Blood and Bones Part 6: Suspension of Disbelief
"Perhaps the conspiracy world is an updated version of ancient myths, where monsters and the gods of Olympus and Valhalla have been replaced by aliens and the Illuminati of Washington and Buckingham Palace." Thom Burnett in the Conspiracy Encyclopaedia using the German term Verschwörungsmythos meaning "Conspiracy Myth"
I quoted Goebbels in a previous episode: that people can be primed to experience phenomena that they might otherwise discard. They may see ghosts or witness UFOs or are chased by aliens. Their readiness to believe is generated by being in a suitably spooky environment such as a dark wood and, heightened by having recently seen a film about aliens, so even the most innocent of sightings of a pair of car headlights can be interpreted as something other worldly. We see what we expect to see.
But let’s not judge these people too harshly; people who see such things are not stupid after all this is, apparently a normal human condition. Others may call it cognitive dissonance or hyper reality. We call it Suspension of Disbelief and it’s the basis of all narrative art.
The term "Suspension of disbelief" was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817 and without it any form of story telling – film, books, opera, fairy tales would be impossible. When we watch or listen we have somehow to disregard the fact that we are actually only seeing flickering images on a screen or reading words that represent a very abridged description of the world, or even that we are hearing something utterly preposterous and nonsensical. We can shut down our awareness of the present, physical world and enter the other, illusory chimerical world of the imagination. In the theatre, suspension of disbelief is our stock in trade; audience members are required to believe that this is not a stage but the battlements of a Danish castle, that this person is not an actor but is Hamlet Prince of Denmark, that he is experiencing genuine emotions not that he is just reciting lines of text. I know people who find suspension of disbelief a tricky idea and for them the whole narrative structure becomes a puzzle, but for some reason most of us have been gifted with this strange ability to believe two quite contradictory things at once.
All children play “Let’s pretend” and it’s quite clearly a way of learning about the world and coming to terms with it through experiment and rehearsal. In children it’s called “play”. It can also be called “lying”. Apparently we lose the ability to play as we get older but for most of us it’s still buried there waiting for some excuse for expression. Hence the rise of computer games, virtual reality creations and tipsy dressing up nights. It’s not that we actually lose the ability to pretend, rather that we acquire more and more ways of blocking it out. It gets overtaken by the reality of day to day existence and lost to the necessity of engaging with the world at work and only occasionally creeping out when we spend precious minutes at our desk daydreaming. For some people the urge to play and pretend remains so strong that it becomes subverted into actual conflict with the real world hence the conspiracy theories and so on. The children’s play-lying can become pathological in adults. The necessity of floating off to a less engaged level can fuel drink and drug escapes. Theatre is the natural place to express this necessary desire for play to stop it becoming pathological.
Have you seen video of the way a hunter hunts on the savannahs of Africa? How he stops, sniffs the air, touches the ground where his prey has passed. Using his hands in delicate movements to trace the tracks. Making the shape of the animal with his arms, thinking himself into the animal itself. Connecting with it so that even as the creature gains ground and surges ahead, our hunter knows which way it will have turned in the scrub. He breathes as the animal breathes. He attunes himself to the animal so that even out of sight, he knows when the creature is flagging and wishes for the end. For the duration of the hunt he enters an ecstatic state in which he becomes the quarry so much so that, when, at last, the creature falls, the hunter mourns him as a brother, strokes him, and thanks him for giving up his breath to him. The theatre of the hunt is no sciolous posturing but a genuine transformation of the self into a second reality where the outcome is that of winning food and providing life for the tribe for another few days.
This hunting theatre transfers to a re-enactment of the hunt to those at home, and to an abstracted performance ritual that demonstrates the technique to young hunters and welds the spirits of the hunters and prey into one to guarantee future success. The theatre of the hunt shows us how our theatre can be as central to the understanding of our lives how the adoption of character needs to be as total and believed as that of the hunter and his prey.
In some way, Suspension of Disbelief enables us to put aside the mechanicss of the world around us so we can rehearse, practice, test out ideas and emotions. We project ourselves into another reality just as the hunter projects himself into the Creature he is hunting.
The playwright creates the ritual words that open the portal through which the actor must pass on the way to becoming the Other. The audience provide the environment with which the transformation takes place and, observing are enabled to become with the actor who is their proxy in the other world. They observe and empathise, thus becoming the Other themselves whilst also able to see with ironic eye.
Somehow suspension of disbelief is a social act that enables us to share experiences and even to have views in common. We conspire with each other in following a narrative, setting aside our differences and perceptions of the world around. We agree to follow the lead of the narrator or story-teller. The narrator becomes a shamen with magic powers. We put our trust in her and allow ourselves to follow her footsteps.
So the two conditions for suspension of disbelief are firstly a carefully crafted lie, a wholly believable narrative perpetrated by the story-teller and secondly a willingness of the watchers to participate. They must see the need for this hoax and to dive into it wholeheartedly. As a great writer once said: “we should strive for authenticity in emotion and credibility in performance.” And if they didn’t, they should have done.
My theory is that the subconscious accepts what is delivered to it as the truth while the conscious is the part of the brain that analyses and questions. The interaction between credible sub-conscious and analytical conscious is a debate about truth and fiction. It is Apollo and Dionysius with the Apollonian conscious mind interposing between our awareness and the deep Dionysian subconconscious reaction.
This selectivity in perception is how astrology and other forms of fortune telling work. Once the subject has made the conscious effort to engage with the fortune teller by, turning to the astrology section in the magazine or by attending the mind reading event, however sceptical they may be consciously, their unconscious has prepared them to hear and interpret whatever comes their way as being the truth. The plainly wrong forecasts are edited out and anything else that chimes, however vaguely with their experience will be regarded as accurate and will reinforce their inner perceptions. An actress friend and I worked up a stage mind-reading act one summer that we took to a few events for a bit of fun. I sat in a darkened tent wearing a strange hat and a desk piled with arcane looking books and props. She stood outside and had some apparently inconsequential chat with the prospective clients waiting to see the Professor. As folk entered the tent she would slip notes she had made through to me. After a lot of mumbo jumbo, I would slip in a few startling observations. Feeding back those bits of gossip they had let drop to In the end I became extremely unnerved. The“clients” were taking this bit of fun really seriously. It was a sunny day at a village fete but in the darkened tent they genuinely believed and started asking deep personal questions about departed relatives and so on however nonsensical or outrageous my answers. I was so spooked we stopped doing this after a couple of outings.
This level of suspension of disbelief is the playwright’s secret weapon. If we can create a situation with enough credibility then audiences will want to go along with what we say. They will overlook a number of discrepencies in character and plotting, often blaming themselves for not getting a point.
Weirdly this aligns us with the hoaxers and scammers. It also aligns us with children playing let’s pretend. We make use of their tools but we need to use it self consciously and with care.
To sum it all up, to me the ability to suspend disbelief is the capacity to say “What if?” This is the key to all human wondering and imagining. It is the starting point for all scientific enquiry and for the ability to emphasise with others of our species. It is magic ingredient that has enable human beings to make the imaginative leap towards the future that leads to all innovation and creation. This puts artists and writers out there on the front line exploring new possibilities, other ways of looking at the world, novel ways of experiencing the way other people feel and behave. We create the Matrices of the alternate and offer them to audiences to consider and debate.
In a later episode I’ll try and consider whether an artist does indeed have any responsibility for the lies they perpetrate on the world. Next time I’ll talk more about how, in order to create theatre we need the sophisticated arts of negotiation and collaboration.
