[SkittyDog]

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.

[perl4ever]

>"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.

[SkittyDog]

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?