In Support of Fiction: Why We Do What We Do

The term “fiction” has had a bit of a bruising in modern times. People seem to synonymise it with lies, deceit, untruth. We all know at least one person who revels in their own hilarity by placing a book that they don’t agree with into the fiction section of the bookshop. Similarly, people deride the scientific developments they don’t want to believe as “science fiction”, like that’s a bad thing. Or people dismiss (other) religions as fictions, and worse, proponents of those religions get angry about it. Some idiotic world leaders have tarnished fiction even further by calling everything “fake news”.

According to some modern philosophers, fiction is not only good, it is vital. Our societies can’t function properly without it. Money, corporations, nation states, are all collective fictions that we agree to uphold – they exist only as a shared system of belief. We’ve seen catastrophic consequences when people stop believing. Similarly, the Law has a concept called a legal fiction, allowing it to function at all.

Equally as intriguing, humans have an uncanny ability to believe contradictory things. Orwell explored the dangerous side of this in Nineteen-Eighty-Four, calling it doublethink: 2 + 2 = 5. Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania. But what about the benevolent side? NZ was the first country in modern history to grant legal personhood (something that the proponents understood to be actual personhood) to a river, as a form of environmental protection. We’ve now granted it to mountains, species and locations. Other countries are doing the same with buildings, artifacts, even ideas. Or science: are we solid matter or vibrating energy fields, or both (or neither)? And what about “virtual reality”? A trillion-dollar industry built on an oxymoron. We seem to love authenticity, whatever that is; but we also put great weight on ‘creativity’. The one is something that ‘really’ exists already, the other is something ‘made-up’ recently.

After so long in the film world, I still find people who don’t realise that sound effects and design are creative, rather than technical, endeavours. (‘I thought you just plugged in the cables and “cleaned up” the vocals.’) I’ve learned to take this as a compliment these days. In my youthful indignance, I used to try to over-splain how the sound was ‘very creative’; ‘why do you think you feel a certain way when you watch xyz’; ‘just turn the sound off if you don’t believe me’; etc etc. The number of eyeballs I watched glaze over led me to the following conclusion: I was ruining it for them. People want to believe that the monster sounds were recorded from a real monster. That I actually sent a microphone into space to record aliens. That I put myself in great danger recording the sound of tornadoes, war zones, car crashes, zombies and dinosaurs. How else could I possibly have done it? They know deep down that the sounds couldn’t actually be the real thing, but they don’t want to have to acknowledge that to themselves. Why should they? Every movie demands that they suspend their disbelief, why should they break the illusion after it ends? When you read or watched Life of Pi, how deflated were you when the narrator broke the high-school short-story rule, and told you it ‘was all a dream’?

I used to imagine a character, that would haunt me every now and then, called Uncle Sensible. Everyone knows that one bore that would turn up at a gathering and ‘splain’ the magic out of everything:
”Well if ghosts are real, why is the evidence completely lacking in these days of more cameras than ever?”
”Vampires were probably based on peoples’ misunderstanding of bodily decay.”
”If time travel existed, someone would have come to tell us by now.”
”Cats can’t see spirits when they stare at the wall, they can just hear mice or birds behind it.”
”Sparrows and bees and schools of fish don’t have any kind of collective consciousness when they move as one, they just obey local rules faster than we can perceive.”
”The Loch Ness monster couldn’t have existed because blah blah blah…”
…and so on. Yes, Uncle Sensible, you’re probably right, but did you really have to be such a bringdown? We were enjoying imagining a world where these spooky and interesting things existed. Using the power of our imagination, as did our literary heroes like Shakespeare, Stoker, Carol, Swift, Rowling. Celebrating glorious fiction without having to skewer it with that dreaded asterisk denoting the disclaimer of common sense: *of course, we know it’s not really true. Even writing this now bums me out. Why would I want to do that to my audience?

Once, I was operating sound for a stage play that involved a volcano under the city rumbling away and eventually erupting. The sonic impact was immense; loud, ferocious and exciting. An old woman approached me after the show and gave me a stern telling off for doing something so dangerous as recording a real volcano. Should I have responded like Uncle Sensible? “Well, actually… sound effects libraries… layering of sounds… use of subwoofer… illusion… we didn’t really…” …I bore myself even writing that. I simply shrugged and said “the things we do for art” or something equally as banal. I hope she recanted the story of the dangerous recordist at every afternoon tea for months afterward.

So once again, being a “creative” sound designer is about finding that connection between you the designer and your audience. How much of a ratio between Reality and Fiction do you give? Yes, some people love to know the details and mechanics, the ‘science’. Others are much happier believing, like we all did when we first saw Star Wars. If anyone asks me in the future, my initial response will be: “of course it’s the real sound. How else could we have done it?”