Religion & Law

Bastards On the Beach

By John Pieret

The Fifteenth Carnival of Elitist Bastards is lounging about the beach at The Coffee-Stained Writer.

Stephanie Zvan at Quiche Moraine has an interesting take on the framing/accommodationist/incompatiblist debate that centers on the claim by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum in their book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future:

Dawkins and some other scientists fail to grasp that in Hollywood, the story is paramount?that narrative, drama, and character development will trump mere factual accuracy every time, and by a very long shot.

Willing suspension of disbelief does not mean hanging it by its neck until dead.

Accuracy has an important role to play in building world, plot and character. Every time we flub or cheat a detail, we're making our audience, at least part of which will catch any inaccuracy, do more work. In writerly terms, it's called throwing our audience out of the story. It means that something has gone wrong enough to remind an audience that the story is only a story. In order to get back to the point where the story is a world that the audience is visiting, the process of suspending disbelief has to start all over again.

Every time another inaccuracy is noticed, the process starts once more, and upholding that disbelief gets harder and harder. Some readers or viewers will give up on us completely. They'll give up on the story because it asks too much of them?not in thinking but in forgiveness.

Yes, there is a kind of movie that can get away with flubbing all the details. Details aren't why people go to summer action extravaganzas, those movies in which everything explodes, even the water. They're not looking for accuracy. On the other hand, they're not going to these movies looking for story either.

Setting up story and accuracy as a dichotomy also ignores the richness that accuracy can add to a story. In fact, whole stories can be built from closely observed detail. Juno is one of those stories. It doesn't have a suspenseful plot. The characters don't change much from beginning to end, although a few of the relationships do. What we get instead is messy, accurate observations of the complexities of life, and that was enough to win Diablo Cody an Oscar to garner an impressive return for the movie.

There's very little Richard Dawkins or any other scientist will have to say about it, no matter accommodating they are.

Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on July 26, 2009 (boomark / email).