Authors of fiction have an advantage that we often don’t realize we have: Our audience wants to believe us. They know we’re lying, but in most cases they’re willing to accept anything we want sell them in the name of the story, and ask only that we’re honest about what the story is, and we remain true to our premises. When the willing suspension of disbelief snaps, it is usually not because the event triggering the snap was something that in isolation is inherently more implausible than other things in the story, it is usually because the event doesn’t fit with the story’s world as set up by the author. We’ll accept things in the Saw movies that would never fly in CSI.
The implausibility effect also has to do with tone. If you’re watching an action flick, the tone sets the level of realism that the audience expects. If a action sequence from a Jackie Chan movie broke out in the middle of The Departed, something would be wrong. Rambo is not Reservoir Dogs.
Then you have Shoot Em Up. Of which Roger Ebert said, “I may disapprove of a movie for going too far, and yet have a sneaky regard for a movie that goes much, much farther than merely too far.”
Not one scene in the film is remotely plausible even by the standard of your average 1980’s Schwarzenegger movie. But it is brutally honest with its audience, making sure that before the credits roll, everyone has a clear picture of the movie’s warped universe. The first person (of literally dozens) to be killed by Clive Owen’s character is dispatched by the use of a carrot. A carrot. As in our protagonist brings an orange root vegetable to a gunfight, and wins. By shoving the carrot through the guys head. Through the guy’s head. A carrot.
The scene does many things, like making every subsequent gun battle more plausible by comparison, but it primarily tells us all that the rules in this story are not the rules of the real world, and if anyone is worrying about that sort of thing after the head-piercing carrot, it isn’t the story’s fault.
1 Comment
Steve Buchheit · June 24, 2010 at 2:09 pm
With my first full novel that’s crossed the finish line, I also faced that level (brings a knife to gun fights, and wins) of suspension. It can be a difficult thing to maintain, and I’m proud to say there’s really only one hand-waving incident in the whole book (at least in this regard – and it has a plausible reason which you find out later – guns aren’t always as easy as they seem). Out of nine readers so far, only one said they were tossed out of the story. Keeping the pace set at ‘breakneck” through the action scenes tends to help. A lot.
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