Hi Boards! Long time lurker, first time poster. I have a question that has been buggin me for ages, so I thought I would come to the universal ultimate authority.
I cannot be the first person to have observed that schlock fiction (CSI, Law’n’Order) works because the writer and audience tacitly agree to accept that even though the detail of the story is made up, at some higher level we are being shown how things would go if the detail were true.
Thus, we accept that on CSI on any given night, the story at the basic level of characters and crimes depicted is made up, but we are willing to suspend disbelief because at some meta-level we are persuaded that Grissom’s methodology (examples: the Magic Databases, Grissom’s assertion that the way to truth is to ignore the witness and follow the evidence; that every crime scene allows reconstruction of the crime to an infinite level of detail, etc) represents the way things actually happen. Of course, the point is that the meta-level stuff is made up, too.
The principle doesn’t just apply to police procedurals and whodunnits, of course. It applies to soap opera, medical drama (eg, House); indeed just about anything that isn’t frank comedy.
So what is the proper name for this trick? The best I can come up with is False Process Authenticity (which is way too creaky). I am guessing that there is some fancy Greek word for this (there is a fancy Greek word for everything - what kind of abso-bloody-useless word is tmesis?)
What I am looking for is the sort of word you could pull out and use on some bloke in a pub who, when discussing real crime, scornfully pontificates about what the police should do to solve it, based on what he saw last night on TV. The sort of word you could use in the following sentence - “Ha! You’re just a victim of …(insert word here)!” Kind of like Woody Allen pulling Marshall McLuhan out of a nearby shrubbery.
Yes, I realise this has the capacity to make me look like an utter prat. I promise hand-on-heart only to use the Word for niceness instead of evil, to dispel ignorance in all its manifestations and then only with restraint and under irresistible provocation.