Of fantasy and messages
This entry was originally posted on 20 May 2003 at 1:03 p.m. Inactive links have been removed.
I just finished reading Ivoryshell's most recent entry (Ranting: On music and the theatre (movie theater included)). It's really good. If you haven't read it, read it now, because i'm going to be as unoriginal as ever and do something that Future Problem Solving groups call "piggybacking."
In the third paragraph of Ivoryshell's entry, he talks about how the fairy tale of Cinderella, told as a fantasy, was more moving to him as a kid than it would have been had it simply been told to him in the form of a news item. Somehow, the message, the moral of the story sunk in more when it was told as fantasy (complete with musical numbers etc.). To wit, he says,
To this, i ask the question of the eternal three-year-old: why? Why is it that, as a species, we tend to assimilate and accommodate (technical terms, different meanings) morals, messages, and stories best when they're told with only the most rudimentary trappings of realism? Why is it that setting the story in another world makes it easier to draw the lessons from it?
[Author's note: Before i go on, i want to make it clear that this entry focuses on stories with monumental lessons, the kinds of things you want to teach your children, or things with deep philosophical, spiritual, or religious roots. I also want to make it clear that i'm temporarily suspending the differences i conceptualize between the terms "creativity" and "imagination"--in this case, the act of imagining requires a certain level of creativity.]
When it comes down to it, the question is really why are fairy tales fairy tales and not CNN classics? Why do we require that level of abstraction, whereby we tell and conceive of the story as belonging to a place that doesn't exist--when we want people to draw a real meaning from it? And why is it that it seems we absorb those messages better through the fantastic?
It seems counterintuitive. Having to imagine an entire world slightly different from one's own--in which a wolf can speak and make human-like decisions, or a pig can build a house, or a pumpkin can turn magically into a stagecoach--should, by all rights, be a distraction. But somehow we still manage walk away from the story, newly-created world and all, with the vital message it carries.
I think there are a couple of possibilities here. First, the simple act of imagining a place "long ago and far away, filled with magic" encourages us to pay more attention to what is actually unfolding in the story. Our creative impulses do not stop once we imagine a specific "unreality" and can see it vividly in our minds. World-making is just the beginning of creation. One can see this clearly in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, where God creates the universe, then the world, then the creatures in it, then humanity itself. Myth reflects nature; God's act of creation reflects our own creative abilities. Once we've imagined a new world, we must populate it. And once we populate it, we must--out of sheer curiosity--know the stories of the population we have created. Hence, both the new unreality and the story are burned into our ontology, and the message is now easily accessible due to its vividness--the amount of detail that we put into it, rather than distracting us, actually makes it easier to remember.
Second, world-building makes it easier for us to use idiosyncratic heuristic devices, that is, heuristics that are tailored to our individual perceptions and ways of calculating things.
Think of it this way: emotions are heuristic devices; they provide a great deal of information in a split second, even before we've had time to process them. Much like Spiderman's Spider Sense, emotions alert us that something is out of place, comfortable, disagreeable, agreeable, and so on. Fantasy may work the same way; the major difference would be that we build the fantasy, whereas our emotions are more or less hardwired. In this schema, fairy tales are heuristics that work like emotions.
Third, it's easier to pack allegory into fantasy because it allows for layers of metaphor. Stories based in reality are constrained not only by the laws of physics, but also by the abilities of the average human being--and, perhaps most of all, by the limitations imposed upon us by historical characters, real not. Stories set in reality require even fictional characters to be believable. It's much easier layer symbolism on top of a character with supernatural abilities that are acceptable within an unreal world, than to layer it on top of the same character who has to deal with the realistic reactions of other fictional characters around him.
This may be why a film like The Matrix can include all sorts of mythological and philosopical connections, while a film like Fallen spends more time on action. In the case of The Matrix, the reality/unreality problem is addressed directly: before we can begin to understand the symbolism in that film, Neo has to get beyond reality. In the case of Fallen, we never get to the level of symbolism (and there was plenty of opportunity for it), because the character is bound by a reality that doesn't include demons--so we spend the entire film watching the story as it unfolds, rather than delving into meaning. (Substitute The Sixth Sense for Fallen if you haven't seen it.)
It isn't that stories set in reality aren't good or meaningful. That's not the case at all. It's just that it's easier to draw a lesson from a story that isn't constrained by pragmatic, physical, and material concerns.
