Good fiction–written or portrayed on film or stage–requires suspension of disbelief, but that, in turn, requires an at least minimal amount of competence from writers, editors, directors and actors in order that an intelligent and reasonably literate audience not be offended into rejection of the fiction the putative artists are attempting to portray.
It’s usually the little things. In dramatic performances, props and settings don’t have to depict things in meticulous detail in order to be believable within a story’s framework, but such things should at least evoke a credible representation of places and things that advance a story. Items evoking a late 1950s setting should not dominate a late 1960s plot line, for example, and in film, closeups of patently fake stage blood or grossly incongruous weather and lighting, etc., are distractions that any director with half a brain ought to avoid.
So, too, are problems with actors portraying behaviors that their characters engage in daily, routinely–behaviors, “business” in acting terms, that the characters are supposedly competent to perform–and botching the action, sometimes almost too clumsily for words. *sigh* And actors portraying certain professional acts incompetently are complete turn-offs for anyone with even minimal knowledge of competent performance of those actions. My “favorite” is idiots making a hash of portraying music conductors. In fact, in a lifetime of viewing dramatic fiction, I have seen actors portraying the conducting of musical performances do a credible job just twice. The rest of the time the portrayals range from simply stupid and incompetent to offensive.
In written fiction, one of the surest signs of a writer whose characters are little more than babbling descriptions by a blind man of faded shadows of statues based on paintings made from blurred photos of reflections in a carnival mirror is when the writer tries to create a character by listing the things that character owns–usually invoking some currently trendy brands of whatever objects the writer associates with the sort of person the writer thinks he’s trying to evoke. Usually wrongly.
Of course these kinds of things are common in most fiction nowadays, so finding anything contemporary that at least minimizes these sorts of distractions is a Good Thing.
But at least I’m not dealing here with the even more poorly-depicted fiction in newspapers and network news. That’s even worse.
A brief addendum. I’ve mentioned the Brit mystery show I’ve been watching. I’m currently in season seven (of fifteen), and although I still enjoy the incidental instrumental music a great deal and the scenery and sets just as much, one thing has become increasingly grating: the murders. Almost every one of the persons murdered in the stories has been a complete idiot, characters intent on lending Darwin a hand in weeding the gene pool, as it were (though an unfortunate number are portrayed as having reproduced before their stupidity eliminates them).
I’ll let one typical “victim” stand in as a proxy for almost all the rest. After bludgeoning one cooperative soul to death with a handy cudgel, the murderer continues to stand over the body of his complicit victim. As he’s standing there, another useful idiot approaches and says, “What have you done?!?” and very helpfully kneels over the body as if to say, “Me! Me! Kill me next, please!”
Of course, the murderer obliges.
*sigh*
How many idiotic characters will the writers dispose of before the show ends? The answer: both too many and not enough… No wonder the British Empire is no more. 😉 But… given that the show is still so much better than the fare that attracts viewers in droves on American TV, perhaps that indicates something about an inevitable decline of American society and even–maybe–America’s place on the world’s stage, as well.
