Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson

“Willing suspension of disbelief” is a bigger deal than it’s made out to be.
Suspension of disbelief is usually described as how we read SF or fantasy (and often, action films): We know perfectly well that vampires don’t exist, Santa Claus doesn’t exist, and the weight of giant-size humans would probably snap their own bones. Nevertheless, we’re able to watch Buffy, Miracle on 34th Street or The Amazing Colossal Man and for the duration of the show or movie, accept a world where those things can happen.
JRR Tolkien states in On Fairy Stories that he hates the idea of people going “Oh, magic, isn’t that silly. But let’s pretend it’s real, shall we?” and finds it patronizing. He has a point: If you’re consciously suspending disbelief (“It’s just a movie, stop being so picky!”), the story isn’t doing its job; in one that works, like LOTR, Conan or the first season of Heroes, disbelief goes away without a conscious effort.
One observation I’ve seen on this topic is that the audience can swallows violations of legal procedure, science and medicine, but not behavior: If people don’t behave like real people, disbelief is inevitable. I don’t agree with that, which is what brings me to The Graduate.
For those who don’t know, Dustin Hoffman plays college graduate Benjamin Braddock in this 1967 comedy. He’s unsure where he wants to go with his life; insecure, including sexually; doesn’t want to follow his parents in their complacent suburban lifestyle; and makes bad life choices such as letting Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft, whom I may make a separate post on later) lure him into an affair.
Despite Mrs. Robinson’s objections, Ben starts dating her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) who breaks it off when she learns about the affair. After a couple of months of her shutting Benjamin out, she goes back to school; Benjamin then tells his parents he’s going to marry her. He rents an apartment in Berkley, shadows her around and keeps asking her to marry him even when he learns she’s involved with another man.
When Benjamin learns she’s getting married, he rushes to the church, arrives mid-ceremony and drags a delighted Elaine out of there (though the ending is much more ambiguous than happy).
As Gavin deBecker noted in The Gift of Fear, this is classic stalker behavior: Following her everywhere, convincing himself she’s his one true love, refusing to give up even when she decides to marry his rival. Yet here, it’s evidence—well maybe not of true love, given the ending, but it’s clear that breaking up the wedding is a triumph over parental oppression and a Good Thing.
And it works. Because it’s a good movie, and we’re willing to accept its slant on things.
Likewise, consider the original Parent Trap. As one review of the VHS edition noted, this is a movie about a deeply dysfunctional family: The parents split up, each taking one of their twin girls; never attempt to contact the other daughter; and tell their respective children that she never had a sister and her other parent is dead (IIRC, the Dennis Quaid remake tried to come up with an explanation for all this).
But in the movie as presented, there’s nothing dysfunctional going on, it’s just a convenient set up for the twin Hayley Mills to discover each other’s existence and reunite their parents. And again, it still works for me, even though I see that critic’s point.
I think disbelief regarding human behavior is entirely possible, assuming the following:
•We enjoy the movie or the book.
•It’s part of the premise to set things up (as mystery writer Lawrence Block once observed, it’s perfectly acceptable to use implausible coincidences to kick off your plot).
•It’s not too far out of line with human nature (in the movies, obsessive behavior and true love are often joined at the hip).
•It doesn’t press too many buttons. I’ve never been able to accept a story where a woman really enjoys being raped, for instance.
To paraphrase theX-Files, I think we want to believe; otherwise, we wouldn’t be spending the time reading or watching things. The creators’ job is to make sure nothing gets in our way.