> In real life there is nobody enforcing Chekhov's gun.
Of course not. Which is sort of the point. We already have real life. Stories are something different. Checkov's gun isn't a statement of some kind of platonic ideal of fiction construction, it's a convention. We like stories with "tight" framing because it's easier to watch and keeps our attention on the things that matter. And that's all it means.
You can tell other kinds of stories. Art is art. But if you want people to like your stories (or whatever other artwork you're producing) you'll probably be better served y adhering to convention and violating it in small, targetted ways than you will be throwing out long-held standard assumptions.
(Note that the fact that these conventions exist is itself ammunition for creativity, btw. A "realist" story where nothing necessarily matters is going to have a very hard time delivering a creative twist at the end. A conventional plot, though, can leverage the fact that the audience is conditioned to expect things based on rules like Chekhov's, and subvert those in interesting ways.)
Chekhov's gun treatment can remove an element of surprise, or worse, reveal whole plot-line. It's a convention that is an art in itself, too much and too little can ruin the experience.
Properly blending it in is a form of art, and a surprise in itself. For example, [spoilers] the rock hammer in The Shawshank Redemption, or more literally, the rifle on the wall in Shaun Of The Dead. A good gun makes you go "oooooh!"
On the other hand, building up readers' expectations with details that turn out to be irrelevant is just deception. See the last season of Game of Thrones, for instance. All those characters that were carefully built over the last seasons get discarded without any explanation.
There's sometimes stuff like that in Tarantino movie, like the outlaw lady in Django.
I'm pretty much alone in the world in thinking this, but I consider the rock hammer in Shawshank to be a bad execution of Chekhov's Gun, albeit for reasons unrelated to the core logic of that rule.
Basically, Shawshank clearly establishes itself as having a gritty, realistic tone, where shit happens for reasons that have no cosmic significance or relation to your epic hero arc. Specifically, when that prisoner turns out to be a witness who can clear Andy, and just suddenly gets shot by avaricious guards who don't care about the injustice. (If it hadn't been already, Red's final parole speech cements that tone.)
It's a huge betrayal of that when you turn around and say "oh man, if you just belieeeeeeeve in yourself hard enough you can somehow make a figurine carving tool last 100x longer than is realistically possible and accomplish major excavation work, it's all about your force of will".
(Similar complaint about Interstellar, which commits to hard sci-fi enough to include an expensive, photo-realistic black hole, and doubles back and resolve the plot with "ah man we just have to tap into the mysterious fifth-dimensional power of love!")
Discarding with explanation can sometimes be used to effect too.
For example, suppose a character sends a spy to accomplish an objective. Meanwhile, another group of people are also trying to do this, which will benefit the main character, although the main character is unaware of this. The second group gets there first, and even though there was considerable buildup to the spy's mission, in the end, his presence doesn't matter (much).
If you want as lean a story as possible, you would cut out the spy's mission altogether, but its presence gives a sense of realism, because the character in the story doesn't know ahead of time that sending the spy would be redundant.
I don't think that rule expresses universal truth. These rules come and go. You have great writers who wrote famous books which don't follow these Storytelling that follows then becomes boring and predictable when they are widely used.
The junk adventure/vampire what not literature tend to follow all the structural rules and is as forgettable as it gets.
The argument with real life matter. Because when your storytelling rules make it impossible to tell real stories, then there is something wrong with them.
according to some theories, there is enforcement of Chekov's gun. Reality is combinitorial explosive, ie. there are vastly too many inputs for us to synthesize. So our perception and memory both function to "chunk" events and objects. These "chunks" are what you perceive and remember. So you don't just bump into random objects, but in fact you only see and remember things that are in some way relevant. In other words, everything is a Chekhov gun in some ways.
Of course not. Which is sort of the point. We already have real life. Stories are something different. Checkov's gun isn't a statement of some kind of platonic ideal of fiction construction, it's a convention. We like stories with "tight" framing because it's easier to watch and keeps our attention on the things that matter. And that's all it means.
You can tell other kinds of stories. Art is art. But if you want people to like your stories (or whatever other artwork you're producing) you'll probably be better served y adhering to convention and violating it in small, targetted ways than you will be throwing out long-held standard assumptions.
(Note that the fact that these conventions exist is itself ammunition for creativity, btw. A "realist" story where nothing necessarily matters is going to have a very hard time delivering a creative twist at the end. A conventional plot, though, can leverage the fact that the audience is conditioned to expect things based on rules like Chekhov's, and subvert those in interesting ways.)