Quicksand, Mouse Holes and Other Movie Tropes from Childhood

Make-out Reef from Spongebob Squarepants

Source: Screenshot, Nickelodeon

Recently a reporter asked me to talk about the psychology of the Quicksand Meme. You may have seen these images from film of heroes sinking into quicksand. The meme says, “When I was a kid, I thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it is.”

I think a lot of us enjoy those memes because they ring true. When you are a kid, you learn about the world through the stories people tell you. They can be your dad’s story about how he punched the neighborhood bully, or the story of Wesley and Buttercup braving the Fire Swamp in the movie the PRINCESS BRIDE. You know that the PRINCESS BRIDE is a movie, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t expect to see things you can use inside a story. You might learn about loyalty or relationships or a rule of thumb like “never get into a land war with a Sicilian.” The line between facts in the “real world” and fiction are not really lines. They’re more like interpretations. Fiction is really imagination, and our imaginations are filled with realities and “what ifs.”

Here are some tropes that kids saw or heard about in the media when I was growing up:

1) Quicksand exists, and you will likely run into it if you are a hero.

2) Mice live in mouse holes. These are perfect little ovals right above the baseboards. Sometimes they have doors.

3) In high school, couples all drive their cars to the same spot at the same time to make out. These places are called things like Inspiration Point or Lovers’ Lane.

4) If you are at a party and get drunk, what you do is, “put a lampshade on your head.”

5) If you want to make out with your date, what you do is “pretend to run out of gas.”

6) You can tell someone is a pirate by their eyepatch and peg leg.

Now, before you tell me that quicksand or make-out parking lots do exist, let me be clear: I do know that. Each of these things exists to a certain degree (okay, mouse holes do not really have little doors, but you know what I mean). The make-out spot on TV's HAPPY DAYS was Inspiration Point (a name that I find endlessly delightful for a make-out spot). Inspiration Point is actually a place of natural beauty near Santa Barbara, CA. See the list of resources, below, for a list of best places to make out as well as the best fictional make-out spots.

The point is that when kids are trying to figure out how the world works, sometimes they encounter tropes that tend to exaggerate or twist the reality of these things. Yes, there are dark roads where couples go to make out. Yes, someone somewhere probably really pretended to run out of gas in order to find themselves alone with their date. But in popular culture, when something becomes a trope, it’s a kind of shorthand and kids can easily expect the world to look a bit different than it does.

I’ve never seen quicksand in real life. Actually, I have literally never seen any of the half dozen tropes I listed here happen in real life as stated above. Have you ever seen a person with a lampshade on their head when they got drunk? Maybe you have, but it’s not exactly a go-to move.

When Johnny Carson (kids, he’s the Jimmy Fallon of my childhood) used to do his monologue, he would mention things like quicksand, lampshades on the head, etc. This sprinkling of tropes throughout the culture reinforced the idea that adults saw the world that way.

When I was little, I watched the movie Godzilla, and I thought that Godzilla was a real creature who lived in Japan. I thought Japanese people just got used to Godzilla stomping around their cities. Maybe they had forecasts like, “cloudy with a 10% chance of Godzilla.”

Mock me if you will, but why shouldn’t I have thought that? I had visual evidence that Godzilla lives in Japan. I knew his origin story. I also knew he loved Diet Dr. Pepper – a fact I figured would be good to know if you needed to do some Godzilla-luring.

I love the human capacity for imagination. I love that we make up stories about quicksand and Godzilla. At one level, it’s all for fun and adventure.

Of course, movies and TV also have a way of teaching us some things that are really out there in the world we live in: romance, parties, mice and monsters. I’m grateful to the artists and the dreamers who’ve told me stories about all of this.

Resources

Here’s a list of the best places to make out in a car. Number 4 is indeed a “hill overlooking town,” aka Inspiration Point in Happy Days. https://www.complex.com/sports/2013/04/10-best-places-for-in-car-make-o…

The 13 Greatest Fictional Makeout Points: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&authuser=0&biw=1161&bih=661&tbm=isc…: