When my friends and I are walking through the cold dark parking lot of the movie theatre, having just come from watching Hollywood’s latest offering, the first question asked is always, “Well, what did you think?”
Not, “What did you think?” in terms of abstract thought, but “What did you think?” as a reaction. “What did you think?” as the gut, visceral response that highlights the conflict between the world the film offered and the world we live in.
The point of a story is to tell us what did happen, just so that we learn what can happen.
The natural result of a story is that our worldview is either reinforced or restructured.
When we take in a story, we need to trust the storyteller. We need to know with absolute certainty that they have an understanding; that they have something worthwhile to tell us. When they present us with a new thing, a new piece of understanding, which way will things fall? Will we accept it as something to be learned, or reject it as something to be debunked?
The phrase “Suspension of Disbelief” comes up when a storyteller has lost our trust. They’ve introduced a gross lie of some sort – they’ve made a statement about how things work that is so absolutely false that we recoil in unconscious rebellion against them and their story.
It means they’ve failed in some way, and lost our trust.
You’ll notice that we never, ever have issues of Suspension of Disbelief over the mere appearance of green fish-men in a story.
We have issues when green fish-men start acting grossly un-green-fish-man like.
We have issues when green fish-men show up in the middle of the heated discussion between the patent lawyer and the attractive widow who is trying to push her husband’s invention to market in the face of a corporate monopoly which is trying to bury her. We don’t mind that they appeared, but we mind that their appearance… doesn’t make sense.
We have issues when green fish-men turn into blue butterfly-men through some sort of ‘mystical transformation.’ A butterfly is not the natural consummation of the evolution of a fish.
Give us a story where green fish-men behave appropriately and through courage and endurance overcome obstacles and attain the approprate reward, and we’ll be in bliss.
If the storyteller can’t convey a picture of a world that is consistent and truthful… well, what’s the point of listening to an incompetent storyteller?
Tell us what did happen, so that we will know what can happen. But we need to believe that it did.
We need to believe that, in a world where fish men actually live, when Quish-ptsosh did exercise courage and learned to believe in himself and listened to the wise old stingray’s song that he was able to rally the Quareen to defeat the Shark invasion, and that the result was that the kingdom was saved and he became the new king and married the beautiful fishcess.
Then we’ll accept to what you have to say about what can happen in the midst of treachery and betrayal and personal struggle and romance and all that stuff.
But if he turns into a butterfly man, or eats caviar, we’re going to watch the hockey game instead.