Suspension of Disbelief

This morning, my underwear reminded me of something I'd like to share: suspension of disbelief. I'll spare you the entire train of thought, but suffice it to say that I got to thinking about the movie The Incredibles. Specifically, I was thinking about the superfast little boy who zipped up from his school desk, put a tack on his teacher's chair, and zipped back to his desk before anybody could register that he was not in his seat.

Ok. That's fine. Let's suspend our disbelief. Grant the little tyke his speedy feat. But what about all the consequent phenomena? Just how fast was he going? Faster than sound? He would have made a shock wave and everybody in his class would have heard the sonic booms. Let's say he stayed under Mach 1. His trip through the classroom would have left the air stirring like the wake of a semi truck. The tack he placed probably would have been sucked up into the low pressure zone he made as he vacated the spot he was in as he placed the tack. A roaring wind would have ripped around the classroom. Surely people would have noticed.

Completely unbelievable, even if you posit the one incredible thing. That brings me to the general point of this particular wet blanket. Suspension of disbelief is great. I like it. But there's only so far a reasonable person can go with it. We can easily suspend our disbelief regarding phenomena outside the human experience or outside the realm of knowledge. But once universal laws start getting stepped on, the disbelief suspension gets less and less easy.

Take for instance another movie, X-Men: The Last Stand (colloquially, X-Men 3). I'm willing to grant Wolverine his claws and healing ability and metal-coated skeleton. I can grant Professor X his telepathy. There are lots of the mutant powers toward which I am willing to suspend disbelief. But what about that one dude who kept throwing those spikes at Wolverine? Where did they come from? Where is all the mass coming from? And the scene with the bridge and Alcatraz? OOH! That is completely unbelievable, it had me spluttering and pointing in disbelief. Bridges are the shape they are because some really smart people spent a lot of time and energy designing them. And suspension bridges absolutely depend on the cables to hold them up. That bridge would have collapsed the moment that our nearly believable Magneto stopped holding it up.

I have another movie example. In Starship Troopers, which by the way absolutely murdered Heinlein's novel, a ship in orbit around a planet is shot down. Hm? Things in orbit don't fall out of orbit just because they get broken into two pieces. They are already falling. That's what orbiting is. They can't just fall out of the sky. Remember the Chinese weather satellite? It is still up there in pieces.

When well understood physical laws get violated, I start asking questions. And so should you. I don't mean to be a killjoy (or should I say, "wet blanket?"), but I do want people to do a little more thinking and question asking than they seem to do now. And if you are a movie maker, I would be happy to act as a believability consultant.