Yeah, that intro to Dark City was a crime against the audience. And honestly I think it was really shortsighted/cowardly of the studio. If you look at two movies that came just a year later, The Matrix and Sixth Sense, a big surprise reveal was central to both of their appeal. And this shouldn't have been a surprise to the studios... the twist in The Usual Suspects came half a decade earlier, not to mention Empire Strikes Back.

My second least favorite thing studios do is cut the trailer in a way that makes the movie seem totally different or even a totally different genre.

Aside: a friend gave me the Sixth Sense dvd as a birthday gift one year, which I had yet to see, and my idiot roommate at that time was in the room couldn't restrain himself from trying to cleverly address my friend in a way that communicated he knew the twist. Except he'd never touched on clever in his life and gave it away instantly. Nice one Paul. Nice one.

“I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.” -- David Lynch

> They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.

Most people, in most cultures, don't accept it as fact that life doesn't make sense.

What % of people would agree with the statement "everything happens for a reason"? Or even "because God did it".

Of those who don't think everything happens for a reason (i.e. life makes sense... to someone), the vast majority nevertheless believe we live in a universe of physical rules.

We accept we could get wiped out by an asteroid or a deadly plague, sure. That makes sense.

We don't accept we could get wiped out by a Lynchian fever dream. That doesn't make sense.

You've misunderstood the David Lynch quote. He's observing the fact that people have the instinctive ability to rationalize about the reality we observe, in order to maintain a consistent theory of our own existence in it... We can be surprised or shocked at what we witness, but we must somehow integrate it into our mental picture of reality. Often as not, our mental picture isn't particularly accurate... We have to fill in the gaps with our imagination.

Film & literary theory starts from an understanding of this phenomenon. It's the basis of willing suspension of disbelief. We don't have to try to fill in the gaps with our imagination, when we see/hear/read the corpus of a story... Our minds tend to start playing along, automatically, when prompted.

Plenty of people have proved perfectly willing to entertain the idea of getting wiped out by asteroid or plague... But also, plenty of people have proved willing to entertain the idea that we live in a constructed artificial reality, a la "The Matrix".

Our religious beliefs are just as nutty and varied as movie premises, and that's not a coincidence, because religious beliefs basically emerge from the same mental phenomenon as literature.

I mean, it makes no sense that an invisible Sky-Father supernaturally impregnated a Jewish teenage girl, two thousand years ago, and that the resulting child could reverse thermodynamic processes at will... But nearly 1/3 of the world says they believe it like that, more or less.

What sense does getting wiped out by a plague make?

A lot of religious people I know would just say that god had his reasons and that's good enough. You don't need to understand why, the very core of religion is to believe that god "acts in misterious ways" and if something happened then it's because god wanted it to happen. Maybe those people have sinned. Maybe that's god's way to teach people a lesson. Or maybe it's something entirely else and we just don't know yet - you just need to trust that god knows what they are doing.

Really, it's as deep/shallow as this, not much else to it.

For most of history this was how people viewed life and death.

If you tried telling them it was just nature, bad luck, and an uncaring universe they would have viewed you as a naive simpleton.

> uncaring universe

What "caring universe" do you measure things against to see it's not caring?

How can you have yin without yang, in other words?

This is a classic philosophical argument that was dispensed with in the middle ages. The usual form of it is "how can you know what infinity is if infinity doesn't exist?" The answer is as simple as "I take the word finite and put the word not in front of it." We are perfectly capable of synthesizing concepts that do not exist in our experience of reality.

>We are perfectly capable of synthesizing concepts that do not exist in our experience of reality.

I am not sure exactly what this means, but I don't think I asserted anything to the contrary.

An automaton or a parrot can place words next to each other without "synthesizing concepts". Can an intelligent being not do that too?

As another application of my original point, "synthesizing concepts" would not mean anything unless it was possible (and I think it is) to not synthesize a concept when a string of symbols is put together.

It's not that we have to have a caring universe to imagine one, it's that we have to at least imagine one in order to say the universe is not caring.

One way to look at the universe we live in is that it seems to be faithful. Every atom follows physical law perfectly, at least we assume. Maybe that's not exactly proven, but it's the conventional faith today, and we certainly can imagine the world otherwise, with lots of miracles.

You could look at it a dozen different ways, depending on your sense-making framework:

* God did it (makes sense- God does cataclysmic stuff)

* Nature did it (makes sense- biology is a jerk and we haven't mastered it yet)

* Humans did it by mistake (makes sense- we make huge errors all the time)

* etc

Sure. In the context of Lynch's work things that happen without sense are often intra-textual in his work or hint at some interior sense that is obscure to the characters, audience. Why do characters (dead!) from Twin Peaks show up in Mulholland Drive? Well, that _might_ be touched on in Twin Peaks season 3 or maybe it isn't. Kinda up to you.

Seems to me that's Lynch's point. In daily life we're all willing to accept on some level that we need to make sense of things ourselves so why should we expect art to be direct?

In daily life, we have faith that there is some sense out there to be made of things. This is generally justified by the lawful nature of nature. In comparison, Lynch can do whatever he likes.

In other words, I disagree with Mark Twain: Reality has to make sense, whereas fiction can be made arbitrarily nonsensical.

(However, doing so may make it bad fiction, whereas reality is not subject to any such appeal.)

The GP is just making assertions about cultural anthropology, with basically zero evidence or argument supporting their assertions. I wouldnt bother trying to argue with them, directly... I would not expect them to have any real expertise on the subject, so I expect you'll just get more of the same quality.

