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Comment by bsedlm | Hacker News Reader

it depends on how much you already know about computers...

I'm very very curious about the concept of 'suspend disbelief'.. which from my ongoing analysis, is all about how any fictional story is connected to reality.

I just watched the Moonfall movie and the most impactful thing for me is just how bad it comes out. While it's clear they've studied what's supposed to make a story work; and the dialog and exposition waste NO time, it fails to get me to suspend disbelief.

On the other hand, considering stranger things which does a better job, without being really good (it's just ok), still manages to get me to suspend disbelief much better than that awful movie.

Anybody have anything on suspend disbelief from a narrative (the technique of storytelling) standpoint?

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Good question! The WP article is very Wikipedia-ish, but not a bad intro to the issues. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief

I’m sure there are much longer/better discussions, and I don’t know where to find those aside from browsing the WP article references.

I generally like the ‘criticisms’ section. I agree with it and and don’t feel like the term suspension of disbelief adequately characterizes what’s going on. There are probably more useful analyses when it comes to understanding how to write stories. Personally I think it’s more about whether the story is 1) good and 2) plausible enough as a fantasy idea, in that order. If it’s not good, the threshold for incorrect physics goes down.

The approach Stranger Things (at least, in the first, best, season) uses to suspend disbelief is to invoke a sense of child-like wonder, AND terror. Our protagonists are, by and large, children, or emerging from childhood into the lived body-horror of being a teenager. We see the world (primarily) through their lens, a lens that magnifies AND simplifies things. They don't understand what's going on, they just _know_ things are happening. Their credibility is established on the basis of "are these things a kid could conceivably think/believe."

Contrast that to media like Moonfall, where the characters are supposed to understand what's happening AND convey that to the audience. That's a much bigger lift. Their credibility is established according to "does this correspond to things an engineer would plausibly say/believe," which not many films get entirely right.

Stranger Things also has one more screenwriting technique going for it - it shows, instead of telling. We are _shown_ 11 being submerged into a tank and transported to the Other, we aren't told that that's whats happening. We are _shown_ the terrors of a mother who's lost her child, we aren't told "oh she's so sad." Show, don't tell, is THE big rule of storytelling, and it's ignored because it's hard to achieve.

EDIT for grammar

> Show, don't tell, is THE big rule of storytelling

This idea has major limits and is by no means absolute. Many sci fi shows fail when they try to show too much, and end up with both bad vfx and bad story. The ones that are standing the test of time are the stories that leave some things up to the imagination, they imply without trying to render every last detail. I honestly think George Lucas was a better director before CG, precisely because he couldn’t show everything he wanted, but had the ability to tell story around the visual gaps. That or good writers and crew.

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