Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 46, November 2003
Pablo Ortega-Rodriguez
How is Disbelief Suspended?:
The Paradox of Fiction and Carroll's _The Philosophy of Horror_
Noel Carroll _The Philosophy of Horror;
or Paradoxes of the Heart_ New York: Routledge,
1990 ISBN 0415902169 288 pp. In _The Philosophy of
Horror_ Noel Carroll expounds what he calls the 'Paradox of
Fiction', reporting two opposing solutions to the problem,
and giving an 'intermediate' solution which he calls the
'Thought Theory of Emotional Responses to Fiction'. In this
paper I want to critically assess Carroll's solution in
defense of a revised version of one of the other two
solutions, namely, one which involves the familiar idea of
*suspension of disbelief*. The paradox Carroll
discusses could be stated thus: How is it possible that
something that we know to be purely fictional can induce in
us feelings or emotional reactions as one would expect only
to be produced by something we consider as *really*
happening? It seems that, for example, we can only be
frightened by entities in whose existence we actually
believe, but it is the case that no movie theatre audience
will in fact say that the Green Slime they see approaching
from the screen is real and that it is mandatory to go ask
for help from the army -- despite their being utterly
thrilled by it. To solve this inconsistency, it seems that
we must either say that there is a special kind of belief
going on in fictional spectators, one which is somehow
immune to being seriously acknowledged by anyone who has
(despite all) a deep impression of verity when seeing a
fictional piece, or we must say that what we experience in
theatres is not an authentic emotional response at all: we
do not really fear the Green Slime, but only have a kind of
milder, analogue experience of fearing it. Carroll finds that both
options have their defenders. In the former view, he
acknowledges the Coleridgean thesis that we have a kind of
controlled faculty to suspend our common beliefs in order to
give credibility to the ghosts of our fantasy. As Coleridge
says in his _Biographia Literaria_: 'my endeavours should be
directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least
romantic: yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a
human interest and semblance of truth sufficient to procure
for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of
disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith'.
[1] But Carroll points out,
first, that beliefs are not the sort of thing we have a
willing control of. I simply cannot make myself believe in
something previously not believed unless convincing and
proving evidence is offered to me, something that simply
does not happen when the credibility of film or theatrical
fiction is lost (65). Moreover, suspension of disbelief does
not apparently solve the problem, in the sense that for
Carroll the suspension process entails a simultaneous,
latent consciousness of the fictional character of the
object whose disbelief we are suspending; for in order to
have a proper response to fiction (not calling the army when
we see the Green Slime), we must somehow believe that we are
confronted with a fictional spectacle (67-68). However, Carroll also
finds problems in the alternative view, as sustained by
Kendall Walton in his article 'Fearing Fictions'.
[2] For Walton, the fictional experience is like a
pretend or make-believe game, with no crucial feelings being
involved. Just as a little girl pretends that his playful
father is a children-eating ogre just for her amusement
(without in the least believing seriously that he is one or
reacting emotionally in that direction), we simply pretend
to be horrified by a horror film without actually developing
real fear, but only a 'quasi-fear', similar in its
manifestations to -- yet not identical with -- actual fear.
Carroll presents Walton's view with a series of critical
remarks, but in essence he objects to its incongruity with
the 'phenomenology' of fictional experience: being terrified
to the bone by a movie like The Exorcist is not like being
pretending to be terrified by it. In that sense, Walton's
view solves many logical problems, but it misses the whole
pathos of intense emotional response to fiction, which is in
many relevant aspects identical with that of real emotions.
(We may also say, as a complementary observation, that
people who enjoy horror films are in many cases
*regretfully* reluctant to watch them because of their being
too scary, resulting in their denial of what is an enticing
source of amusement for them. According to Walton's theory,
such films could not be scary as long as they are enjoyable,
for the terror involved was only pretend-terror and never
felt.) After discarding these two
options, Carroll responds with his own 'Thought Theory of
Emotional Responses to Fiction'. The theory amounts to this:
unlike the two theories discussed, we must reject the idea
that we are only genuinely moved by what we believe is real;
for it is the case that the mere content of a thought,
without the reference of its reality in the world, produces
in us genuine emotions, such as when we see a precipice and
consequently experience a real and frightening sensation of
vertigo (80). As Frege pointed out, fiction does not involve
reference, just meaning. Fiction is a disposition of been
moved just by vivid description, not by any actual belief
(85). Carroll's view is more
'phenomenological' than Walton's in that we actually observe
that some entities in whose existence we do not really
believe may frighten us (like in the movie _Leprechaun_).
