[Originally posted on 12.9.21] There’s a famous bit in The Empire Strikes Back (’80) when the Millennium Falcon won’t turn over and so Han Solo twice slams a console with his fist and wham…it’s working again.
There’s a scene in The Bridge on the River Kwai (’57) when William Holden angrily kicks a non-functioning two-way radio, and suddenly it’s working again.
There’s a scene in The Hot Rock (’72) in which a police precinct captain (William Redfield) is told by a subordinate that a phone isn’t working, and he asks “well, did you jiggle it? Did you…you know, fiddle around with it?”
There’s a scene in The Longest Day (’62) where Capt. Colin Maud (Kenneth More) walks up to a stalled vehicle during the D-Day invasion and says, “My old grandmother used to say, ‘Anything mechanical, give it a good bash.'” He hits the vehicle and it starts right up.
And don’t forget that moment in Armageddon (’98) when Peter Stormare said “this is how we fix things in Russia!” and then whacked an engine with a wrench.
In 2010 my last and final Windows laptop (I had more or less become a Mac person two years earlier) stopped working in some fashion — it was acting all gummy and sluggish — and so I decided to bitch-slap it a couple of times. Instead of suddenly springing to life, the laptop more or less died. Violence, I realized with a start, was not the answer. Times and technology had changed.
I resolved at that moment never to try and William Holden or Harrison Ford or Peter Stormare or Kenneth More or William Redfield my way out of a technical problem again.
