It’s a great summation of… well… everything, man. Really nicely said.

When we have a suspension of disbelief, I think we’re allowing ourselves to have this experiential projection into the film. When you’re watching a good film, your senses are sucked into the frame like a tunnel excluding all other input. We attach to a scene or a character and away we go. Just like we’re high when flying a kite, our heart races when we, and Indiana Jones, run from a giant boulder.

Conversely, when we have more than a willful suspension of disbelief, but rather an actual belief that what we’re seeing is real, this projection also acts in reverse. In addition to projecting ourselves into the film, we project the film back into our lives.

This is something that we probably all did as children. I was perhaps eight years old when I saw Night of the Living Dead. To this day, I would not purchase a home unless I could see how it could be defended when the zombies come. For our adult selves to engage in this manner of projection, we need some sanction, either implied or explicit that what we are seeing is real, or at least based on something real.

As far as what’s more powerful, I think implying something is real is more effective than stating it. Take The Fourth Kind for example. This film burns gas in almost every frame reminding you that what you’re seeing is a reenactment of actual events. It even goes so far as to use split screens depicting “actual” events and “reenacted” events (http://tinyurl.com/ycf9lq3). The effect is that you know nothing you’re seeing is real, and after the first five minutes, having the film scream it at you is just annoying.

The truth is that everything on film is in some sense a lie, even documentary footage. Film forces a perspective and quality that is the same for every viewer, and this is not the case for real, experienced events. What makes a story feel real I think is a combination of things. It’s the character – are they relatable? Is what they’re saying authentic? It’s the basis of the story – there are assumptions about aliens, so the alien autopsy plays off this inherent narrative. It’s the presentation of the story. Does the story follow all the beats of some formula? If you make a story about a killer who is unkillable, and has one more gasp of evil after he’s finally “killed”, we all know this is the standard put-on. If you manage to tell a story that keeps the audience off balance, then this becomes more real. We don’t have the standard guard rails containing the narrative in a safe boundary.

All these subtleties from the writing to the manner in which the story is filmed play into the realness, and allows us to project the film into life.

When it comes to finding out whether or not something is real, I think if you’ve actually told a good story and gotten under someone’s skin, it doesn’t matter. Knowing it was not real doesn’t negate the experience. I remember the episode of All in the Family where the character Edith dies. Now, I had no expectation that All in the Family was real. I did however have a misconception: I believed that Jean Stapleton, the actress who played Edith Bunker, had actually died which is why she was written off the show. I believe that a friend of mine had told me that as well, and since we didn’t have the Internet and I didn’t follow the TV industry, I had no information contradicting this. When I saw that episode, I was sad because I thought Jean Stapleton was a nice lady and I was sad tat she’d died. Of course I have no way of knowing that Jean Stapleton is a nice person because really I thought the character she played was nice. This sort of projection of what I was seeing back into the real world is exactly what I’m talking about.

Many years later, I saw a recording of a play on either A&E or Bravo. I don’t know what the play was, I only noticed it as I was flipping through the channels. One of the actresses in the play was Jean Stapleton. At first I assumed that this must have been old footage, but it clearly wasn’t. The quality of the recording was better than TV in the early 80′s and Jean Stapleton was obviously older.

Clearly Jean Stapleton had come back from the dead.

I knew it couldn’t be true, but I felt that it was. Now that I know Jean Stapleton hadn’t died, my experience still hasn’t changed. I know in a rational sense that she was never dead, but in an emotional way, I know she’s been resurrected. And I’m glad she came back to life, cause I’m still sure she’s a very nice lady.