Yet, the problem with it is that it does not explain why in
many cases we do not feel fear in the sole conception of a
horrific thing *which in other circumstances actually does
produce fear*. Consider the common case of a horror film
which we enjoy with relative equanimity in daylight,
surrounded by friends, or that we may recall with no great
thrill at work, but that could and would produce terror if
seen or recalled in the solitude of night. This means that
we need a positive reason for making a horrific thought
scary in some situations where that reason is present, and
for failing to scare us in others where it is absent (a
'principium terrificationis', if you will). In defense of Carroll's
theory, it could be argued that the sheer vividness of the
thought is responsible for rendering strong emotional
reactions. Yet, this does not seem to be a satisfactory
account, for I can perceive with complete detail and
vivacity a monster mask and remain completely non-shocked;
yet, the blurriest and faintest recalling of that mask may
make a child shiver. Rather, I think many familiar and
common experiences suggest that it is our more intense
belief in the reality of the horrific thing represented by
the content of our thought that really accounts for the
emotional reaction commonly entailed by fiction. In my view,
such commonplace experiences could be variously described.
1, The reason many people give for explaining why a horror
movie was not scary for them is: 'I didn't buy it', 'I
didn't fall for it', etc. What is more, if the characters
fail to render a convincing reaction of fear when facing the
fictitious monster, then that very same monster that would
normally frighten us in good fiction does in fact lose a lot
of its chilling capacity (a good monster, then, is not only
its design but more radically its dramatic context). 2,
Horror simply grows if we manage to place a horrible thing
in a concrete relation to our real situation, like thinking
that a ghost is just about to come through our bedroom door.
3. Even cliched monsters that do not frighten us could prove
to be scary if we convince ourselves that they have become
real. 4. Possibly the best way to dispel a scary impression
left by a horror movie is to think about the actors and of
how the scene may have been artistically produced, depriving
it of its ability to be thought of as real. 5. Sudden
frights regarding elements that normally would not be scary
(as in a close, strident yell) very likely shock us because
in the brevity of the moment our mind appears to have no
time to figure out if the presented object is a real threat
or not. 6. Young children, who admittedly are the least
capable of clearly discerning between fiction and realty,
are thus more sensibly affected by almost any type of scary
fiction. 7. Darkness and solitude seem to affect us because
those are states in which the precise and ordinary
configurations of things disappear, and the common-sense
view of the world is not vividly manifested, therefore
allowing more easily our imagination to acknowledge that
non-ordinary events may be possible. None of these phenomena
are accounted for in Carroll's 'content theory', which
simply fails to realize that in the realm of fiction (and
very specially of performing fiction) the art of being
truthful and convincing is almost the defining element of
the craft, being that without which no strong emotional
responses in the spectator are obtained. What is more, even
a revised version of Carroll's theory, such as Aaron Smuts'
insight into Robert Wise's _The Haunting_, explicitly
acknowledges the limitations of the Thought Theory in
relation to analysis of haunted places, and ends up talking
about the kinds of belief (mitigated belief) and techniques
of enhancing belief in fiction. [3] And finally, the
fact that the sheer thought of something is actually
disgusting or distressing (like the idea of screaking a
chalk-board with our nails), cannot be offered by itself as
a proof for Carroll's position, for it is not at all clear
that in those cases the effectiveness of the idea is not
simply produced by somehow convincing us that we are really
facing the disgusting fact (e.g. that we are really in the
brink of breaking our nails) just in the same fashion a
dramatic piece would convince us of the verity of the
story. In my opinion, all this
eloquently supports the idea that an intense emotional
response to fiction needs something more than thought
content, that is, a kind of belief in what is being showed
(which certainly does not mean that we cannot enjoy the
beauty of, say, the composition of the verse or the
declamatory virtues of an actor without being intrinsically
immersed in the action of a play). Of course, the problem
persists of how fictional belief is attained without
producing in the actual actions that are natural
consequences of really believing stuff, like fleeing from
danger or arresting the villain. Let us face Carroll's
objections against the suspension of disbelief
theory. Surely Carroll is right in
saying that we have no willing control about the things we
want to believe in or not. Yet, although this makes
problematical the plain Coleridgean notion of a *willing*
suspension of disbelief, we can save the idea of a
suspension of disbelief if we accept that it requires the
'external' help of *truthful appearance*. Consider that
there are illusionary events that will always appear real to
us even though we may successfully oppose to this impression
a reflective act which holds us from asserting its verity:
it always appears to us that a drinking straw in a glass of
water is bent, although we do not believe that it is really
bent, thanks to our acquired knowledge of the refraction of
light in water, and so on. This means that, despite our
capacity of holding our belief in such an illusive
impression, we do not have the power to stop its likely
appearance, and we must actively cancel its force by a
sustained and additional mental effort. So it could be said
that there can be a suspension of disbelief, but not in any
case we wish: only if there is present a persuasive illusion
before which we simply do not oppose a mental effort to
cancel its force (the 'willing' aspect would be thereby
reduced to a mere elected passiveness in not bringing to
