this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
65 points (95.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36108 readers
1092 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Why do people put pistols in their mouth to kill themselves?

I'm remembering a scene from Fight Club and Possessor where the main characters put pistols in their mouth in an attempt to "kill themselves" (plus other movies I've seen).

In Fight Club, Tyler misses (I guess on purpose), and in Possessor, the main character needs to do it after completing a contract (to leave the body she possessed).

In Possessor, the angle suggests she might miss her brain entirely.

I can understand something like a shotgun; it's not exactly something you can hold to your temple, but why put a pistol in your mouth?

Is it more effective somehow? Does it hit a part of your brain where firing from the side might otherwise leave you alive, yet disabled?

I'm sure you could argue it's just more dramatic from a movie critic perspective, but I'm sure people have really done this, and it maybe be a case of art imitating life, but I believe it would be the other way around.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The idea is that you'll go through the brain stem.

Which, it can. It just isn't a guarantee.

But you gotta realize that movies, even ones that are meant to be mostly realistic, fudge that kind of stuff a lot. There's insurance reasons even when they don't care about showing it accurately, and most of the folks that work as the gun safety manager (can't remember the right term for the job) will raise immortal hell if someone makes it too realistic. Well, the few I've talked to anyway.

As you surmised, "Tyler" missed on purpose. The narrator "Jack/Joe" is aiming at Tyler, it's not meant to kill the body at all. Iirc, Tyler tended to be on that side of the narrator more often than not, so they picked that side. Can't recall where I ran across that, though. Which is all tangential anyway.

But, putting a gun to your temple is pretty bad too. Just as likely to end up a vegetable. None of the positions used in movies are all that great if you want it to work, and that's a good thing. It's at least sometimes intentional, like how they fudge recipes for dangerous things (like they did in fight club) just enough that it won't work right. They'll give the big brush strokes to satisfy the chemistry nerds sometimes, but omit important steps.

It's been ages since I researched suicide success rates (for a book, no bullshit, though I never used that part of my notes), but you never see the ones that are as close to 100% as it gets with firearms, or most OD/poison scenes either.

A lot of times the director and writers just don't care about accuracy though. They just use tropes that are good on camera. Seriously, you'd be amazed at how much of most movies just hand wave as "good enough" because it's what people think should be there. Like the "one phone call" thing when someone gets arrested, or not being able to file a missing persons report until however long they need it to be for the plot. I think screen rant did an article about that kind of thing a while back.

When it's an action movie in particular, John Wick levels of almost realism isn't the norm. It really is all about making it look good on screen, so don't expect most of that stuff to hold up to someone that does whatever it is irl. It's also common in books to do the research and still fudge things because reality gets in the way of telling a story sometimes. Which, again, tangential.

What isn't tangential is that because people think that movies are realistic, they'll do things the way it's seen on screen. You ever get in a fight as a kid and someone was doing those stupid cowboy movie roundhouses? Great way to get knocked the fuck out because you're wide open and not delivering power where it needs to be. But it looks great on screen.

Guns are no different. People do what they think will work, often because they don't know better. But, in the internet age, they may think to look it up, but get worried they'll get found out, or be "put on a list" (which is a trope of its own). So they just follow the on screen directions, and wake up without a face, or maybe don't wake up and are hooked up instead.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

It's also common in books to do the research and still fudge things because reality gets in the way of telling a story sometimes. Which, again, tangential.

Andy Weir did the math for every single thing that happens in The Martian, often on the page in front of you. His guesses at the internal structure of NASA were so accurate that NASA thought he had an inside source. He still had to fake the fact that a dust storm could blow over a rocket on Mars, because there was no other way to strand Watney there without his crew.

Martian dust storms really do reach hundreds of kilometres an hour. But F is MA. And the density of Martian air is so low that M is stuck being tiny. So there's very little force in a Martian gale.