Notes from Maine - 2021/10/10
The shower curtain rustles and leg slides out from the tub. Emilio’s toothbrush stops mid stroke. He’s frozen in shock for a moment before his survival instinct begins to ramp up. When he sees the bloody knife push the curtain to the side, he runs.
Bolting down the short hall, he runs right past his keyring and wallet on the counter as he sprints for the door. Throwing himself out into the October night, Emilio bounds down the stairs and reaches his car in three long strides. That’s when he remembers the keys. They’re still on the counter.
“Oh, come on,” my mom would say at this point. “Emilio wouldn’t run right by his keys. He would have grabbed them. They were right there.”
And then I would say, “Sure, but he did run by them. Maybe he was too panicked?”
“No way. I don’t believe,” Mom would say.
This is my mother’s problem with a lot of fiction—books, TV shows, movies—she makes up her mind about the people on the screen and then refuses to believe when they do something that she thinks is out of character. Even on very small details of a plot, she’ll fight against the Suspension of Disbelief. I’m not saying that Mom doesn’t enjoy fiction. She definitely does. She just likes to criticize what she considers contrivances.
In high school we were slogging through Romeo and Juliet and the subject of coincidence came up. I was definitely on the side of, “This isn’t believable because there are too many coincidences that drive the plot to its terrible end.”
Our teacher, Ms. Martin, said that strings of coincidence do occur and maybe that’s why those are the stories we choose to tell. If we get rid of all the things that we haven’t personally encountered, then fiction would be very boring. When you open a book, I guess you might as well sign up for the ride that the author is offering.
That lesson really sunk in for me. When I watch a movie and the person does something out of character, I’m more likely to think, “Well, I guess I misjudged them,” instead of, “They would never do that.” In the case of Emilio’s keys above, you have to remember that his vision was narrowed by fear and his movements were driven by panic. The keys and wallet were only obvious from our omniscient viewpoint. To him, they might have just been another obstacle on his way to safety.
My issue isn’t Suspension of Disbelief. I have a problem with Suspension of Distrust.
TV shows are the worst—especially ones that have plots that stretch over multiple seasons. In order to enjoy a show like that, you have to trust that the writers are going to be clever enough to pull it off. How often (Lost, Game of Thrones, Dexter, Seinfeld, Futurama, New Girl, X-Files, Arrested Development, True Blood, etc.) has a show captivated us and then suddenly disappointed, sometimes right in the final episode?
It has gotten to a point where I immediately distrust any new show. The more I love the first episode, the more fearful I get about how it’s going to be messed up.
The antidote to that (for me) has been these ”limited run” series on Netflix and HBO and the like. I just watched Midnight Mass the other day. It’s seven hours long (I think), but I pretty much watched it in one day. Every time I began to doubt the writers would see it through, they surprised me with something delightfully horrible.
I always think about these things when I’m in the second half of a book. I want to make sure that I don’t abuse the trust people have put in me. When you open one of my books, you can believe that I’ve struggled to honor my end of the deal. I hope that shows, and I hope you’re well.
