie doesn’t have a GSM and the second movies does seems a little nitpicky. (Although I think we could maybe classify GSMs in two ways – movies in which the audience is shown something explicitly, and movies in which the audience can be safely assumed to know the premise before it begins.)

And the thing is, even by YOUR definition, there IS still a GSM in Rocky. Because WE get to see Apollo come up with his plan and select the particular boxer. If your definition is, “the audience knows something is happening, but one or all of the main characters do not know,” then Rocky qualifies.

The only difference between your and my definitions is, I’m arguing that GSMs are established by your expectations BEFORE THE MOVIE STARTS, and you feel like they EMERGE DURING THE MOVIE, as we are given info. In the Wrath of Kahn, the GSM emerges when Kahn appears to Chekov. It’s RESOLVED when he appears to Kirk. In a horror movie, the GSM emerges when the killer first appears. It’s resolved when the main character realizes there is a killer out there. In Rocky, the GSM emerges when Apollo selects Rocky. It’s resolved when Rocky is told about the opportunity. Does this sum up your position?