Suspension of disbelief is when we disregard the unreality of a story and dive into the story anyway. For example, we ignore the fact that you can’t bring a corpse back to life with lightning and funky-looking machines, or we let it by that animals don’t wear clothes when we’re forced to watch The Great Mouse Detective with our younger family members, or I ignore that there are so many people in the cult in The Following that there’s no way that sort of cult could exist in reality, no matter how charismatic a serial killer Joe Carroll may be.
So many sick people follow him, even he has trouble believing it sometimes.
We need suspension of disbelief to enjoy some of the more strange of fiction, and sometimes to even get through the craziness of life. We’re pretty good about this as kids, when most of the shows we watch are cartoons with all sorts of improbable things going on.
But why do I mention all this? Most of the people who read this blog are well aware of suspension of disbelief and what it is, especially the writers who read this blog. Well, sometimes our suspension of disbelief cannot help us with a story, especially when we become adults and sometimes prefer our entertainment a little closer to reality.
But even for those of us who are still able to do suspension of belief like when we were kids, we occasionally find a story that we can’t get past the craziness in. For example, one of the problems I had with Mockingjay, the final book in the Hunger Games trilogy, was that after Katniss (spoiler alert!) killed President Coin for the murder of Prim, she wasn’t prosecuted or killed or thrown in the loony bin or held up as a hero by those who opposed both Coin and Snow. No, she was held in a room for several days and then dumped in District 12 for the rest of her life, with the only punishment being that she have counseling sessions on the phone for the rest of her life. If this were Egypt, China, Venezuala, Ukraine, or the United States (especially the United States!), any of the stuff I listed except what actually happened to Katniss would’ve happened. What makes Panem so different that the murder of the national leader gets you dumped in a coal-mining town that’s literally rebuilding itself from the ashes? Explain it to me, please!
“My country? Well, we’re hungry…and once a year 23 people die on national tV…and…that’s it.”
Another problem I had with the whole trilogy is that Panem had no character besides that of the Games and a capitol that oppressed the districts. Seriously, was that all there was to Panem? We only got brief looks into any sort of a national culture, with some district culture mixed in. And yet most culture is centered around the Games and the Victory Tour during the off-season. Is there anything else to Panem? There is so many questions left unanswered. Plus, what about the economy? It seemed the economy all depended on the Games and the oppressed districts. And did anyone in the Capital actually work, or did they all just party and do things related to the Games? I only know Panem as a nation of oppression and murder, and for Collins’ purposes, that’s all she really needs. But I have trouble believing that Panem could actually exist, especially when most of the nation is defined by oppression and a sick obsession with reality TV and the television in general.
I also have problems with other stories. I have a lot of trouble believing that Superman’s biggest problem in life is his love triangle with Lois Lane and himself (thank God it looks like Man of Steel might deal with that), or that a biologist might shy away from some skeletons of dead Ubermen but be attracted to a strange-looking cobra-worm in Prometheus. I’ve grown disillusioned with some Bond films because the villain’s super evil plan involves flooding the Earth or using diamonds as a laser beam or living in a space-station that nobody noticed until Bond pointed it out (you know I’m right). Why does Anakin go to the Dark Side just because he’s in love? Shouldn’t there be more darkness in him besides a fear of loss? And why in some fantasy films they can only get rid of a monster by sealing it away but hundreds of years later the very same magic used to seal the monster is suddenly able to kill it without any major innovation being mentioned?
I know I seem to be tearing into some very beloved stories, but I have to say, some of this boggles my already messed-up mind. Is there something I’m missing here? Or maybe the story is missing something and I and some others are angry enough or nitpicky enough or something else enough to point it all out.
I bit that guy because he didn’t like the skeletons but for some reason wanted to pet me.
It’s probably why when I write a story and there’s a chance it may get crazy or overly complicated, I try and have something to make it easy to understand and believable. I dumped a whole idea for Reborn City‘s sequel just because I thought it might be disbelieved by more than a few readers. I went through a lot of parts of Snake before I wrote and even while I was writing it just to make sure there was nothing that could be too hard to believe. And with the bajillion stories in my head, I often tinker with them in my inmagination for years just to see if there’s something that could be pointed out as too weird to happen (believe me, even in speculative fiction that’s a lot).
What do you have trouble believing, even in beloved stories that everyone else is cool with? And do those things make you examine your work differently?
Rami Ungar The Writer 