They didn't anticipate pausing back in 1994. Of course that's entirely not true, as VCRs had been pausing for years. So maybe let's just say they didn't think or possibly care too much about any of it.
The pause you see here is from after Lelaina (Winona Ryder) has been getting gas customers to pay her in cash while she charges it on her father's gas card, a scheme she has to employ because she ran up a $400 phone bill by calling 1900 numbers. (For emotional therapy, not for titillation.) She adds up the wads of cash she gets each time she pulls the scheme, to make sure the numbers add up to the $400 she needs.
The thing is, they don't add up.
Lelaina has written out $389.84 at the bottom of that list of numbers, but they actually add up to $393.97.
Even if you give the benefit of the doubt that I'm counting something as a six that is actually a zero -- there's about one ambiguous number on there -- it doesn't account for that sort a difference.
Would it have been so hard just to figure out what these numbers actually added up to, and have her write the correct number?
If we wanted to attribute a sort of intentionality to Ben Stiller et al, they might say that it's the character adding the numbers up incorrectly, not the set designer or the continuity person. Lelaina's the dumb one, not us!
But if so, what a way to undercut your main character, who is trying to use her ingenuity, as her father told her to do.
I's not a perfect moment of self-actualization; it's essentially a scam perpetrated on her father by his daughter. So maybe you could get away with her poor math skills being part of her stunted evolution.
But if you are a person who's at least somewhat decent with numbers, you can scan down that last column and add up the digits and know that the last number couldn't be a 4. It obviously has to be a 7. I mean, doesn't Lelaina know basic arithmetic rules and know how to carry the 1?
Wait ... carry the 1! Lelaina doesn't.
There are none of the extra chicken scratches at the top of this equation to show you're carrying numbers from previous columns. To add that all up in her head without any markings -- it gets harder after the first column -- would make her pretty gifted in math indeed, which does not seem to describe who Lelaina is. (Not very gifted in language, either, as she fumbles when trying to define "irony" on her job intereview.)
So if Lelaina is not a genius, and there are no chicken scratches, then we must assume that Lelaina is using an off screen calculator and just writing the totals in. Which, in that case, is absurd, because that means the calculator produced the wrong answer. Or more likely, Lelaina typed the numbers into the calculator incorrectly, or transcribed her results incorrectly.
Whatever the case may be, they really didn't anticipate pausing.
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