Walk down that road, but not in that road

As I was watching Craig Brewer's Song Sung Blue on the plane to Japan, I was reminded of an old movie trope that I find fairly inexplicable:

Why do movie characters always walk down the middle of the road?

I mean not always. Sometimes they use the sidewalk. But a lot more often than they should. And a million times more often than real human beings walk down the middle of the road.

Which is especially dumb for the characters in Song Sung Blue, though I have to issue a SPOILER WARNING before I explain why that is.

Have you heeded this warning if it applies to you?

Good.

The thing I didn't know about Song Sung Blue, which they wisely withheld from the trailers, was that Kate Hudson's character loses her left leg below the knee when she's hit by a car while gardening outside her house. The driver loses control of the car, and though this is just one of those freak things, you can't make up the fact that it almost happened a second time. (The movie is based on a documentary, so I'm going to assume this detail is real.)

When she's rehabbing and testing out her artificial limb, we see her and her husband/singing partner, played by Hugh Jackman -- their banding Lightning & Thunder covers Neil Diamond -- walking down the middle of a road, arm in arm for support. (The support might be mutual; Jackman's Mike also has a heart condition.)

When you've recently been hit by a car, and are very traumatized by that fact (which is dramatized elsewhere in the narrative), why the HELL would you walk down the middle of a road? Even if there are currently no cars on it? (Which of course there aren't, otherwise you could never do it.)

To double down, we later see her doing it again, this time by herself. Without even Mike to throw her out of the way if a sudden out-of-control car -- not unprecedented in their neighborhood -- came careening down that road.

Real answer? Because of the way it looks in a film. Because it's an iconic pose.

The sidewalk? That's for old people with walkers. Vigorous people who take life by the lapels walk right there in the street, come what may. 

It's the same reason passengers are often shot without wearing seatbelts in movies, and movie motorcyclists are often shot without helmets. As much as movies frequently strive to portray real life, they also want the characters to be epic.

It's just that Song Sung Blue is the sort of movie that draws attention to the contradiction, just because of what happened to poor Claire.

But I agree, it does work. At the same time I was noticing this contradiction, I was also appreciating the composition of the shot, with houses on either side of the pair, equidistant in the frame.

It also works symbolically, in a way I hinted at in the subject of this post. The characters are walking down a road, metaphorically. They are not walking down a sidewalk. 

We notice this specifically when a character runs down the middle of the road, which is not a scene in Song Sung Blue, but which is a common scene in film otherwise. Whether they have tears in their eyes, revenge on the brain or joy in their heart, a character who runs down the middle of the road reads to us as focused on whatever that thing is, not on traffic safety.

As for the movie itself, well, I went for it like a sucker. And I don't mean that the movie isn't worthy of someone loving it. I just mean it played on my emotions like a guitarist strumming my heartstrings. I even got a little verklempt during the finale, which I have no reason to spoil today.