Magic Beans (LOST spoilers, I guess) (Page 2 of 2)

I'm gonna resurrect this, 'cause I think Brian made a point that deserved maybe more attention than it got. It was this:

I heard a guy say something one time: "Human beings are born with only three instinctive abilities: the ability to grasp with their hands, the ability to suckle with their mouths, and the ability to spot bad advertising."

I also once heard somebody describe the act of catching a baseball. Not like in the majors, but just in a backyard game of catch. I don't remember who said it or in what context, but the guy went into all this detail about how many calculations our minds have to work through in an amazingly short amount of time, just to catch a baseball.

I bring these two things up because I think Brian's absolutely right, but I really don't know whether it's cultural, whether it's instinctive, or whether it's a natural consequence of how we're wired.

Human beings are monkeys, biologically speaking. We're brachiators. We have long arms, ball joints in our shoulders, binocular vision. We're highly optimized for swinging through trees. Catching a baseball is no big shakes compared to that. Even though it's objectively really difficult — try to imagine building a robot that can catch a baseball — it's easy for us because it's a side-effect of our biology.

Maybe our innate bullshit detector is like that. Now, maybe this is all just silly, but go with me for a second. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, being able to spot inconsistencies in our environment below the level of conscious perception is a survival trait. If you have to spend all your time looking for the jaguar to avoid being pounced on, you're not going to be as effective at foraging or fucking or whatever it is your little monkey lifestyle demands. But if you can just sort of spot it out of the corner of your eye, and if some deep part of your brain sends out a surge of adrenaline, you're more likely to be able to avoid jaguars and pass on your genes.

Telling stories is lying, and we're evolved — in part — to be able to spot lies. Little things don't add up, somebody behaves out of character, some little inconsistency tickles that deep monkey brain and it's just like we're back in the jungle with the jaguars.

So telling stories to entertain is a balancing act, and telling stories to entertain for money is a very high-stakes balancing act. Everybody knows we're lying, but we have to lie just enough to amuse the audience without lying so much that their monkey brains spot the jaguar. (For purposes of discussion, the jaguar is the storyteller. My metaphor kinda fell apart at the end there.)

We talk about believability in acting all the time; this performance was believable, that one wasn't, whatever. But it's really hard to identify just what makes the difference between a believable performance and not. We can talk about it in broad strokes, sure. Overacting, wooden acting, bad timing, bad line readings, whatever. But when you really look close and try to analyze it, it's not anything you can describe. What makes a truly great performance truly great, rather than merely good? Dunno. It's something ineffable. Something that happens below the level of conscious perception. Something in our monkey brains.

I think that applies to storytelling as well, at least to an extent. It's not always possible to say precisely why a given story smashed through the limits of the audience's credulity. Obvious examples are obvious, of course, but sometimes it's too subtle for deconstruction. Sometimes a plot just doesn't work, for reasons known only to our million-years-ago ancestors.

Sometimes, despite our best efforts not to, we spot the jaguar.