Yeah, I probably should have mentioned that credit, but I just assumed everybody here knew about it.

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.

Oh, leave me alone. I drank a lot of coffee today, that's all.

"Schindler's List" is … well, it's kinda hard to say, really. Is it possible for a movie to be an utterly superlative example of the craft, deserving of every accolade you could smear on it … and pretty irrelevant in the context of the medium's latter-day history at the same time?

Anyway. My list:

1. Twelve Angry Men
2. Battleship Potemkin
3. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
4. The Searchers
5. Days of Heaven/Badlands (a twofer)
6. Godfather II. And guys? Seriously? For nearly a year, I've had the DVD sitting right here. Right on my table. I've just never once, in that entire year, been in the mood to watch it.

Oh, and until just recently, I was humiliated because I — an Errol Morris fanboy through and through — had never seen "The Thin Blue Line." I rectified that a few months back, thanks to Netflix, and my conclusion was pretty much that yup, I was a moron for not watching it sooner.

I second that. I'd like to hear what the DIF hive thinks of that movie.

(Er. I guess I could just keep that on my clipboard and paste it in here whenever somebody makes a good suggestion.)

Talking of which, the TV show "Lost in Space" was also scored by a very young Johnny Williams. He wrote the themes (including the absolutely kick-ass third-season theme) and a lot of the incidental music.

If you're in the mood for funny, get "Murder By Death." The cast will blow your mind. David Niven, Peter Falk, Maggie Smith, Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness and Truman fricking Capote. It's awesome.

Oh, man, yeah. Seconding "The Ice Storm." Astonishing film.

Also, "The Girlfriend Experience," by Soderbergh.

My apologies, 'cause I'm pretty sure I'm responsible for the most-polarizing thing. I meant that opinions on the forum are polarized. It's not my fault the guys on the podcast are all tasteless hacks.

(I kid because I love. No, seriously. Please don't ban me.)

God, you're easy.

I wasn't there for the Lost party, so I kinda feel like I'm butting into an overheard conversation.

We can talk about magic beans and Wonderland, but really what we're dancing around is the notion of willing suspension of disbelief. All stories are false; that's what distinguishes stories from histories. But some stories aren't merely false, but impossibly false. Sometimes authors spew out shit that's just completely ridiculous, but the audience goes along with it anyway. The audience has, for whatever reason, chosen to check their disbelief at the door for the duration of that story.

I'm gonna tell you guys now about one of my all-time favorite shows. You've probably heard of it. It was a speculative-fiction-type show, set in a universe parallel to ours. The world of the show was almost identical to ours, but not precisely. Some major details were different. There were different countries, the maps were different, recent history was different. The whole premise of the show revolved around some event sometime in the 70s that caused the in-show universe's timeline to diverge from our own. It was a big mystery on top of which this character-driven story was constructed. The show always played a little fast-and-loose with the chronology — they did a lot of flashbacks, in particular — but in the last couple seasons the writers got more ambitious, playing with flash-forwards and Rashomon-style point-of-view shifts. But under it all, throughout the whole show, there was this one underlying mystery.

And you know what? That central mystery of how the two timelines diverged, the big back-story of just exactly what happened to cause the differences? It was never explained. The finale came and went, and absolutely no explanations were ever offered for it.

I am, of course, talking about "The West Wing."

Now Jeffery, you say. Surely you are being silly. Surely you are making up lies to entertain strangers over the Internet. But I say to you that I am not. Think about it. In the universe of "The West Wing," not only is there a different president, but they have their presidential elections in the wrong years! Obviously it's a parallel universe that diverged at some point from our own.

And yes, there were Internet people who got lost in the tall grass on that one. Here's my personal favorite fan theory: When Agnew resigned, Nixon appointed Ford to be the new vice president, just like in our world. When Nixon subsequently resigned himself, Ford succeeded him becoming the only president in US history to assume the office without ever having been elected as either president or vice president — again, as in our world. The point of divergence is that, seeing a possible Constitutional crisis looming, Congress called for a special election in November of 74, in which Ford won a full term and was reelected in 78 — he was eligible for two full terms under the 22nd — which threw the cadence of elections off, leading to Bartlet being elected in 98.

But that's just a fan theory. I read it on the Internet. It's not in the story itself. In the story, Bartlet's the president, elections happen on different years, and that's just how it is. It doesn't matter. It doesn't bother anybody. And the fact that how-this-all-came-to-be was never explained didn't stop the show from becoming one of the most acclaimed and popular shows ever until Sorkin quit and the new fucker Wells left Leo dying in the woods and I absolutely refused ever to watch another episode after that. Fucker.

Ahem. Anyway.

An author always proposes to make a deal with his audience. He says, "If you give me your attention and your credence, I will captivate you." Notice that's an equation with three variables: attention, credence and captivation. If the author doesn't captivate the audience, it doesn't really matter how much attention or credence he asked for; even a five-minute, totally-grounded short film can bore. On the other hand, if the story is sufficiently captivating, the audience will go along with anything, and virtually for as long as the author keeps talking. In that way, we are all still children. When we reach the end of a beloved bedtime story, we all want to ask, "And then what happened?"

Though I didn't participate in the whole Lost thing myself, it sounds like a lot of people got suckered into a different kind of deal with the authors. It sounds like the deal those authors pitched was, "If you give me your attention, I will tell you a secret." Maybe you were captivated along the way, maybe you weren't, I dunno, that's between you and your God. But from what I've heard over the past couple days, at least a few people (mostly folks I know on Twitter) were, by the end, only in it for the answers. And those folks came away disappointed. Because at the very end, the authors pulled a Vader and altered the deal. "No, no," they said. "You were supposed to be captivated this whole time. See, it's not about the secret, it's about the characters."

To which at least a few of my acquaintances said, "Fuck that shit."

My advice, if I were in an advice-handing-out mood, would be to be ever suspicious of an author who promises you great wonders tomorrow in exchange for your attention today. Appealing to pure monkey curiosity is easy, and rarely worth doing.

But underneath all this wankery is a concept I call "the stupid line." I call it that because I just don't know how else to describe it. At least with me, there sometimes comes a point where a tiny homunculus of Graham Chapman appears in my head dressed in a brigadier's uniform and goes "Right, stop this now, this is entirely too silly." I don't always see him coming, either. Often I'm right with the author all the way — "and then the daddy fish meets another fish with anterograde amnesia, yes, yes, and then what?" — until wham. Suddenly we've hit the stupid line.

The stupid line is, for me, the point where I'm no longer sufficiently captivated to extend the author any more credit. It might be because I've been asked too much all at once — the second magic bean, in Brian's terms — or it might be because I think I'm gonna have to shell out more attention than I want to get to the good part. For me, Lost fell into the second category. Roundabout the middle of the first season I suddenly just couldn't be arsed any more, because I was of the opinion that the authors were more interested in setting things up than paying things off. And frankly, the characters weren't sufficiently interesting to me to justify sitting on my couch for an hour a week watching inexplicable shit happen in an inexplicable place.

But that's just me.

Sorry. I used way too many words.

Maybe, maybe not. But that's sort of beside the point, when you factor in the historical context of the fact that those things had never been done before.