how stories are entertainment
This is the story told in a 2001 film by William Phillips The film is called Treed Murray, and it illustrates how story in its simplest form entertains us. The interraction or conflict in this case is mostly dialogue. There are only the six principal actors, no other sets, no special effects. The film depends on believable dialogue and on the actors' abilities to sound convincing. If they can do this, I will be drawn into the story. I will identify with the characters and will understand their situation.
At first, our sympathies are with Murray. He is clearly a random victim of gang violence, and that is something we should not accept. But Murray turns out not to be a very nice person. As we learn more about him, we are less inclined to be sympathetic. On the other hand, as we learn more about the gang, some of them don't appear to be so bad. So our sympathies shift from Murray to the kids. And then the shift happens back the other way - several times. Sometimes we think they should let Murray go. And other times we think he can stay up there forever. So the film becomes a two sided philosophical argument or dialectic. I found the argument stimulating and challenging, and because of that I was engaged and entertained by the film.
All stories need a device to capture our attention. Some mainstream recent Canadian films make good use of the usual devices to delight and entertain us: a fantasy game world in David Cronenburg's Existenz; love in Fran?ois Girard's The Red Violin; suspense in Atom Egoyan's Felicia's Journey and the combination of death and sex in Kissed by Lynn Stopkewich from a short story by Barbara Gowdy. Sometimes it is just the oddity of the story that catches our attention, as in the play Earshot by Morris Panych.
Stories provide an escape from our daily lives. Robert Bringhurst has recently translated the mythic poetry of the Haida storyteller Ghandl. The book is entitled Nine Visits to the Mythworld, clearly an acknowledgement that the mythworld is a place where we go for a short while to safely encounter strange, wonderful and sometimes frightening events. But it is also a place that we can leave whenever we wish to return to reality. When we enter into the story, we create an alternative persona. That persona participates in the story and can have fictional adventures without threatening our real person. As Northrop Frye puts it "It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable."
Robert Lepage's most recent film; Possible Worlds, with screenplay by John Mighton is a murder mystery, and as with most good mysteries, the story unfolds layer by layer. We are introduced to two central characters who draw us along the path of the story and we see the events from their point of view. But as the plot becomes more confused, our point of view becomes a little uncertain. It turns out that some of the clues we have been given are not necessarily correct, and possibly the events have been given to us in the wrong order. At the end, we find out how completely unreliable our perspective has been , so we are forced to change our position, adopt our own point of view, one that is different from any of the characters.
Of course we have been tricked, duped into believing several false stories so that we may be surprised at the end. In real life we would likely be angry at such deception. But within this story, we experience a delight at being made to look so wonderfully foolish. We are quite happy to let our defenses down and let the story take us places we would never allow ourselves in real life. That is the very seductive appeal of stories and clearly we must enjoy being lured into such a fantasy.
