Living with fiction
by M. Stewart
Apparently operating with the assumption that you can never have too much money, Great Britain’s richest woman and the world’s first billionaire author, J.K. Rowling, has given Florida’s Universal Studios the green light to develop a theme park based upon her popular Harry Potter stories. The park is scheduled to open in Orlando in 2009.
Don’t worry, I’m not one of those religious fanatics who thinks children’s fantasy stories are the work of Satan. Rowling’s Harry Potter books earn high marks as children’s literature, and the movies preserve the quality and integrity of the books. Given that there are hundreds of other Harry Potter products available, I suppose a big American theme park is a natural progression.
Moving a story from book to film to amusement park is hardly a new thing. Walt Disney pioneered the idea of turning fairy tales into movies and then into a brand-named theme park in the 1950s. Universal Studios ran with the idea and expanded the connection between movie making and amusement parks. Fantasy is fantasy, no matter how you experience it, and human beings can’t get enough of it.
Have you ever wondered why that is? Why do we crave the unreal? From childhood through adulthood, we spend a great deal of our time watching and/or participating in events that have little, if anything, to do with the real world of experience. In short, we are obsessed with fiction.
Before movies there were oral storytellers, books, and live theater; now we’ve got all that and more—surround-sound movies, television, video games. One might even argue that watching sports is a way of engaging in fantasy narratives. After all, what is a football game but a stylized fictional war between cities or schools?
Most of the world’s religions are based upon ancient stories of heroic men and jealous gods who lived once upon a time and did marvelous, magical things (then, but not now). Scientists, the ultimate reality practitioners, are entertained by science fiction. Even news and history come to us in story form. How else could we understand it?
Without the storyteller, we’d be lost.
Literary scholars are familiar with numerous theories that attempt to explain the human obsession with stories, but after 2,500 years of inquiry, there is no consensus. Add computer gaming, cyberfiction, and virtual reality to the mix, and the plot merely thickens. Maybe fiction is just what happens when you hook a big brain to a big mouth.
In our world, few will pay to see a documentary film, but millions will stand in line to see the latest adventure of Spiderman, a comic book character. Wars are fought and people are murdered every day because of someone’s interpretation of an ancient book. Americans who can’t afford proper housing, food, or health care find a way to pay $50 a month for premium cable. A typical last wish of a dying child is to visit Disney World.
For all our big talk about truth, we spend an awful lot of time with lies. But in the end, our stories are all we have. We rely on them to tell us who we are, how to act, how to think, where we come from, where we’re going. We celebrate and obsess over the lives of rich and famous actors, singers, and athletes—all of whom do little more than supply us with fantasies.
Yet most of us will claim it isn’t so, that no such obsession exists. We laugh at the college literature major. How irrelevant and impractical! Why not study something real? We think of writers who are not rich—that is, 99.999999 percent of them—as deviant weirdos who should get a real job. Teachers insist that kids quit daydreaming and get “back on task.” We claim to despise people who make things up--liars.
Meanwhile J.K. Rowling has sold more than 300 million copies of books about an adolescent wizard and his friends, and that's not counting the hundreds of millions who've seen the movies. The United States is involved in a costly war with religious fanatics who murder innocent people to satisfy an invisible god. The average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day. In a 65-year life, that person will have spent a total of 9 years watching television, much of it fictional stories. And that’s just television--not videos, theaters or books.
The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it the "willing suspension of disbelief." In other words, when we witness a fictional event (for Coleridge it was live theater), we agree to pretend for a while that what we see is real, even though we know it isn't. It's this little trick that keeps us from standing up and shouting, "Hey, that can't happen!"
Whatever your attitude toward fiction, there no denying that it's all around us. For most contemporary Americans, not a day goes by that we don't purposely watch or otherwise experience a fictional story. Even at night when we are unconscious, our brains spin the weird tales we call dreams. No matter how hard we try, we can't turn it off.
Apparently operating with the assumption that you can never have too much money, Great Britain’s richest woman and the world’s first billionaire author, J.K. Rowling, has given Florida’s Universal Studios the green light to develop a theme park based upon her popular Harry Potter stories. The park is scheduled to open in Orlando in 2009.
Don’t worry, I’m not one of those religious fanatics who thinks children’s fantasy stories are the work of Satan. Rowling’s Harry Potter books earn high marks as children’s literature, and the movies preserve the quality and integrity of the books. Given that there are hundreds of other Harry Potter products available, I suppose a big American theme park is a natural progression.
