JerryvonKramer

I'm not saying that the only way you can enjoy something is through suspension of disbelief, I'm just saying that anyone who claims that they never do it is either lying or a robot, because it is so fundamental to the way we process narrative.

I don't care to exchange with jdw for reasons everyone knows by now, but I do think there is a difference between narrative forms and, for example, emotionally connecting to music. I think they are really two different things. I am not convinced that you can have an emotional connection to narrative forms, that is to storytelling, without some suspension of disbelief. I really don't -- and I think it comes down to what people think "suspension of disbelief" is. It's NOT believing that the thing is real. It's simply investing in the storyline enough to become engaged on an emotional level with its world and its characters. Hence, you can "suspend disbelief" watching fantasy or sci-fi. I think there's a lot of confusion over this. "Believability" is not about verisimilitude -- that is, it's not about whether the thing pertains to reality as we know it -- it's rather about something being believable within its own self-contained universe, and believable enough that you can feel something about it. I can't really see how you can dispense with that and still have a human reaction to the thing.

I'd much prefer to do anything else in the entire world than continue this discussion with you know who. So let's forget about it. See you in another thread Matt!

Category error there Winged Eagle, suspension of disbelief does not mean believing it's real.

Even hardcore structuralism is a study of emotional effects generated by whatever techniques Matt, if you didn't ever suspend your disbelief you wouldn't get a sense of what it felt like. That's why I call BS. If you say "no I don't suspend my disbelief, I watch it completely without emotion as a kind of intellectual exercise", then I can buy that. I'll think you're a weird Spock man, but I can buy it. Emotion without suspending disbelief I do not buy.

This thread was going pretty well. I think suspension of disbelief is absolutely fundamental to watching and engaging with movies or anything else on an emotional level. I don't see how you can really have emotional investment without it. You have to buy into the world of the characters to some extent to feel any sort of empathy with them. I can give you a stack of books as tall as this building I'm sitting in that discuss this inside and out too. Unless Matt D and jdw have literally reinvented how people watch and engage with things -- in which case quickly write a book about it, it might make you some money -- I suspect that they actually are suspending some disbelief when they are watching the stuff. That you can't imagine other people seeing and enjoying things differently than yourself isn't something sad about me, but sad about you. Unless you are a cyborg or something, I call BS on feeling emotion while not suspending disbelief.

Honestly, I just thought it wasn't the time or place to get into it. As host I was thinking "hmmm, 30 minutes on this now, or let it go and keep momentum up?" Sometimes you gotta call it on the fly like Flair.

Or, he could be talking about the criss-cross rope-running spot. There are good examples in the DiBiase vs. Bret matches. One guy drops to the floor and the other guy skips over him. I don't think the aim is to trip in that spot though, but to evade getting clotheslined or whatever.

Think he's talking about a drop toehold from an Irish Whip. Stan Lane does this spot a lot. Usually followed by an elbow drop from Eaton.

Will - the stuff I was saying is not a knock on individual teachers by the way, it's a knock on the way the syllabus is designed. Like I said: "schools do a bad job of macro overview. They seem wedded to modular "bitty" teaching so all the bits don't join up and any bits left out and simply that: left out" -- that is not the fault of teachers, it's the fault of a system that has completely done away with the notion of "grand narrative". I can understand the political reasons for it, but practically it means students literally have no "story of what happened across time" in their heads. The thing is, we don't expect them to come to university already knowing about theory or multiple approaches. To one extent university says: Hey, you know all that shit you did at school? Chuck it out. Question everything. You learned one approach, there are at least TWENTY. None of them are "right". There is no One True Way. Learn to think for yourself. Those skills that got you the grade you needed to get here, well, you're gonna need more than that. That's fine. It should be a step up. The problem is when they come not knowing anything else either, because then we have to provide: 1. The sort of "connect the dots" history from my slides 2. The actual history itself 3. The theory 4. Then the study of the text This is hard to do all at the same time, and it leads to a certain shallowness when there's no base knowledge there at all. Because if the name on the slide is just a name on a slide in the macro overviews, they'll have forgotten it by the next week. Here are some slides from a week 1 lecture I gave last week, trying to do all of these things at once. The problem for me comes when ALL of this stuff appears new to them. This just shouldn't be the case. How can ALL of this stuff be new? Where have they been? I don't just mean the narrative overview or a few of the names and faces, but ALL of them. That presents a problem for me. I don't want to have to explain all of the incidental things I mention here, there has to be some ground-level of knowledge already. And it's not there. That is what is frustrating for me.

