Show don’t tell. That’s the rule for all writing. Also Save The Cat, as the screenwriting book tells us. In movies, you don’t drown the audience in exposition, you have to show characters doing stuff to demonstrate who they are. If they’re smart, you need to show how smart they are. Screenwriters then go into their bag of tricks. The only problem I have is that it’s a pretty small bag. All of these things worked on me the first time that I saw them but then when I saw them again and then again, they started to annoy me like the broken glass scam or an email from a Nigerian prince.

Here are some ways that movies show someone is wicked smaht (Good Will Hunting should have its own section).

Playing Chess

The most obvious example is Searching for Bobby Fischer in which the child prodigy can beat opponents without needing to see the pieces on the board. That’s not the best example of this phenomenon, since that movie is actually about chess. In Shawshank, Andy Dufresne, the erudite banker, wants to teach Red, the common thief, about chess. I remember seeing a character introduced in Charlie Wilson’s War playing simultaneous games against multiple opponents in the park. Whoa! This guy’s so good at chess, he’s playing multiple people at once and winning!

Being Good at, Like, Math

This was actually joked about in the first five minutes of Rushmore when Max solves an equation that gets him out of math for the rest of his life. This usually involves a character effortlessly solving equations drawn on a board (or a window or mirror for some reason, Good Will Hunting and A Beautiful Mind) or counting cards (Rain Man, 21, and The Hangover, which is parodying Rain Man).

Being Good at, Like, Computers

The first computer whiz that really stood out to me as badass was the character of Theo in Die Hard, complete with glasses and a laconic wit, he could just hack into the system. I think being good with computers packed much more of a punch in the eighties when we, as a culture, didn’t really get computers. We were just on the cusp of the Internet and PC revolution but we weren’t quite there yet. So, Matthew Broderick in War Games and then in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, could just “hack” into his school’s computer system to change his grades. In Real Genius, Lazlo could “hack” into NASA to re-enter coordinates. In fact, most computer tasks could be explained away until at least the late nineties by saying the word “hack.” A believable thriller in the nineties could very well contain a line such as, “Mr. President, they’ve hacked the database.” I even bought everything Lisbeth Salander did in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, so maybe I’m not the best person to be pointing this out but I’m doing it anyway.

Solving a Rubik’s Cube (Or Any Puzzle)

They pulled this trick in The Pursuit of Happyness (well, the trailer, I didn’t care to watch the whole thing). Chris Gardner (Will Smith) is so smart that he takes a Rubik’s Cube from one of the traders at his firm and solves it in minutes. The trader takes the completed Rubik’s Cube back, astonished. Bear in mind that it took Neil deGrasse Tyson a week to solve a Rubik’s cube. (He did it when it first came out. I could solve a Rubik’s cube in a minute or two but that was only after memorizing all the steps from online tutorials twenty years after it first appeared.)

There was also a puzzle in both The Manhattan Project and Scrooged where there were four silver balls that had to go to the corners of this enclosed square puzzle. Anyone who solves it in under four minutes is a genius. Both Paul Stevens and the Tiny Tim stand-in solve it immediately (you spin it and the centrifugal force forces the silver balls to the corners).

Unexpectedly Knowing Another Language

Oh snap, William Wallace speaks Latin! Jason Bourne knows so many languages, he straight up forgot that he speaks German, daaaaaamn. They even pulled this trick in an episode of Felicity when she tells off a pompous date who speaks French to a waiter.

It’s not that I don’t like these tricks, it’s that I’ve seen them multiple times. It also panders to us as an audience. Look, you guys, math! Ooh!

It can definitely go too far in the other direction too. I only saw the movie Primer once and I loved it but it did to my brain what swimming less than a half hour after eating does to my stomach.

There’s one little scene from a movie that I loved. It was Jodie Foster’s directorial debut about a child prodigy called Little Man Tate. He’s learning division with the other grade schoolers and his well meaning teacher points to numbers one through ten and says, “Which of these numbers are divisible by two?” Fred Tate looks up at the board, shrugs, says, “All of them,” then goes back to his own work.

Now that was a funny line.