HungryGhost
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User ID: 4050
HungryGhost
1mo ago
I think of it like this. Watching a movie is like eating. The ending of a movie can be considered the terminal condition. You eat because you are hungry. You eat and eat until you feel full, and then you stop. Without that feeling, you would just continue eating forever. A movie works in a somewhat similar way. Something happens, a crisis or a problem appears, and the story continues until we reach a point where we feel that the original question has been answered and we can stop.
From that angle, I think returning to the status quo can be looked at a little more charitably.
I find the nature law arguement from Christiany useful here. Something is good when it is allowed to exist according to its proper nature, while evil is often understood as a kind of damage, sickness, or deviation from that form. If a cat loses one of its legs, the answer is to restore the missing leg, not to decide that four legs are boring and give the cat six tentacles instead.
A story usually starts because something has gone wrong. So fixing the problem often means restoring things to something resembling their proper condition.
So it qualifies as a proper terminal condition. And it's also believable.
A happy ending can easily feel like cheating. The dead don't rise. Sacrifices can't simply be undone. Many things in reality are impossible or irreversible. So such endings feel hollow.
But the status quo has happened. We have seen it. The glorious past. People look backward and reminisce about bygone days because the past is real and imaginable. It happened once. Maybe it can happen again. To be normal, to be healthy, to have your family, to go home again, even without being extraordinary, shouldn't that already be enough to be happy?
This is the default answer. 30 points out of 100. Passable. But sometimes you just wish for more.
Fiction can be seen as a kind of prosthesis, like an artificial eye or leg: we use it to replace a missing part of ourselves. A 30 point answer can fill in the absence, but it doesn't fits perfectly. It's a general answer, made for everyone, so gaps remain.
A movie might end, but if the ending does not satisfy the audience, then in some sense the act of viewing does not stop. The audience starts looking for that satisfying answer somewhere else: another movie, another book, another game, another version of essentially the same kind of story.
There are not really a hundred completely different movies. Sometimes it feels as if there has only ever been one movie: the one you haven't reached the ending yet.
And that's roughly how I think about the psychology behind this.
HungryGhost
10mo ago
Between dream and reality
People say life is like a book. Isn't that a very apt comparison? Everything fits perfectly. People are the characters and the history between them is the plot. But isn't that comparison backward? People and their lives exist first. Only after a while did books come. And after books, films. And after films, video games. Each an imitation of life. Yet each becomes a mold that shapes life
Books were not humans' first attempt at simulating life. Before it there were stage plays and songs. Actors moving, audience watching. A festive atmosphere where people laugh and cry together. Stories were very much alive. And just like life, they are always changing. When the audience rebukes the bard, telling him the development is nonsense, a new version shows up. When the audience complains, bemoans having to listen to the same thing again, a new version shows up. When the audience listens to another bard, a new version shows up. A story lives many lives.
But with the introduction of books, stories can now be singular. There can be just one author and one version. The pages remember. The beginning is set. And so is the ending. The story is already finished before you read it. Life comes before books. But life is like books. I see life as a book. Books have a determined end, so life has a determined end. One life, one book. As many books as there are lives. The books are stored in a library, surrounded by fog. Rumors said it contains all books in existence. The books were there before I came, and it will be there after i'm gone. I see books but see no authors. I see effects but don't see causes
Is life a book? Or is it a film? To read a book one needs to be literate. To watch a film, one also needs to be literate. Film literacy is a thing. In the book Gutenberg's galaxy, McLuhan presents the case of the Africans and the chicken: where when shown a slow-motion health-education film (a sanitary inspector demonstrating how to clear standing water), many viewers only reported seeing the chicken that flitted into a corner of the frame — not the man or the broader narrative. He writes "African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film". The African audiences see the events, but not the plot. The illiterate man sees a dirty stack of paper, but not a book. An educated man sees a book, but not a dirty stack of paper. The stack of paper has been hidden. Likewise, an educated man sees only the plot and not the events. Outside, to live, a living being eat, and sleep and shit. In films, characters eat and sleep and shit in service of the plot. He is drinking milk! This shows he is a psychopath. He is shitting. His son will come in and shoot him to death. This shows even the mighty one can meet such a lowly end. Life comes before films, but life is like films. The educated man sees not the events but the plot. Every action becomes a statement to the invisible audience. What you eat, what you play, who you meet, where you go.... in 1998, Truman could rebel against the show and move to reality. But where would modern humans go, when reality is a film now?
Or is it a game instead? Books and films, there are no places for you there. You can't influence the plot, you can't influence the outcome. Just a passive observer. But in games, it's different. You are the player. You can act. The only being that can, in fact. Salvation or destruction, it's all up to you. Yet the story is still not yours. The player is not the protagonist. You merely inherit his or her fate. How would the game look like from the perspective of the protagonist's friends and family? How would it feel to wake up one day to see your friend changed, doing one impossible task after another. Yeah, it's good that the world is saved. But that being, is it still your friend? If a game has no choice. Then it's the same as a book or a film. The future is not yours, for you have no said in it. But even with choices, you don't decide everything. Before you arrived, some choices must have been made. The choices were not made by you, so it must have been made by another being. That being vanished when you arrived, leaving you with a past that you did not create. What makes you you? Is it the past or is it the future? Do you even want to be you? A common pondering. Isn't the popularity of transmigration, regression, reincarnation, multiverse... stories the proof? Life comes before games, but life is like games. One life, one game. Holding one, I yearn for another.
One can read many books, watch many films and play many games. Yet one can have just one life. How then should such a life be led?
This reminds me of Claude Shannon’s information theory. The idea is about sending a message. Before Shannon, you might think of sending a message as mere translation: you encode a message into a medium and send it, then the receiver receives it through that medium and reconstructs it. However, Shannon flips the perspective. Instead of viewing it from the sender’s perspective, he views it from the receiver’s perspective. If you already know the message, why do you even need to receive it? The receiver has to guess what the message is.
And guessing is different from translation. Translation can be done mechanistically: you already know the thing and simply replace one representation with another. Guessing begins with not knowing. There are multiple possibilities, and one of them has to be selected.
Translation naturally gives rise to an impression of objectivity and completeness. There is a singular truth, buried in the world itself, waiting to be excavated and laid bare for others to admire. The worldview of God.
From a human perspective, knowledge seems closer to guessing. Of course, “guessing” here does not mean choosing randomly. I do not quite know a better word for it, and perhaps I do not fully grasp the idea myself yet. My impression is that it makes more sense to see knowledge as both the question and the answer, not just the answer.
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