Tug Dumbly # 11- The Girl With the Half-Shaved Legs

It irks me when a character leaves food and drink unfinished in a movie. There they’ll be at a bar or restaurant, or relaxing at home, with a nice steak or burger, with a cocktail or beer, when they’ll get a call, or get suddenly assaulted, or somehow otherwise interrupted and have to race off on something urgent, leaving all that nice food and drink untouched, or at best half toyed with. It sits an itch in my mind. Half an hour later they’ll be dangling from a helicopter, or beating a confession from a criminal, or having sex in a phone booth, and I’ll still be thinking about that frosty martini they left back there at the bar. I don’t even drink anymore, but to see it just left there hurts.

Same with shaving. It disturbs me when a character is half way through a shave (could be a woman doing her legs in a bath, but more often a man with a cut-throat razor in some old Noir movie), and the door knocks, or phone rings, and they get suddenly called away on urgent biz. The man will abandon his shave, hastily wipe the remaining cream from his face and race off. But I’ll be left stranded, still fixated on that unshaved stubble. Scenes later, I’ll still be searching his face for traces of it, maybe when he’s having a conversation with a girl in the car. Maybe the girl with the half-shaved legs.