distortion as storytelling

It's interesting how loving something, combined (naturally) with knowing a lot about it, has the tendency to ruin your enjoyment of the treatment the subject receives at the hands of someone who doesn't care as much as you do, or has a different agenda for it.

Well, obviously. It's hard when you see something you love being dealt with in a way you would never do it, in a way that is therefore ostensibly disrespectful. I mean, I'm most familiar with this phenomenon in the sensitivity Christians have toward the portrayal of Christianity, God, and Jesus (in descending order, interestingly) in secular media. (Not that I think some of us do a much better job of it, often, but that's a different thing.) However, this sensitivity, and even offense, actually seems fairly universally felt in regards to something you care about.

Some of it, of course, is justified; sometimes, the person representing the subject in a particular way is doing so out of hostility. More often, though, the problem is that the subject is not the priority of the matter, and is being distorted in order to serve another purpose. This happens all the time in popular media, movies and television. Think of the number of times you, or someone you were watching a show with, were bounced out of the story with the exclamation of "But that would never happen that way!" Like a basic understanding of physics while watching most action movies (although that is an almost universally-accepted conceit).
 

For a specific (non-physics) example, I was skimming a discussion board about Casino Royale (yes? what?) and a comment caught my eye to the effect that the last round of hands in the poker game was ridiculous, and spoiled the movie for the commenter. If I recall, the four hands were a flush, two full houses, and a straight flush (which Bond held, of course, and yes I did recently rewatch the movie). As the commenter described it, they are "monster hands", and the probability of them coming up like that was astronomical. Because the commenter knew the odds, it destroyed his/her suspension of disbelief; in effect sabotaging the entertainment which depends on it. And let's face it, Bond movies do rely heavily on the audience suspending disbelief and investing in the fantasy, which was what sunk the last Brosnan efforts; they were too fantastic to be believed. (No, the other meaning of "fantastic".)

However, I will posit that the commenter in this case (and in many similar cases) was wrong. Not in their (subjective) enjoyment of the movie, but that they assumed it was down to either bad storytelling or indifference on the part of the storytellers. It was neither, and this is an awareness that audiences today generally lack. It is not (always) bad or indifferent storytelling to distort some element or other to serve the story's impact; often it is good storytelling.

As a sidenote, I think the difference lies in how much you distort the elements and whether they need to be distorted. That comes down to skill, creativity, and research. The distortion itself is almost always a part of story; moreover, there are usually many elements that have been distorted that you haven't enough understanding of to notice, and therefore enjoy thoroughly (while someone else is crying out, "But that would never happen that way!").

To continue with the Casino Royale poker example: not everyone is as familiar with the odds as the commenter was. In fact, most people have a poor capacity for judging odds, which is part of the reason Vegas and lottery competitions flourish. And the reason is the same: in story, the mathematical odds themselves don't matter so much. (Every person lives in a story inside their own head, and sometimes that story bears less resemblence to the "real" world than is ideal.)

In stories generally, the odds are not relevant as themselves, they are relevant as they serve the story. If the storyteller wants to make a point of how impossible something is, they'll draw attention to the odds against. In Casino Royale, the hands had nothing to do with the odds. In-story, they had to do with the tension of whether Bond was reading Le Chiffre correctly, in order to get him to go all-in on that round.

There are also a few good storytelling reasons for making them all "monster hands". The established movie-poker vocabulary is that the climactic hand is always the most impressive. For the vast majority of the audience, minus a few poker nuts, that is the reality, because that is most of the contact they have had with poker. It is expected. Which means that not doing it that way, ironically, destroys their suspension of disbelief.

A related reason is that, as opposed to poker, the same majority of the audience has had a great deal of experience with money, quite outside of its portrayal in movies. The pot of $120 million is an amount they do understand conceptually. To have such an impressive amount of money riding on a realistic (unimpressive) array of hands actually creates some cognitive dissonance, which, again, damages the suspension of disbelief. Unless you're making a point, it's bad storytelling.

That's just one example. One not related to movies has come up in some recent discussions of music I've had with college students, some of whom are music majors, and some who aren't. Many of the music majors find a lot of songs and styles unenjoyable (even unendurable) because of the technical flaws or lack of skill, where we untutored mortals just hear a song we quite like. It comes down to values, priorities and taste, which are often (not always) legitimately subjective. More importantly, it bears a great deal on clear communication; being able to understand the priorities the other person is working from. But that's another ponder.

According to my values, knowledgeability that destroys enjoyment is not desireable, but neither is ignorance. Knowledgeability-in-perspective is what I'm looking for here, I think. Others may find it more desireable to sneer, and more power to them, but I reserve the right to snicker condescendingly.