Moving a story from book to film to amusement park is hardly a new thing. Walt Disney pioneered the idea of turning fairy tales into movies and then into a brand-named theme park in the 1950s. Universal Studios ran with the idea and expanded the connection between movie making and amusement parks. Fantasy is fantasy, no matter how you experience it, and human beings can’t get enough of it.
Have you ever wondered why that is? Why do we crave the unreal? From childhood through adulthood, we spend a great deal of our time watching and/or participating in events that have little, if anything, to do with the real world of experience. In short, we are obsessed with fiction.
Before movies there were oral storytellers, books, and live theater; now we’ve got all that and more—surround-sound movies, television, video games. One might even argue that watching sports is a way of engaging in fantasy narratives. After all, what is a football game but a stylized fictional war between cities or schools?
Most of the world’s religions are based upon ancient stories of heroic men and jealous gods who lived once upon a time and did marvelous, magical things (then, but not now). Scientists, the ultimate reality practitioners, are entertained by science fiction. Even news and history come to us in story form. How else could we understand it?
Without the storyteller, we’d be lost.
Literary scholars are familiar with numerous theories that attempt to explain the human obsession with stories, but after 2,500 years of inquiry, there is no consensus. Add computer gaming, cyberfiction, and virtual reality to the mix, and the plot merely thickens. Maybe fiction is just what happens when you hook a big brain to a big mouth.
In our world, few will pay to see a documentary film, but millions will stand in line to see the latest adventure of Spiderman, a comic book character. Wars are fought and people are murdered every day because of someone’s interpretation of an ancient book. Americans who can’t afford proper housing, food, or health care find a way to pay $50 a month for premium cable. A typical last wish of a dying child is to visit Disney World.
For all our big talk about truth, we spend an awful lot of time with lies. But in the end, our stories are all we have. We rely on them to tell us who we are, how to act, how to think, where we come from, where we’re going. We celebrate and obsess over the lives of rich and famous actors, singers, and athletes—all of whom do little more than supply us with fantasies.
Yet most of us will claim it isn’t so, that no such obsession exists. We laugh at the college literature major. How irrelevant and impractical! Why not study something real? We think of writers who are not rich—that is, 99.999999 percent of them—as deviant weirdos who should get a real job. Teachers insist that kids quit daydreaming and get “back on task.” We claim to despise people who make things up--liars.
Meanwhile J.K. Rowling has sold more than 300 million copies of books about an adolescent wizard and his friends, and that's not counting the hundreds of millions who've seen the movies. The United States is involved in a costly war with religious fanatics who murder innocent people to satisfy an invisible god. The average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day. In a 65-year life, that person will have spent a total of 9 years watching television, much of it fictional stories. And that’s just television--not videos, theaters or books.
The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it the "willing suspension of disbelief." In other words, when we witness a fictional event (for Coleridge it was live theater), we agree to pretend for a while that what we see is real, even though we know it isn't. It's this little trick that keeps us from standing up and shouting, "Hey, that can't happen!"
Whatever your attitude toward fiction, there no denying that it's all around us. For most contemporary Americans, not a day goes by that we don't purposely watch or otherwise experience a fictional story. Even at night when we are unconscious, our brains spin the weird tales we call dreams. No matter how hard we try, we can't turn it off.
posted by M. | 2:21 PM
5 Comments:
Interesting that all the Gods and saviors did the 'miracles' thousands of years ago.
How can you put up a picture of the Holy Mother, and then write an article saying that God is a fictional character? You brag about being an atheist but you have an everlasting soul that will burn in hell. You can have long conversations with The Devil about East Liverpool.
I don't have to go to Hell to have a conversation with the devil, but when I get there, I'll be sure to bring up the topic of East Liverpool with her. And by the way, next time you see the Easter Bunny, give him my regards.
Matt, I'm sorry to read that you're an atheist, but respect your right to be so...I read somewhere that a person said he didn't believe in God and someone said, "That's OK, he believes in you." I like to think that's true.
As for talking to the Devil, I believe you are right: we can talk to the Devil here on Earth on a daily basis. I happen to know a person who is the Devil personified.
I have believed in God all my life, but there have been times in my life I've questioned where He was at that particular time. God knows we believers sometimes have a tough time believing. And He understands...that's what keeps me going every day.
Dear M. Stewart,
I absolutely love your writing. My sister has told pretty much everyone in our family about this web-site, and now I am gratefully addicted to your observations.
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