You have no sense of fun John.

An example of it going the other way is Garvn vs. Flair at Starrcade 87. That Chicago crowd was fucking pissed off after the Road Warriors didn't win the belts. They were shitting on Garvin and trying to shit on the match and they are losing their shit by the end it and popping big. That match literally turns the crowd around. Although they are basically cheering on Flair during it.

I'm not sure if it's the biggest but Jake vs. Rude just kills Wrestlemania 4 flat dead. And the crowd doesn't pick up again till the main event.

Oh and their entry into the Pat O'Connor memorial tournament / Sheepherders / Pat O'Connor himself.

My knowledge of Kiwi history or basically anything Kiwi is literally nothing apart from Jonah Lomu and Jango Fett.

I don't recall knowing any of this stuff when I came out of high school. I think schools do a bad job of macro overview. They seem wedded to modular "bitty" teaching so all the bits don't join up and any bits left out and simply that: left out. What country did you go to school in OJ? I can never work out where exactly you are from. I wouldn't expect kids from anywhere other than Britain to know the Restoration or kids from outside of Europe to know the Romantics.

English. I expect American students to know the basic narrative of American history from the founding fathers through the Civil War etc. They should have a rough feeling of what was going on in each century going as far back as 1776. I teach American students as well as British ones. I also showed them that clip and they did do a little better: naming Carrie as well. I find their history is very patchy though, but give them more of a bye because I assume they are taught American history rather than British history in school. I expect British students to know their country's basic narrative, at least from the time of Henry VIII, if not from 1066. I also expect them -- being literature students -- at least to have a SENSE of the over-arching story of lit from the Greeks to Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Pope / Dryden to the Romantics to the Victorians to the Modernists and beyond. A SENSE of it. When they have absolutely no sense of it, that's a concern. I can't teach all of history to them. And we have to build our modules from somewhere. I try to go "ground up" as much as possible, but it's frustrating when there are NO touchstones at all. As if when you say "Laurence Olivier" it's the first time they've ever heard the name in their lives. That presents significant challenges. Teaching to a completely blank slate isn't what an undergraduate degree is about.

It's not just my DVD collection, it's everything. Basic history. Basic cultural knowledge. The basic story of how things develop. A rough gauge on what was going on in each century. And so on and so forth. It's not there. It's frustrating because it means I have to explain it. I don't want to have to explain it. I want them to come ready-made, from school, at least having HEARD of, say, Method Acting, or Marlon Brando, or I dunno, an idea that the Romantics were in the 19th century and that the Restoration happened in the 17th century. That's all I want. Come knowing that shit already because it's the ABCs. We're in university not kindergarten. The problem is with the way history is taught in school. They teach pockets of history in detail but don't join them up. So kids learn about The Tudors and The Nazis but 1) about virtually nothing else and 2) seemingly have no idea how they join up with other world events. No diachronic history. That's the basic problem. Not knowing specific shit on top of that.

It must be so sad to be you. I'm not saying that as a snark, but genuinely. I can't imagine being unable to suspend disbelief when watching movies.

I don't care about the kids in 1984, I don't have to teach them.

They aren't familiar with any of them. I don't care at this point. I have found they know absolutely nothing at all. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. About anything. Not just films, anything. I can't hold it against them, some of these students are bright and eager to learn, etc., but it's still risible. They come out of school knowing fuck all.

Nah, Kill Bill and V for Vendetta.

I love jdw so much

Incidentally, I made this little video package for one of my final-year classes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExGugY-jVxg Between them, as a collective group, they could only name 2 of those films. Guess which ones.

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/wwe-owner-vince-mcmahon-reported-to-be-sniffing-around-newcastle-united-with-a-view-to-incredible-takeover-bid-9135535.html Literally amazing!