Thursday, June 15, 2006
(8:36 AM) | Brad:
Suspending Disbelief; or, How I Learned to Stop Disbelieving and Love Shitty Entertainment
(...) it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
It is summer movie season, and with it comes that failsafe, seemingly intelligent excuse for liking the shittiest offerings Hollywood has on tap for the year: the willing suspension of disbelief. The way this works is pretty simple. Bright person A & B go to see, say, X-Men 3. Bright person A walks out with a scowl, aghast at how poor a movie it was, what with its inexplicable introduction of characters that do nothing for the story, amazingly bad direction of Hali Berry (& considering how poor an actress she is already, the effect is startling), & a stated desire that he could have at least seen Famke Jansen in her underwear a little longer. Bright person B, however, walks out shrugging, arguing that while it is not a great movie it was good summer fun, mindless entertainment, & that all one needs to do in order to enjoy it is to suspend your disbelief.
Much like the "theory of Advancement," though, I have to wonder whether all this is just an excuse to like shitty entertainment. (For more on advancement, see one of my favorite blogs here.) Don't get me wrong. I like a lot of crap. I, for instance, find myself watching a surprising amount of Animal Planet. More to the point, I'm not a complete culture snob. I grew up collecting comics, and remain unwilling to part with any of them. I really liked the first two X-Men movies. I have a strange fondness for the Will Smith / Martin Lawrence buddy flick, Bad Boys (though not the ill-advised sequel). In short, I know how to enjoy "mindless fun." But I refuse to employ Coleridge to either validate or defend the mindlessness (or relatively shittiness) of that fun. I'm even growing wary of the Zizekian route of redeeming, to some extent, shitty movies & crap culture for the theoretical moves & points I can make with it. (This is quite an admission, what for the paper I wrote about the ultimate in trash culture, Las Vegas.)
None of this is meant to attack your individual preferences. It is, however, about the, ultimately needless, justifications we use for our preferences. Using "the suspension of disbelief" as the defense for liking crap entertainment would seem to place Coleridge's poetry -- or, if nothing else, his Biographia Literaria -- all too quickly on the level of a big-breast-exposing B-movie? And this I cannot abide, if only because reading Coleridge is rarely so engaging! And while there is something fun, and sometimes even profoundly insightful, about using, say, Tremors 3 or Police Academy, to illustrate how popular culture already knows the truth it must also repress, I'm reminded, not without irony, of that scene from Fight Club where Tyler Durden asks Ed Norton's character:
There is, perhaps, a danger (or at the very least an irritating tendency) to making a cultural artifact either dumber than it needs to be & thus expecting very little of it (as is the case when too easily employing the "suspension of disbelief"), or far smarter than was ever warranted. Either way, it threatens to level the field of aesthetics, desensitizing us to the appreciation & impact of art that matters, wherever it crops up (be it in the museum or in the subway or on television). In short, it moves us one step closer to embracing as a people the artistic vision & philosophy of Andy Warhol. And I'll be damned if that's not evil."How's that working out for you?"
"What?"
"Being clever."
"Great."
"Keep it up then."
