The actors have left the page and screen, and now stand next to you. They walk into your bathroom, demand you look in their bedroom and proclaim every detail you see or else you hate them.
All the actors know they are actors. They only aprove the story lines of the other actors, and demand all non-actors join them in the story, or else they are ridiculed and dismissed from the new stage.
This world is Lucifer's Stage. His "truth" is his hate for the image and character of God. Your "real truth" is God's Truth, that you are made in the Image of God. Your character is to be the Character of God.
He will do everything possible to get you to partner with him on his stage, joining "his truth", which he knows is a lie, so that you will have your True Image and Character gleefully given, rather than stolen, so he can insure it is destroyed and you are killed in every human and spiritual way possible. (John 10:10)
These descriptions that follow are no longer only artistic descriptions, but commentary on our Societies.
Judges 21:25
"Everyone Did That Which Was Right in their Own Eyes."
- Suspension of Belief William
Coleridge coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief" in Chapter XIV of his Biographia Literaria to describe a state of mind in which readers willingly ignore obvious untruths and fantastic elements in literature in order to allow themselves to enjoy the story. He called it a form of "poetic faith."
- Most of the time, a work of art–especially a dramatic work–is at pains to draw you into the story. In addition to the suspension of disbelief with regard to the story, there is a sort of suspension of the senses with regard to the technique, in which we enter into the world of the work of art on its own terms. The observer is not usually intended to focus on the technical means of producing the artistic effect, or the means by which the story is told. The tools used to create the work are not part of the work itself. Most of the time, these are means to an end. The viewer can of course be conscious of them, but they are still tools and techniques, and not the subject of the work of art.
Sometimes, however, an artist will employ a self-conscious or even self-referential display of these tools or techniques, intentionally drawing attention to the means of making the work, in order to convey a meta-message, or to enrich the storytelling in surprising and paradoxical ways. The medium of film has perhaps some of the greatest potential for showing the viewer the methods of its own production. But it is important to remember that the filmmaker, when showing you the “behind the scenes” footage as part of the main product, has made a conscious choice of what to reveal. Moving what should be behind the scenes in front of the camera does not make the product less scripted, more authentic, more real. No one is under the illusion that “reality” TV shows show us anything that isn’t scripted up front and then shaped in the editing room to form whatever narrative is desired. But should we not be just as skeptical about documentary films? And on the other side of the coin, are fictional films less true because they are made-up stories?
In three films as diverse of style and content as Orson Welles’s F for Fake, Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up, and Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, we see truth more clearly the more the artifice of the film is insisted upon. In each film, we are asked directly or implicitly, not to suspend our disbelief, but to frankly acknowledge the falseness on the surface of the film in order to approach something deeper and more true. These films ask the viewer to suspend his belief in what he is seeing, and question the very nature of storytelling on film, and by extension, in our lives. In each of these films, our senses tell us that we are being lied to, and we are not asked to deny it, but to accept the lie for what it is, and seek a paradoxical truth that is deeper.
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So again, the tools of the film are laid bare for the viewer in such a way as to elicit and examination of the surface narrative. What is “real” and what is “fake?” Is that which is “fake” therefore “untrue?” As director Kiarostami said in an interview regarding one of his films, “We put a series of lies together to reach a higher truth.
- Suspension of disbelief, sometimes called willing suspension of disbelief, is the intentional avoidance of critical thinking or logic in examining something unreal or impossible in reality, such as a work of speculative fiction, in order to believe it for the sake of enjoyment. Aristotle first explored the idea of the concept in its relation to the principles of theater; the audience ignores the unreality of fiction in order to experience catharsis.
