Jonny Atlas Writes.

Wait - Inglorious Bastards?? Don’t you mean Inglourious Basterds?

Do you have a copy? Seriously? Is it PDF? Can you hook me up with a download?

To answer your questions:
Yes.
Yes and no.
Yes.
Yes, seriously.
Yes.
No.

Why am I bringing it up when I should be talking about characters?
Good question. To be honest, I was reading through it and I really felt like the first “chapter” lined up perfectly with what I’m going to be talking about.

It opens on a dairy farm in Nazi Occupied France, where the farmer and his family act like farmer-and-family. Then the Nazis roll up and act like Nazis. The farmer’s instinct is for his family. He makes sure they are safe, and does what he can, but he’s scared. They all are. The Nazis are fucking ruthless. Describing the farmer’s disposition, QT writes on page 2:

“After living for a year with the sword of Damocles suspended over his head, this may very well be the end.”

I’ll be damned if this whole sequence doesn’t resonate. You know why it resonates? Suspension of disbelief.

Wait… what the fuck am I talking about? Suspension of disbelief? This isn’t a horror flick. This isn’t Sc-Fi we’re talking about. It’s Nazi occupied France! It REALLY happened!!!

Right, but did this actually happen? Did these people actually exist? Did this moment between SS Colonel and French Dairy Farmer actually play out in the annals of History? Highly unlikely. However, at no point in the sequence do we question it. If this were a horror movie or a Sci-Fi epic, and this scene were with vampires and werewolves or aliens and human cyborgs, would we question this scene any more than we do now? It’s quite possible. Of course, if done right, it shouldn’t matter what genre this scene is. We should still buy it hook, line and sinker.

Sink her? I hardly even know her!

See, without the suspension of disbelief, no one would watch movies. Most of the movies that suck ass - the ones you roll your eyes and groan over whenever someone mentions them - failed miserably at this. It’s one of the main reasons why the horror genre is hanging on by a thread. Nobody gets this fucking principle any more.

I don’t know when, where or why it got thrown to the wayside, but for the love of God people, pick that shit back up!!! Please! I can’t handle much more of the derivative, shock-and-awe bullshit. I won’t buy it, and no one else will, either. If you don’t sneak attack me with some semblance of truth and trick me into the suspension of my disbelief, I’m going to turn around and think your script is GARBAGE!!

And you know what?

I will be right.

You’re about to go to school here, so take lost of notes. There will be a test.

Right now I feel the need to do more than just tell you to utilize suspension of disbelief. That has been said a million times, and it really doesn’t help anyone. You have to understand something first before you can utilize it. I have found a number of writers, instructors, and bloggers who have thrown their two cents into the idea of the suspension of disbelief. What I find most interesting about a majority of the “information” out there is how cryptic or downright shallow it is. It’s not until you dive into the writings of philosophers and early poets and play writes that you begin to get an idea for what this expression is really conveying to us.

I already used the phrase “semblance of truth” like, three times between my last post and this one. Okay, four. If you know what I’m talking about, gg. We should chat sometime. If you don’t, read on.

The concept behind the expression “suspension of disbelief” has its origins in the very beginnings of man’s creative impulse. From the first cave drawings to the early cults and religions to the films, dogmas, and various art forms of today, none would have held any water with its audience if the ideas were not presented with a necessary degree of believability and consumable appeal. Something within the story, concept, or art form held a gem of intrigue and value high enough to cause the viewer to disregard suspicions of the idea’s possible falsehood. It also presented a true enough concept to outweigh any such suspicion. While writing about his contribution to the collection Lyrical Ballads, Samuel Taylor Coleridge stated, “… it was agreed, that my endeavors 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 a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” This is the first time the use of the actual expression “suspension of disbelief” was known to be used.

The concept being conveyed is essentially that whatever form of artistic expression you may utilize, it is most important to reach within yourself and deposit a piece of who you are into your work. I know this sounds like an absurd analysis of this statement, but take a second look at what Coleridge said. He attempted to “transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth”. “Human interest”, of course, refers to our interest in humanity and the human condition. It is referring to the one thing that interests and intrigues us more than anything else - relationships. Love relationships, hate relationships, thriving relationships, failing relationships… they are what make us tick.

As for the “semblance of truth”, it’s a slightly more complicated matter. But only slightly. When a work of art is executed so poignantly, so flawlessly that people are truly taken aback by its marvelous presence, it is almost always described as “genuine”. It may be said that it “struck a chord” with the audience - that it reached out to them or to their very human nature. This is what Coleridge is referring to. How does one make art genuine? Coleridge is suggesting, and I agree with him, that we do so by depositing a piece of ourselves into our art. There is nothing more true than what you have experienced, or what you are. What is the first rule of writing? Write what you know. It has been said “live, live, live, then write, write, write.” Why? I suggest it is because only by living life and experiencing the world that we gain the bumps and bruises of life that give our existence meaning, depth, and truth. When it comes to art, it is only by reaching into those experiences and depositing them into our work that we can create “a human interest and a semblance of truth”.