mind those considerations that would counteract the
impression in terms of its being believed). Of course, this 'force of
appearances' could only explain the conditions and processes
by which we are lead to believe a fictional event, but it
does not account for the central problem, i.e. why do we not
perform in a theatre all the actions expected to be
performed by someone literally believing everything he or
she sees? It could be argued that what really happens is
that we allow ourselves to be frightened up to a 'critical
point' when we 'dis-suspend' disbelief by bringing forth
external considerations about the fictional nature of what
we are seeing. Yet, it does not seem to be a good
description of the fictional experience to say that we are
constantly feinting to escape the theatre if a monster
appears, or go help the heroine if something bad occurs to
her; and even less to say that we are constantly
disconnecting ourselves from the fiction and realizing how
credulous we were; rather, it seems to be the case that, in
a typically successful contemplation of a drama or film, we
simply lose any memory of ourselves or the theatre from
beginning to end, being more likely disconnected from the
story by reasons of sheer boredom than by any strong
emotion. That is why we should
acknowledge that belief is a complex operation admitting
diverse levels of function. Then, in my opinion, the paradox
could be addressed in this way: when something with a
truthful appearance is shown to us, our mind has the power
to suspend disbelief *in relation only to some of its
overall functions*. (More precisely, the functions of
feeling compassion for another person, of placing ourselves
in the position to experiment that other person's thoughts
and emotions; for it happens that we get to believe that
someone is actually experiencing that which takes place in
the fictional piece.) But yet we do not and cannot suspend
such disbelief in relation with our kinetic or intellectual
responses, in the sense that we do not see our spatial
relationship with the fictional elements as a real one, or
that, when being asked seriously if we believe what is going
one in there, we would clearly say: 'no'. Carroll's
objection that the suspension of disbelief retains the
paradox by entailing a deep consciousness that the fiction
is not real, is not conclusive, for in our point of view the
mind is an heterogeneous entity, capable of holding belief
in respect of some of its functions and suspend it in
relation to others (putting it in a plain Aristotelian
fashion, we believe and do not believe in something but not
*in the same mental respect*). Anyone unable to develop a
proper distribution of such suspension through the specific
variety of our many mental function, would simply fail to
appreciate fiction adequately; and this could happen both by
not being capable of believing it for any of our functions
(an absolute indifference to what is being shown in the
fictional medium), or by responding by believing it in
*more* than the required functions, as when a maddened Don
Quixote attacks a group of chivalric puppets firmly
believing they are the real enemies of
Christianity. Such a proposal as is
sketched here may sound subtle, but it does not really
conflict with the peculiar way our brain separately performs
many specialized abilities (as is clearly shown in the
focused nature of some perceptive or kinetic disorders
related with brain-injury). Moreover, holding a kind of
'double belief' is a familiar experience we have in many
instances of ordinary life. Think of cases where we execute
actions which only make sense if we believe that it is at
least reasonably possible to succeed in their objective,
although we are in some level deeply convinced that they are
completely pointless, as when we are watching the last
minutes of a football match wherein our team is loosing by
many goals: very rarely do we turn off the TV set before the
final whistle, and there is a sudden and vivid upset when
that ending occurs, although a few seconds before we stated
with complete sincerity (seconded by our knowledge of the
game) that nothing could be done. In such cases, hope makes
us irrational, in that it is not settled with the things we
do know and believe about the real world, forming a kind of
second 'blind' belief simultaneous with our 'intelligent'
belief, to the point of seeming to pertain to a second
individual inside us. Likewise, we often acknowledge and
talk about the fact that we will one day die, but curiously,
it is only on rare occasions that this idea actually becomes
so vivid and patent that it gets to be depressingly real to
us; therefore, before showing that depressing consideration
of death, we seemed to have a kind of intellectual belief of
the reality of our death, but an inner certainty that our
life had no limits. In conclusion, I think I
have shown good reasons for accepting the idea of a
suspension of disbelief, although not interpreted as a
purely voluntary act, nor as an intermittent inner
regulation of our beliefs during the fictional experience,
but rather as kind of 'ability' or 'disposition' for
producing or holding beliefs in connection with only certain
mind-functions; such an ability manifests itself, so to
speak, as a capacity to experience what a fictional
character would experience of himself if he could see
himself somehow detached from his own self, as if witnessing
his acts like any other sympathetic person would. Universidad de Costa
Rica San Jose, Costa
Rica Notes 1. Samuel Coleridge,
_Biographia Literaria_, vol II (London: Oxford University
Press, 1939), p. 6. 2. See Smuts, 'Haunting
the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial
Experience', _Film Philosophy_, vol 6 no 7, April 2002.
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n7smuts>. 3. Kendall Walton,
'Fearing Fictions', _Journal of Philosophy_, vol. 75 no. 1,
January 1978. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Pablo Ortega-Rodriguez,
'How is Disbelief Suspended?: The Paradox of Fiction and
Carroll's _The Philosophy of Horror_', _Film-Philosophy_,
vol. 7 no. 46, November 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n46ortega-rodriguez>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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