Levels of Reality in Genre Fiction

And yet they're all lies, through and through. Hogwarts does not exist, nor Falstaff, nor Oedipus. If the devil is the father of lies, then the greatest trick he ever pulled was the creation of narrative fiction, literature is but an elaborate lie, and "beware the storyteller" is as good a point as any. Another point is, "beware your biases and assumptions." Kujan assumes Verbal is stupid and tells him that he is not going to go anywhere until he tells him what he wants to hear. Verbal obliged him.

Of course The Usual Suspects was told as a “lie”. The main character is making it up as he goes along, feeding us, the viewers, as well as the detective, a story that obviously didn’t happen because of who he is.
The movie itself is not a “lie” anymore than Rashomon, with its multiple point of views of the same event each ending differently.

It’s lazy criticism.

Well I feel that Rashomon was a lot better because I cared about the situation more and found the characters more compelling, especially the protagonist. I guess The Usual Suspect's story I felt did not have any depth for me to get sucked into in comparison. I guess Rashomon just made me care about the lies.

I don't think that your experience here was unique. I think a lot of people were turned off by this film as it breaks a rule of story-telling which is "the lie must be true(ish?) for the duration of the lie... ...er, I mean story." Reminding the viewer that the story is just a lie during the story is a bit like a prostitute reminding you that s/he is only doing it for the money in middle of the conjugal act. I think that this is what bothered people--the film transgressed a boundary condition that is not explicitly written anywhere but part of a tacit-contract of how reality functions in fiction. Myself, I love the Usual Suspects, however, I am more interested in why people rejected the film "for lying," than I am in judging them for doing so.

Is the previous post about Rashomon or The Usual Suspects, or both?

The Usual Suspects

I didn't really get a strong sense of tension from Rashomon, even though the writing was usually very impressive. The Usual Suspects was one brutal but well-told story that always kept pushing the boundaries of tension.

Well I guess The Usual Suspects was well paced and cut for sure, if that adds to it, but I felt Rashomon had more to say when it comes to believing witnesses in crimes, and themes of jealousy and lust.

Also, in The Usual Suspects I felt cheated how the main character in the flashbacks changes appearances in order to support the lie with different actors playing him. Whereas at least in Rashomon the same actors still played the same characters in te lie, so it didn't feel as forced for me if that makes sense.

I think this provides a clue to the Paradox of Fiction and the Paradox of Tragedy. We are moved by it, because it IS raw experience.

I don't know that I agree with the proposed mechanism of the screenwriter. People were captivated by poetry, campfire tales, and books long before the advent of the cathode ray tube. Television and film get immediate penetration, I think, because they are a direct seeing. To the eye it appears unmediated. You have to work a little bit harder to get the machinery running if you are, for example, reading a book (e.g., you have move your eyes across the page, form your own images, interpret sentence structure).

The mechanism, therefore, is us. We are simulators. Some art more easily engage the mechanism (e.g. VR, film, television, plays) than others (e.g., poetry, novels, oral storytelling). What kind of mechanism are we? Again, we are simulators and we live our lives in simulations. Here we merely need look to Kant's separation of phenomena (noumena, what we experience) and noumena (the thing in itself, which we never directly experience). Our brains are working overtime to turn over 7 millions bits of information a second into a "story" in our consciousness, connecting different parts of our brain and allowing executive features of consciousness to exercise control based on abstraction and prediction.

It seems real because it is real. Reality is, in a sense, simulation. Fiction is simply a simulation running on a simulation. This is the great "hack" of symbol-using creatures. We can use our simulation pumps (i.e., minds) to offer more than just an account of a facial expression in a potential enemy or an interpretation of movement in the bushes.

Arguably the paradoxes should come rushing back in at the point we realize that if we're controlling, to some extent, our simulators (i.e., minds), then we must know when we're simulating a simulation (e.g., consuming fiction). And we do. But we are only partially in control of ourselves and the better the story, the more "real" it becomes (the more we become immersed into a "reality"). This partiality also involves the incompleteness of consciousness. Let go of the notion of a Cartesian self sitting in some control room in the brain which is simultaneously aware of all things with self-transparent clarity, and replace it with a modular and blurry take on conscious experience and we can find that, indeed, to some extent, the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing when we lie to ourselves so as to simulate our way out of our mundane lives.

In short, for a sliver of our conscious experience it is simply "real" (conscious experience is not crystalline and Cartesian), it moves us, because it engages with our firmware for simulating reality. If your brain says its real, then it is real to you, at least for the moment. We are confronted less with any paradox of fiction and moreso paradoxes of reality (e.g., if all reality is a fiction, mere phenomena, then how can we speak of realities which underwrite them?) which vex philosophers.

Connected with the prior post is a hint at the moral ramifications of art. If art is simulation and if simulation is "reality," then we must hold ourselves to account for the art we produce and the art we consume. The idea of innocent viewing clearly delineated by reality and fiction is no longer quite so stable an idea.

And even if watching horror movies does not make us into axe-wielding psychopaths, it may still put us in a bad state of being. If it is bad, for example, to watch an actual snuff film, then a compelling simulation of a snuff film (e.g., a found footage horror film) implicates us to the extent that it puts us in the experience of functionally having done so (for that part of our experience that accepts what it sees as "experience").

If you don't think so (if you think what could this "bad state" be if not some illusory bad state of soul?), then I would challenge to you to tell me what is bad about watching a snuff film. Suppose, for example, that you might watch a snuff film under conditions that did not result in profit or attention for the producers, which (for the sake of argument) would be in no way causally connected with the future suffering of any human being anywhere. Would it be OK to watch? Or, if you did not want to watch it (not your cup of tea, right?), suppose someone else did and did so under the aforementioned conditions? Would you (or they) have done something wrong? Would you prevent them, prosecute them, or denounce them?

If you believe, as I do, that there is something objectionable about consuming this sort of "art," then how is this distinct from the case of a viewing that is so clear an approximation of the real thing (from our POV), that the only assurance we have that it is not a murder on film is the assurance on the tin which announces it is "fiction"?

If we insist on a clear delineation between reality and fiction, we might have to explain to Sam Harris why there is nothing wrong with "Abusing Delores" (the robot from Westworld).


And we would have to do so despite the sense that there does seem to be something very wrong in this case.

In short, we may need to come up with better justifications for our patterns of consumption than mere assertion that it's "art."