Elbowing the Audience by killing the Suspension of Disbelief

“Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and,
instead of bleeding, he sings.”
R. Benchley

 

ONE

If you go see a theater play, you have to make a deal with yourself, even if you even don’t realize you do it  :

“I accept to believe that these people on the scene are real”

If you don’t, you’ll watch actors making as if, that’s weird, right?

This is not new, of course : Coleridge (an English philosopher) called it Suspension of disbelief :

“a willingness to suspend one’s critical faculties and believe the unbelievable; sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment.”

You watch Braveheart on TV. You need your good “willing suspension of disbelief”, and if you don’t, you will laugh all along : you’ll see Mel Gibson (Australian actor) running in a skirt, pretending to fight for Scotland, hahaha.

And in a magic act, “an audience is not expected to actually believe that a woman is cut in half or transforms into a gorilla in order to enjoy the performance.”. Now imagine the work you have to do to accept an opera! 🙂

OK, you got the concept.

TWO

Creators and critics are aware of that. Nathalie Sarraute, a French writer, wrote a book (The Age of Suspicion), where she says that the novels’ readers less and less believe in the author “I know all” invention, and therefore that the writers tend to depersonalize the characters. Readers are more and more also critics, they analyze their pleasure, and you have to be smart and inventive to catch’em back.

In fact, this phenomenon appeared in many Arts.

• In theater, directors began to play with the old “suspension of disbelief” trick : keeping the lights on in the room, allowing characters to call out to the audience.
• In novels, the “omniscient narrator” began to speak to the reader (about his doubts, or the way the story was told).
• In movies, characters suddenly watched the spectator, talking to him (Cf Pierrot le Fou, Godard).

THREE

I found this idea in interviews of movies directors like Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock and Brian de Palma. Their idea is the same, I would formulate it like that :

“I KNOW for sure that I want to make movies for an audience who is AWARE that it’s a movie. I don’t want to put them in a classical “dream mode”, but I want to play with the audience with the fact a movie is like a clock, a fake funny mechanism MADE FOR HIM, therefore I constantly ELBOW THE AUDIENCE with nods, tricks, implausible twists and turns. They have fun not because they believe it, they have fun because they know I’m here with the scriptwriter working for their entertaining intelligence – so there!”.

So what is played here is not “sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment” any more, like in the normal Suspension of Disbelief. It’s a weaving between entertainment AND logic and realism. Inside the audience, the spectator AND the critic are dancing tango, with a smile. Intelligence is summoned, not only the dreaming capacities…

TOOL :

Where would you use this? Advertising? Poetry? Marketing? What would be a private joke to an audience? What is to elbow you spectators, and how to? Why? If you succeed, what happens?

You can also read : Strangeization.

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : __bodylanguage__

 

Umberto Eco & the Open Work

Umberto Eco wrote an entire book about the idea of Open Work. I just present you here this idea, as a seed, that a “work” has an openness.

A work “appears” like this or like that, but has a number of ways of being read (seen, viewed, watched, decoded, interpreted, appreciated, contemplated, analyzed). This seems obvious for the sheet music, the score, or for a play, right?

1. There’s maybe an “obvious” openness, a prescribed way to read a work, but it can be a little more vague, like a set of possibilities – until complete crypticness : find what you can, if you dare to do it, then.
2. Some elements are often chosen by the artist to let the audience appropriate the work their way, but not “that” their way. Symbolic novels are obviously made for this purpose (Kafka is an example given by Eco).
3. Opened or not, some people do what they want with a piece of work. It’s a whole decision, it requires culture, or tools, or ways of finding things.
4. Some works, this way, can be enriched by a clever spectator, who would be delighted by elements, details, structures… the artist himself ignore!
5. In classical music or theater, there’s a place between the work (the score) and the audience. The players (or the actors) have a big role about “how they see it”. But after that level, the audience will also interpret things…
6. We probably want to find bonds between the work we study and our own searches, flaws, experiences…
7. Add yours in the comments, please?

 

Tool : If you work out of the “artistic field”, in blogging, marketing, conversation, fashion, coaching, I’m sure you consider many parameters. You can make a list, right? Timeline, colours, variety, energy, waits, etc, there are many levers to pull. But have you considered the “openness” of what you propose?

 

Thanks for reading!

“Nommer un objet c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème, qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu a peu : le suggérer . . . voila le rêve”

“To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem, which is composed of the pleasure of guessing little by little: to suggest . . . there is the dream”

Mallarmé

Instagram : jacopo.rigotti

Exploring movies from Tennessee Williams’s plays…

Once you decided to go under the surface of “news”, there are many ways to explore the movie history. I once imagined I explored a year of cinema : let’s begin with 1960. Let’s watch Psycho, l’Avventura, La Dolce Vita, Elmer Gantry, Exodus and The Magnificent Seven…

There’s another way. Which is to find the author. My best choice (from far) has been Tennessee Williams. You can watch : A Tramway Named Desire, The Night of the Iguana, Suddenly Last Summer or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tatoo, This Property is Condemned or Baby Doll (there are more, but these are masterpieces).

Check the Internet Movie Database !

For a month, forget Netflix and shows. Watch these movies. Read about T. Williams, his life, etc. You’ll plunge, then, in a strange world with a taste of the South.

Something between William Faulkner and Anton Chekhov. One days I read that these two were, for him, the two best writers of history.

There is no “tool”, here. Just a map. An idea. Make a step aside. Stop reaction on “what they propose you”. Choose your territory.

Moite, complexe, adulte : it’s clever-South, clammy adult movies for adults… You’ll have problems to go back to average shows, I can promise you…