How to put on a seatbelt

I had a very active weekend in terms of my recently expressed theory that movie characters never wear seatbelts, containing both an extreme proof of that theory and a disproof of it. An extreme disproof, I suppose, in that it was an absolute disproof.

First came the extreme proof. On Saturday night my wife and I rewatched the ridiculous but super enjoyable 1996 action movie The Long Kiss Goodnight, starring Geena Davis and directed by her husband, Renny Harlin. I was all but certain this was before Cutthroat Island knocked them off the map as a creative power team, but that actually came out a year earlier. Somehow they still made this, and we should be grateful they did.

Remember how I mused what would happen if one of these non-seatbelt-wearing characters got into a car accident, thereby drawing attention to the non-plot-based decision to leave them unprotected? Well that actually happens in The Long Kiss Goodnight. The traumatic head injury that starts to bring Davis' Samantha Caine's memory back results from her being thrown through the windshield after hitting a deer on snowy winter night. Obviously if you're wearing that seatbelt you stay in the car. (Which I suppose is a good thing for her, as the car immediately starts to burn.)

The thing is, we see her later riding in a car and she's still not wearing a seatbelt. No lessons learned? Certainly the lesson couldn't be "Good thing I wasn't wearing a seatbelt, otherwise I would have burned to death in my previous accident." That's some pretty Trumpian mask-denying logic right there. 

I had just about given up on the possibility of movie characters ever wearing seatbelts when I watched How to Build a Girl on Sunday night. This Beanie Feldstein vehicle, a clear homage to Almost Famous (and I don't just say that because The Next Picture Show podcast paired the two in their "classic film influences a new film" format), features one scene where Feldstein's character and her dad (Paddy Considine) ride in a car. I checked their shoulder area and yep! Seatbelts for both! I rubbed my eyes like a cartoon character who can't believe what he sees, then looked again, and they were still there.

If How to Build a Girl, set in the 1990s, really wanted to be an accurate representation of the era, the filmmakers certainly didn't watch The Long Kiss Goodnight to get a gauge on how people behaved back then.