> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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'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.
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.