What I've Learned

A frightened woman hears noises in the middle of the night, lights a candle, and goes walking about a spooky mansion to see what it is.

When I was a kid and saw that in a movie, I thought, "She wouldn't do that. Heck, nobody would do that. If I were there, I'd sit in the corner with a baseball bat until morning."

The nightgown-clad woman was tiptoeing about at night, not from over-active curiosity, but from bad scriptwriting.

A movie – any movie – asks the audience to temporarily suspend disbelief. We are sitting in a theater with other people staring at a flat screen that has lights projected onto it.

We don't believe for a second that what those lights are depicting is real. But for the sake of the experience (and the high price of the ticket), we suspend that disbelief and allow ourselves to be drawn in, laughing at the funny parts, crying at the sad, and holding our breath at the suspenseful.

Movies often require additional suspension.

We don't believe there is really a Superman, and we don't believe that a pair of glasses makes the Man of Steel unrecognizable to Lois and Jimmy. But we suspend those disbeliefs to enjoy the story.

We don't believe that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid could be as good looking as Paul Newman and Robert Redford or that they could survive that leap from the cliff or that Butch could instantly learn to ride a bike well enough to do tricks and to carry Etta along a country path. But we accept it all for the sake of the story.

Problems can arise when movies ask us to accept and belief things that don't make sense in the context of the movie itself. It strains our willingness to suspend disbelief and pulls us out of the story, the way the mansion-exploring woman did me.

If there had been a few setup scenes demonstrating that this woman has an overpowering curiosity that she is at a loss to ignore or resist, I might have believed her night-time roamings by candle light. But with no such setup, it had me thinking, not of her peril, but of her stupidness. Bad writing.

It's not just early horror movies that suffer from this.

Prometheus – the recent science fiction movie – asks us to suspend disbelief concerning faster than light travel and violations of the theory of relativity. Okay, no problem.

But the writers aren't satisfied with a couple of large ticket items; they ask for suspension of disbelief on a whole string of small, stupid things that constantly jar us out of the story.

Scientists who have traveled light years to explore an alien world don't mark the location of things they find. They take no scientific notes at all. They pick stuff up, they take their helmets off and breathe all over stuff that has never been breathed on by a human before.

They carry stuff back into their ship with no safety protocols. When they encounter an unknown life form, the first thing they want to do is reach out and touch it, then are surprised when it eats them. They don't keep in touch with members of the crew who are separated. And the list goes ever on.

Why? For the same reason the woman is made to roam about a mansion at night.

Instead of sitting in a corner with a baseball bat, I often feel like using it to pummel Hollywood writers.