The Top 13 Great Unsolvable Mysteries
in Movies and TV

13 Is there a hidden theme of incest in Back to the Future?
In Back to the Future 3, Marty (Michael J. Fox) is transported back a century and meets his ancestors. And, surprise, his great-great-grandmother in 1885 is a dead ringer for his mother from 1985. Strange enough that genes could pass through several generations without change. But it's completely bizarre that his great-great-grandmother is an ancestor on Marty's father's side and yet is identical to his mother! How could that be?

12 When an character in a film sees someone else off in a car or taxi  
why does he rap the roof with his hand to signal to the driver to go? I've never seen anyone do this in real life. I've got a feeling that if I were to try this, the driver would at best ignore me or more likely swear at me for banging his car.

11 When Bruce Banner turns into the Incredible Hulk,
how come his growing bulk bursts off all his clothes—except part of his pants?

10 Why do people in movies and on TV hold out the phone receiver
and look at it with a puzzled expression on their faces after someone has said something strange to them over the line? Do they think the phone itself made up the comment? Do they think they can view the other person through the handset? Have you ever seen anyone do this in real life?

9 In The Rock, why does Sean Connery roll through a passageway of
shooting flames and swinging blades with perfect timing to break into Alcatraz with Nicholas Cage? Once through, he opens a regular door from the other side, letting Cage in. But Connery is Cage's guide into Alcatraz because he had once broken out of the prison and when he'd broken out he would have just opened the door from the other side. Why would he have learned about or gone through that deadly fire-and-blades contraption?

8 When someone wakes from a bad dream in a movie, why do they always
spring straight up to a sitting position. I don't think I've ever done this. Nor anyone I've slept with. It's not even that easy to do. We just kind of lie there and groan.

7 How come whenever Lois Lane falls off a tall building,
Superman is able to save her by catching her, like 30 floors down? The impact of her landing in his arms should be just as great as hitting the ground! She should be smushed. Same thing in other sci-fi films—The Fifth Element and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones come to mind. Someone falls from an incredible height but is saved from injury by landing in a flying car—which really should kill that person just as effectively as hitting bottom.

6 What's with that "Viewer discretion is advised" warning
before some television shows? If "discretion" means freedom to decide or judge on our own, does that mean we don't get to exercise this freedom with other programs? What, the programs with this warning are the ones that we don't have to watch?

5 How come mad bombers in the movies always put digital read-outs
in their bombs to show the time clicking down? Why would a bomber bother to wire and program that red, digital display into his explosive device? Especially when he doesn't expect anyone to get a chance to look inside the bomb before it blows up. The worst such offence was in Speed II when a bomb was discovered inside a golf club, for godsake—with a digital clock counting down inside it!

4 Why is every personal computer on TV or in a movie an iMac?
Yet in the real world, about 97 percent of computers are PCs. A friend has a theory about this. It has to do with sublimated sexuality. It's the same reason Mustangs used to be so common on television shows — it was the car with the high butt. And you've got to admit the iMac has a more shapely rear end than most Windows boxes.

3 If Spiderman has the powers of a spider,
shouldn't his web shoot out of his...er...well, out of his butt?

2 Why at the end of Casablanca doesn't Humphrey Bogart
cut the tear-jerking goodbye and just get on the plane with Ingrid Bergman? The explanation in the film is that they have transit papers for only two and he's giving them to Bergman and her hubby to leave Morocco. But the Nazi who would stop him has already been killed at the airport, so why can't he go?

And the Number One great unsolvable mystery in movies:

A real boner in the "greatest film ever made"!
The journalist in Citizen Kane spends the entire film trying to find out what the dying Kane meant by "rosebud"? But when Kane muttered the final word of his life, he was alone. Then he dropped the snowy orb on his floor and we saw a nurse come running into the room at the noise. So nobody heard his hoarse whisper! How did anyone know what his last words were? (And don't give me that "the butler did it" theory which holds that a servant was hidden in his room. If a servant was there, he would have alerted the nurse, or said or done something.)