The Fine Line We Ignore: How Fiction Teaches Us to Believe Bullshit

Life and the Film Screen: A Fine Line

Permeation Like a Decent Teabag

Everyone knows there's a boundary between everyday life and the content we watch on screen. I'm not just talking about that fine line that divides fact from fiction, but the agreement of believability we accept when we tag along for the ride of a promising film. One minute, you're chewing beans on toast, watching Mary Nightingale splutter through an ITV news report about potholes or something; the next, you're tight lipped, frowning hard at the black and white screen full of liberated concentration camp prisoners. You refuse to cry, until you see Oscar Schindler finally break, 'I could've done better, I could've saved more of you'. The poles of believability couldn't be further apart. 

When Fiction Mirrors Real Life

Of course, no one moaned about potholes on the Death Star. Why? A pressurized artificial environment doesn't lend itself to potholes, does it? No concrete. Either way, misaligned durasteel tiles, and those black four wheeled little robots are trip hazards. In the UK alone, the cost of potholes has exceeded a billion pounds, so this moon sized station full of whistling twatbots darting around under your feet, the exposed cables, and misaligned platforms meant a huge insurance liability. The Death Stars thermal fart port was another 'Millenium Dome,' or 'Robin Reliant' of its genre. It sounds stupid to cross the mundane with the fantasy world. 

Big Plans, Bigger Fails

The Galactic Empire was quite reminiscent of a particularly stupid British government that also invested billions into an extra thirty minutes journey. Yup, I'm talking about that high-speed train project which they never finished and will not get you to London 30 minutes quicker, oh well! It's a bit like how the Imperial Senate forcibly took people's land and raked up significant landmarks for the sake of 'Being Baddies'. That's just me trying to compare Westminster to Darth Vader! You can do this with anything, like mashing up a shitty UK reality TV show with X-Men:

Abilities, Inclusion, and Everyday Battles

The team would probably be a colourful 'accessibility and inclusion team' employed by the admin section of some university. These are people with diverse 'abilities' who fight for acceptance from society, often meeting the evil eye of The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), who are forever ready to retake their Personal Independence Payments (PIP). Their manager and mentor, Charles Xavier, is ever supportive! His X-ceptional team fight a biased system, defending vulnerable students with assistance filling out the PIP2 assessment form or writing mandatory reconsideration letters. 

Storm claims Carer's Allowance for the professor while finishing her renewable energy module. Most of these X-traordinary human beings are on PIP: Cyclops receives specialist eye equipment, and Wolverine's protruding bones exit his hands whenever he's startled or irritated, which is every other day given the countries muppet show politics. It’s all about focusing on the power we think we have, abilities no one cares about, and the 'can-do' attitude for office-X. However, Charles and the team do often interview the odd bad guy:

An Unusual Candidate

Professor X: 'Why do you want to work here, you're a Doctor?'

Dr. Lecter: 'Well, I’ve always been interested in education, and especially the finer things in life. Intellectual stimulation, elegant dining, and, of course, a little human resource management.'

Professor X: 'As you can see, Doctor, my lips aren't moving because this is telepathy! I can see you're the Chesapeake Ripper. Leave, you can't eat our students!'

Dr. Lecter licks his lips: 'Hmm. . . reading a person's thought patterns, or predicting their behaviour requires no telepathy.'

Professor X: 'Oh, stop the vile imagery, you know eating my brain will give you Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease: CJD! If you haven't got it already, ah. . . sorry, you should see a neurologist!'

Dr. Lecter: 'A cruel irony, indeed,' he looks down at his hands, defeated. 'The headline would have been remarkable: cannibal psychiatrist eats telepath's brain then develops prionic brain-disease.'

Professor X: 'Vegetarian food isn't that bad!'

The Real People Behind Fiction

Sadly, we do actually have Hannibal Lecter types in the world, but realistically cannibals are open to catching HIV, aids, hepatitis, parasites, kuru, CJD. All doctor's know better than to eat people making Lecter quite stupid really. In fact, the fictional make-up of Hannibal were hand-picked from various sources. Of course, there are the real serial killers and machiavellian individuals who shaped his character profile, but these taylored traits missed that unbelievable 'cannibal doctor'. 

This next point is quite fair: fiction is rarely reduced away as pure fancy; it always has roots in something real. You see, Dracula stems from the historical, 'Vlad the Impaler'. Sherlock was based on Dr. Joseph Bell, known for his deductive skills. Truth be said, many detectives and forensic experts are shaped by our cooky Sherlock! The spirit of that Baker Street genius has been invoked by almost every detective production since the advent of television! 

Reading Minds or Just Reading People? 

There is a fine line between cold reading and claims of telepathy. In real life we can read and predict others with skilled observation, deduction, intelligence, and fine-grain intuition. In Hollywood the character's insight can go far beyond realistic and we don't even realise! Internally, we watch a film with a bullshit filter setting, it's often biased if we enjoy it. On the other hand, true stories trigger the BS filter. 

Do you remember the scouse psychic medium, Derek Acorah and his spirit side-kick Sam? He convinced so many people (even himself) that 'spirit surrounds us and wants to talk'. It was his ethos. Once he yelled out 'Mary loves Dick' while in a 'haunted' location. It was a Whoopi Goldburg 'Sam Wheat' moment from the film Ghost, but a low-budget version. I hope Mary found her Dick in the end, and I trust Derek was reunited with Sam after he sadly passed away in 2000. Derren Brown did a few mock spiritualist shows but openly declared it as all trickery, he was phenomenal and his methods involved real skill. 

When it comes to films, perhaps it isn't so much the ideas or the story itself that counts, but rather how convincing they are to the consumer? The point is, we will and do continue to fall for their narration, given the years of them perfecting believable broadcasted content. Check the simple local news and watch how unnaturally interviewees compose themselves; they must posture and subtly perform to meet the news feature. It's unnecessary. 

I think I'll just stop writing.