From Coleridge we can learn that an audience will enter that willing suspension of disbelief if the art is first and foremost genuine, possessing a “human interest and a semblance of truth”. To dive deeper, in her study of the topic Eva Schaper observed that “…some belief conditions must surely be fulfilled for emotional engagement to be possible.”

What she is referring to here is essentially the principles of epistemology. The idea is that the universe is full of truths, and that every cognitive being holds both a set of truths that have been proven to them and a set of concepts or ideas that they hold to be true despite the existence of evidence with which to prove the concept or idea to others. In other words, we all hold a set of truths and a set of beliefs. Within our minds, the summation of what we know is found when our beliefs are backed up by truths. Plato introduced this concept when he concluded that knowledge is a subset of that which is both true and believed.

Now, if we take Coleridge’s concept of “a semblance of truth” and marry it with Schaper’s observation that “some belief conditions must surely be fulfilled”, we can, within our piece of artistic expression, create for the audience a kind of “knowledge within the moment”. What I mean by this is that if we create a believable and genuine enough world with a human enough character, we will build for the audience an apparent truth. If that apparent truth can then be married with pre-existing beliefs of the audience, the audience will in that moment be presented with the knowledge that those pre-existing beliefs are indeed true.

Taking it back to Inglorious Bastards, it breaks down like this:

* It is true that the Nazi party occupied France.
* It is true some French people were farmers, and that there were a lot of farmers in the 1940s.

* We believe that Nazis were a bunch of evil assholes, and that they were pretty damn scary.
* We believe a French peasant milk farmer in Nazi occupied France would be pretty damn fearful of Nazis, and that they would do everything they could to keep their family safe.

* It seems to be true in this sequence that there was a French farmer who was a good man and loved his family (relationships). It also seems true that he cared for his neighbors.
* It seems to be true that the Nazi Colonel is known as The Jew Hunter, and has come to the French farmer’s house because he knows the farmer his hiding his Jewish neighbors.

As a writer, Tarantino hammered on truths that we all subscribe to, and laid our pre-existing beliefs over to of them. He didn’t make the Nazis fun or silly or nice. He fulfilled our belief conditions in this situation. He then took his expertly developed characters and used their relationships to paint us a seemingly true scenario that we would be caught up in. At that point, there is not a single person in the audience who will stop to question whether or not this is a historically accurate event. I would put money on it.

The nuts and bolts of this concept lie in a combination of what has already been discussed about Coleridge’s statement and the exploration of Schaper’s analysis of the suspension of disbelief from a physiological perspective. She explains that a well-constructed artistic expression holds a strong enough analogy to true life and points of reference within reality that the work can make declarative statements that will be accepted by the audience. She expands, “…[beliefs] are true or false according to whether they are correctly or incorrectly identified within the analogue.

In other words, if you have created a work of art that holds both human interest and apparent truth, and you tap into the pre-existing beliefs of the audience, not only will a temporary knowledge be created within the minds of the audience members, but also a new set of temporary or secondary beliefs dependent entirely on the context of your creation. Therefore, as long as your work remains cohesive within itself and you do not betray the semblance of truth that has been built and accepted, your audience will not only accept the entirety of your work, but also build their own set of beliefs around your creation.

Those beliefs, triggered and perpetuated by your integral, unfaltering semblance of truth, will then trigger the audience’s expectations and consequent emotions. If your work of art has effectively tapped into your audience’s pre-existing beliefs, this will all combine to form the moment that all artists strive for - that moment in a work of art when something within its semblance of truth and human interest resonate with experiences in the audience member’s life, creating an overwhelming moment where the emotional response to the subject gets swept up in the viewer’s emotional response to the corresponding real-life incident and they are uncontrollably shaken. That is the moment when art transcends suspension of disbelief and reaches deep within the viewer, becoming as real to them as any prior belief they have held.

Of course, it is impossible to do that without real, deep, tangible characters. Seriously, they are the bread and butter of your screenplay. If your characters are shit, or if they are derivative - hell, even if they just aren’t quite as deeply developed as they could have been - your script will fall flat. Unk has a great post about this topic that’s probably a lot easier to read (ie: less verbose) than mine. It should be required reading.

Have writer’s block? Blame your characters. Or, really, blame yourself for not developing your characters thoroughly.

What am I talking about? You developed your characters. Hell, you even wrote a two paragraph backstory!

lol.

Seriously, if you haven’t been reading Unk’s writing for very long, go read his posts on Depth Charging your characters - parts 1, 1.5 and 2. That is some seriously required reading.

Hell, just read everything the guy’s ever written on characters. He’s a genius. Seriously.

I’d go into detail about how to develop your characters, but Unk’s said damn near everything there is to say on the topic. I’m probably going to go into more detail about your character’s relationships and why they are so damned important next time. Hopefully I didn’t lose you with this post.

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