I have a friend who is a psychiatrist. I once asked her what she does when she thinks a patient is lying to her. “How can you really help someone,” I said, “who isn’t telling you what really happened?”
She shrugged. “Why does it matter,” she asked, “what really happened? The fact that the patient is lying is what’s significant, and everything you need to know about the patient is contained in the lie itself. They’re telling you a story for a reason. Listen to the story.”
Which sort of makes sense. But reason number seventy-zillion why I’d be a terrible therapist is that I always want to know what really happened.
What Really Happened is the heart of my problem with science fiction and fantasy and superhero movies in general. I have an almost complete lack of imagination. People will suggest a move like Dune to me and tell me that I will need to suspend my disbelief — “Just get into the story,” they say, like my psychiatrist friend does with her patients.
Can’t do it.
I know my limitations. I watched all 38 hours of The Lord of the Rings movies — or however long they were; sure felt like 38 hours to me — and I tried to immerse myself in that world and pay attention to the story, even though the movies are awfully noisy. I never read the books because, as a general rule, I do not read made-up books that contain made-up maps and made-up languages because, even at a young age, I recognized homework when I saw it.
But I tried to make sense of it. The little people with the feet and the guy with the bald head and the big eye and the creatures with the ears and… it was a blur to me because it’s not real. It’s totally made up. And worse: It’s arbitrary. The rules keep changing.
I was at about hour 12 when suddenly, someone in a cloak said to someone who looks like an enormous toenail that the only way to get the magic thing to the River of Whatever is to forge the Sword of the Unpronounceable Name that no one’s mentioned in the movie so far.
Screenwriters struggle with storytelling choices all the time. On the one hand, you need to keep things surprising and interesting. On the other, you need to keep your contract with the audience not to push them around and confuse them with last-minute, arbitrary twists.
And that’s why there are only two ways for characters in movies and TV shows to start a car.
The first way is instantly, without keys or an ignition or any effort whatsoever. Just hop in and go.
And the other way is the hard way: find the keys, fumble with them, try to get them into the ignition, try to start the car over and over and over again, and it won’t start, and it won’t start, and then, suddenly, it does.
You use the first way when you’ve got some story to get on with, when there’s somewhere for your character to be. You use the second way when there’s a serial killer chasing your character and he or she is trying to get away. There really isn’t another way to do it.
Inevitably, some irritating person — in this case, someone like me — will wonder aloud how it is that the character just hops in the car and goes in the scene just before the scene where she suddenly forgets which key is the ignition key. “That’s not how it really is,” someone irritating — again, me — will say to anyone who is listening.
And the answer to that is either, “Shut up,” or more commonly, a shrug. “It’s a buy,” someone will say. Meaning, the audience will buy it. They’ll just go along with it, without a bump, because they want the story to keep unfolding, and dropping the keys and fumbling around just adds to the tension. What you don’t want to do is show the actual, tedious, real-life way a person starts a car.
What Really Happened is something that we all struggle with, all the time. When a politician tells us something, when a witness testifies in court, when a friend tells you about an argument with a spouse, all of those moments cause us to wonder, “Hmmmm. Is any of this true?”
But it’s more interesting and meaningful to just let the story unfold, to just “buy into it” the way audiences and psychiatrists do. I wish I could do that. But when it comes to elves and monsters and magical sticks, some buys are too big.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
