I just had a thought on the opposite side from what I wrote before.
Perhaps the reminders that "this isn't real" are a reaction to the SFX which /do/ keep trying to be "more real than reality". They aren't a complaint that the SFX aren't good enough, or an attempt to be 'clever', they are people reminding themselves that "no, there aren't really monsters under my bed, it's pretend". They are scared that people -- including themselves -- might really be fooled by the SFX that these things are real. When it was obvious that the thunder was a metal sheet, or the ray guns were hairdryers, or the aliens were people in masks, they could accept it as entertainment, and pretend that it was 'real' for the duration of the show, but with advancing realism in the FX it is getting harder to tell. (I have no idea which bits of Avatar, for instance, were real actors and which CGI. OK, in some cases I'm pretty sure, but I've heard that there was a lot more CGI in there than I thought.)
In support of which I give as examples not only Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" (radio, note, not movie or TV) but also "Close Encounters" (the film) -- the latter I experienced myself, with a number of otherwise normally intelligent people taking it as fact. I've seen it with the X-Files. And the way people have treated soap operas for decades, being more upset about a character on the show than the same thing in Real Life, also supports it.
So perhaps you are right, that the amount of criticism and pointing out the SFX has grown, but perhaps that is necessary to remind a lot of people about the difference between fiction and reality, because it has got blurred. If some of us don't need that reminder, well, we can ignore it, but for some others they may need it. Hey there, you can't really jump off a 20 storey building and climb down like Spiderman, even though that looked so real...
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branchandroot
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Date: 2009-12-27 04:55 pm (UTC)Perhaps the reminders that "this isn't real" are a reaction to the SFX which /do/ keep trying to be "more real than reality". They aren't a complaint that the SFX aren't good enough, or an attempt to be 'clever', they are people reminding themselves that "no, there aren't really monsters under my bed, it's pretend". They are scared that people -- including themselves -- might really be fooled by the SFX that these things are real. When it was obvious that the thunder was a metal sheet, or the ray guns were hairdryers, or the aliens were people in masks, they could accept it as entertainment, and pretend that it was 'real' for the duration of the show, but with advancing realism in the FX it is getting harder to tell. (I have no idea which bits of Avatar, for instance, were real actors and which CGI. OK, in some cases I'm pretty sure, but I've heard that there was a lot more CGI in there than I thought.)
In support of which I give as examples not only Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" (radio, note, not movie or TV) but also "Close Encounters" (the film) -- the latter I experienced myself, with a number of otherwise normally intelligent people taking it as fact. I've seen it with the X-Files. And the way people have treated soap operas for decades, being more upset about a character on the show than the same thing in Real Life, also supports it.
So perhaps you are right, that the amount of criticism and pointing out the SFX has grown, but perhaps that is necessary to remind a lot of people about the difference between fiction and reality, because it has got blurred. If some of us don't need that reminder, well, we can ignore it, but for some others they may need it. Hey there, you can't really jump off a 20 storey building and climb down like Spiderman, even though that looked so real...