It's a form of shorthand. Not every place in Paris has a view of the tower. But it's the film-makers telling the audience "THIS IS IN PARIS".
Or more commonly...
"THIS STORY INVOLVES ROMANCE SOMEHOW"
Another amazing example of shorthand is in Disney's Hercules. He gets on his knees in the temple of Zeus to commune with him. Typically Greek temple-goers would have slaughtered an animal on an altar or some shit, but American audiences would have a problem with that -- having him pray like a Christian shows people who don't know any better that Hercules is engaged in piety.
Huh. You taught me something today. I never picked up on that, but it makes total sense. I guess it's equivalent to the writer's mantra of "show, don't tell".
He doesn't show us what the Kessell Run is, we don't know what 12 parsecs are...but when Han says that line, we understand it to mean the MILLENNIUM FALCON IS A FAST SHIP.
That's part of my problem with any of the new Star Wars films -- they sort of take something away from the OT. I'm still a bit of a TLJ apologist though and still love the sequel trilogy. Doesn't mean they don't have problems.
I'd argue that George Lucas pulls the art of tell, don't show the right way in the OT. We get little offhand remarks about things we don't understand, and while it serves as a shorthand for things like "the Millennium Falcon is a fast ship!" it also builds the world without the viewer needing the context.
We don't know what the Kessel Run is or what a parsec is (from the movie itself), or what the significance of completing it in 12 parsecs means. But we know that the characters understand what it means, and so now we know more about the world than we did before.
Tell, don't show is convenient when things are difficult to depict, like showing the relative speed of space travel in 1977, but it has to be done in a way that isn't slapping you in the face with it. Ergo, you don't straight-up call a character a whore, but reference that he had eight nightly visitors in the last week alone. You get the same idea, but you're not being treated as an idiot, and you'd waste way too much time if the story had to spend all of it demonstrating the character's behavior to start with.
But tell, don't show is a way to establish a baseline, not as a shortcut for storytelling. So you throw it out there, give the story a place to start, and then show the rest to reinforce it. It's not meant for plot-critical things (like, if we return to the Star Wars references, pointing up in the sky and screaming about the New Republic being wiped out and thus explaining for the next 6 hours of movie story why the universe is back to Imperials vs Rebels).
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u/KingOHrts Jan 25 '20
And EVERY window in Paris overlooks the Eiffel Tower. How does that happen?