I just finished reading Ivoryshell's most recent entry (Ranting: On music and the theatre (movie theater included)). It's really good. If you haven't read it, read it now, because i'm going to be as unoriginal as ever and do something that Future Problem Solving groups call "piggybacking."
In the third paragraph of Ivoryshell's entry, he talks about how the fairy tale of Cinderella, told as a fantasy, was more moving to him as a kid than it would have been had it simply been told to him in the form of a news item. Somehow, the message, the moral of the story sunk in more when it was told as fantasy (complete with musical numbers etc.). To wit, he says,
The theatricality and unrealness of "Cinderella" allows us to get sucked into a new world, and when we leave that world, we have perspective on it. We can take lessons from it more easily because it's not our world. And it feels more vivid because it has its own specific world, created for that story alone.
To this, i ask the question of the eternal three-year-old: why? Why is it that, as a species, we tend to assimilate and accommodate (technical terms, different meanings) morals, messages, and stories best when they're told with only the most rudimentary trappings of realism? Why is it that setting the story in another world makes it easier to draw the lessons from it?
[Author's note: Before i go on, i want to make it clear that this entry focuses on stories with monumental lessons, the kinds of things you want to teach your children, or things with deep philosophical, spiritual, or religious roots. I also want to make it clear that i'm temporarily suspending the differences i conceptualize between the terms "creativity" and "imagination"--in this case, the act of imagining requires a certain level of creativity.]
When it comes down to it, the question is really why are fairy tales fairy tales and not CNN classics? Why do we require that level of abstraction, whereby we tell and conceive of the story as belonging to a place that doesn't exist--when we want people to draw a real meaning from it? And why is it that it seems we absorb those messages better through the fantastic?
It seems counterintuitive. Having to imagine an entire world slightly different from one's own--in which a wolf can speak and make human-like decisions, or a pig can build a house, or a pumpkin can turn magically into a stagecoach--should, by all rights, be a distraction. But somehow we still manage walk away from the story, newly-created world and all, with the vital message it carries.
I think there are a couple of possibilities here. First, the simple act of imagining a place "long ago and far away, filled with magic" encourages us to pay more attention to what is actually unfolding in the story. Our creative impulses do not stop once we imagine a specific "unreality" and can see it vividly in our minds. World-making is just the beginning of creation. One can see this clearly in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, where God creates the universe, then the world, then the creatures in it, then humanity itself. Myth reflects nature; God's act of creation reflects our own creative abilities. Once we've imagined a new world, we must populate it. And once we populate it, we must--out of sheer curiosity--know the stories of the population we have created. Hence, both the new unreality and the story are burned into our ontology, and the message is now easily accessible due to its vividness--the amount of detail that we put into it, rather than distracting us, actually makes it easier to remember.
Second, world-building makes it easier for us to use idiosyncratic heuristic devices, that is, heuristics that are tailored to our individual perceptions and ways of calculating things.
Think of it this way: emotions are heuristic devices; they provide a great deal of information in a split second, even before we've had time to process them. Much like Spiderman's Spider Sense, emotions alert us that something is out of place, comfortable, disagreeable, agreeable, and so on. Fantasy may work the same way; the major difference would be that we build the fantasy, whereas our emotions are more or less hardwired. In this schema, fairy tales are heuristics that work like emotions.
Third, it's easier to pack allegory into fantasy because it allows for layers of metaphor. Stories based in reality are constrained not only by the laws of physics, but also by the abilities of the average human being--and, perhaps most of all, by the limitations imposed upon us by historical characters, real not. Stories set in reality require even fictional characters to be believable. It's much easier layer symbolism on top of a character with supernatural abilities that are acceptable within an unreal world, than to layer it on top of the same character who has to deal with the realistic reactions of other fictional characters around him.
This may be why a film like The Matrix can include all sorts of mythological and philosopical connections, while a film like Fallen spends more time on action. In the case of The Matrix, the reality/unreality problem is addressed directly: before we can begin to understand the symbolism in that film, Neo has to get beyond reality. In the case of Fallen, we never get to the level of symbolism (and there was plenty of opportunity for it), because the character is bound by a reality that doesn't include demons--so we spend the entire film watching the story as it unfolds, rather than delving into meaning. (Substitute The Sixth Sense for Fallen if you haven't seen it.)
It isn't that stories set in reality aren't good or meaningful. That's not the case at all. It's just that it's easier to draw a lesson from a story that isn't constrained by pragmatic, physical, and material concerns.
posted by Circus at 12:39 PM
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