The quote about "the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense" has been around in some form for around two centuries in western culture.

References:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/07/15/truth-stranger/

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/RealityIsUnrea...

The quote from Lynch makes it sound as though the obvious way to get people to accept an implausible story didn't occur to him.

Simply have some small print at the beginning that says "based on a true story". As I recall, that's what was done with the movie Fargo.

"Important point: just because it has happened in real life does not make it believable in a story. If a reader says she didn’t believe such a thing would happen, it is no defence for you to say, "Oh, but that did happen! In 1982 I was walking along..." — Nicola Morgan, Write To Be Published

https://xkcd.com/2115/

I'm familiar with both quotes, but I think we're barking up the wrong tree by trying to intepret them literally.

"Based on a true story" is not what makes a film plausible to us... We instinctively engage in a willing suspension of disbelief when we're prompted by literature, even when we directly know that the story is false.

Fargo includes that text because the film is an homage to the hardboiled crime fiction genre, which frequently featured that style of blurb on book covers as a marketing tool. But people consume books & films, near universally where we have the means to do so, with or without claims that the stories within are factual.

You've misunderstood what Nicola Morgan is talking about, in that quote. In context, "believable" means that the author's job is to reduce obstacles that get in the way of our willing suspension of disbelief... Empathy, context, proportionality, etc.

See my other comments, re: the David Lynch quote. His meaning needs to be taken in context of some film theory.

>"Based on a true story" is not what makes a film plausible to us

It wasn't the only thing that made Fargo seem plausible.

But it permitted people to suspend disbelief, because it was enough like a weird news story.

Saying the same thing about Raising Arizona wouldn't make it realistic, granted.

And it isn't license to tell any story that is true, no matter how unbelievable.

>You've misunderstood what Nicola Morgan is talking about, in that quote.

That quote was from the TV tropes link. I don't think I misunderstood it. I acknowledge the "job" you state. My point, or a point, was, that Lynch appeared to be complaining about doing that fundamental job.

If you want to be pedantic, better to tell me something about Lynch, because I have only read about him.

I get the impression that you're seeing the word "belief" and assuming that you understand what they're talking about.

I apologize if I've offended you, I'm really not trying to be pedantic, or a dick. I just believe that your intepretation lacks some critical context.

Now, I admit, I'm feeling a little confused, and I suspect that I may have missed something you said earlier.

I think my key point is that the human capacity for a willing suspension of disbelief is totally unrelated to how realistic or factual we believe the story to be... Most of us regularly consume wildly unrealistic fiction that we KNOW is pretty far from reality. Consider Game of Thrones and Star Wars... both massively popular, and neither making any claims of factual realism.

Our social primate brains are wired to be constantly trying to understand each other. We're driven to try to predict the reactions of the peers, mates, competitors, and enemies in our social groups. The details are informed by our own learning and life experiences, but at the core is an obsessive, hard-wired anxiety about what is going on in everyone else's heads.

Literature exploits our internal empathizing behavior by presenting us with depictions (on screen, on stage, in text, etc) of characters exhibiting human-like behavior. In response, our social mind instinctively starts to try to make sense of whatever is depicted. Our minds are drawn into attempting to model what is going on inside the characters, just as if they're normal human beings.

For believeability, it's not really relevant whether the characters physically resemble human beings... We can equally empathize with robots, animals, gods, etc. The important thing is that the characters perform in ways to which our brains can assign some human meaning.

When Nicola Morgan points out that factual truth isn't relevant to believeability, she's talking about the fact that real humans sometimes behave in ways that don't compute, and our empathizing process fails to model them for us.

Does that make sense? Are we actually in agreement here, and maybe I just misunderstood something on your end?

I've been on a mini Lynch binge recently (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and a lot of his interviews on Linda Faludi's excellent channel [1]) and I feel like this quote sums him up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVdYdogQM2xd29HUOED4EbQ

That's great insight about Lynch.

I was totally puzzled by Mulholland Drive, then I read an explanation in a IMDB review, watch it again, and I was amazed that everything made sense. It was encrypted and somebody gave me the keys. That's really an artistic experience.

Great artists are often misunderstood, many who are misunderstood are not great artists - The Sphinx :-)

We are Number One. All others are Number Two. Or lower. —The Sphinx.

Do you still have that link somewhere?

https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1902343/?ref_=tt_urv for example

Sorry, I can't find the one I read, but there are several good "explanations" in the IMDB review section. Actually, the story is pretty straightforward. I suppose that if you are a Lynch scholar already, the effect is not so great. The magic for me happened when I didn't get it in the first view and everything made sense in the second.

One big thing, that I realized later (and the GP comments on this too) is that Lynch has his owns symbols and language that clue the audience about what's going on (the red velvet curtain for the subconscious/dream world, for instance). If you are not aware of that, it's easy to get lost.

The corollary is one should start David Lynch from Eraser head :) Which in a way is his easiest film because you can't read it in a superficial level, there's simply no superficial level. You go straight to the cipher.

Dark City’s changes, like most of the time a studio interferes with a creator’s vision, is all about profitability. It’s too risky financially to make a film that does not have wide appeal. It’s nothing personal, just business. And when they test these films they take any criticism rather harshly. They simply don’t have the time or the foresight to find out if people will like it after a little bit.

I must have been lucky. I saw Dark City opening week and there was no explainer. I bought the DVD as soon as it came out, no explainer there either. I bought the Bluray later, no explainer there.

On the other hand I did see Blade Runner when it had the narration the first time I saw it. Luckily I've seen it without many times since.