Fiction Is Indispensable to Life’s Journey |
Fiction offers us the places and people we need in our lives.
Fiction vicariously gives us an escape from where we are.
Fiction has the potential to make a complex and at times difficult world easier to be in.
We never grow tired of loving and needing the fiction we find in books and movies. As children, we beg for one more book before we give over to sleep or ask to hear the favorite, over and over again. As adults we continue to trade in sleep to finish the chapter, see the end of the show, binge-watch the series or re-watch favorites on a host of devices. Why?
We love fiction and we need fiction. We learn from fiction, we upload our imaginations to access fiction, we feel our way through fiction, we connect and we find ourselves and others through fiction. It expands our social cognition—an understanding of the feelings and situations of others (Rezende and Shigaeff, 2023).
Why Do We Hold on to Fiction In a Way We Never Remember Facts?
Fiction Transports Us
Psychologists Melanie Green and Tim Brock, in their Transportation Imagery Model (2013), suggest that we are “transported” by stories. We suspend vigilance to inaccuracies, reason, time, and place. Narrative Persuasion (belief change) occurs to the extent that the evoked images are activated by psychological transportation to a state in which a reader becomes absorbed in the narrative world – for a time, leaving the real world behind. We are moved emotionally and neurophysiologically. It’s not a matter of ignoring the false notes; we don’t even see them. Green and Brock argue that entering fictional worlds “radically alters the way information is processed.” The more absorbed readers are in a story, the more the story changes them. They propose that when we are highly absorbed in the story, we barely detect “the false notes” or inaccuracies. It is not a matter of ignoring the false notes; we don’t even see them.
Whether it is the story you are reading to your child or the movie you are watching with hundreds of others in a theater, the experience of laughing, screaming or crying together connects us to others. Even if we watch separately, the fiction in books and films become part of our shared experience.
Movie titles, characters, and dialogue evoke certain meanings, become part of the shared culture and are used in our daily lives long after a film is seen.
We know what it means to say or hear someone say:
“May the Force be with you” (Star Wars, 1977)
“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” (The Wizard of Oz, 1939)
“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse” (The Godfather, 1972)
“You had me at hello.” (Jerry Maguire, 1996)
Fiction Enhances Empathy and Feelings
Fiction triggers empathy emotionally and by stimulating our neurochemistry through "mirror neurons":
When we are driving a race car, neurons in our brain fire. When we watch James Bond drive a race car, a subset of those same neurons also fire giving us the virtual-reality experience of driving.
In terms of emotional or affective experience, if someone wounds me or steals my child, a set of neurons (anterior cingulate neurons) register pain and anguish in my brain. If you witness my pain a subset of mirror neurons will fire in your brain putting you in empathy with me by registering the emotional pain I am suffering.
As such, fiction invites us to see and experience the world through other people’s eyes. There is a reason that Bambi is one of the most upsetting Disney movies.
Fiction Validates Life Experiences
Fiction allows us to know we are not alone in our feelings and thoughts. Many have embraced the reality that they are not the only one in a dysfunctional family thanks to series like Shrinking and films like Home for the Holidays and Little Miss Sunshine.
Yes, many members of many families have said to each other in public, "Try to act normal.”
Fiction Offers Escape
Fiction fulfills the request, “Stop the world, I want to get off.” It allows us to escape from our world to worlds of fantasy and magical thinking. In Harry Potter, The Wizard of Oz, The Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars, we enter worlds of shared imagination that are very different and far from our day-to-day lives.
Fiction Allows Justice to Prevail
Many films and books provide the justice and moral reckoning we crave but can’t guarantee in life. We believed in the decision reached in Twelve Angry Men. We never tire of police shows that solve the case. We embrace Mission Impossible:The Final Reckoning because we need it. Too many days in our lives feel like a “Mission Impossible.” We have needed James Bond, codename 007, since he arrived in the 1953 novel Casino Royale by Ian Fleming.
We are moved to be all that we can be by films like Rocky, The Shawshank Redemption, Schindler’s List, and A Beautiful Mind. We are inspired by the mix of love, friendship and mortality shared in the words and pictures of children’s books like Charlotte’s Web (1952).
Fiction Facilitates Healing
Fiction allows us to revisit unspeakable and traumatic events at a distance. It interrupts the code of silence and the symptom of avoidance so common to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It allows small, safe, visual and emotional steps to re-experience, find the words and integrate the unthinkable – tragic death, child abuse, war etc.
Films like Saving Private Ryan, The Deer Hunter, and Sound of Freedom evoke feelings and bear witness in important ways.
Fiction Takes Us Into The Experiences, Feelings, and Thoughts of People We Fear or Don’t Know
A number of fictional shows have helped shaped attitudes about gender, racism, and diversity. Vezzali, Stahi et al. report that the greatest magic of the Harry Potter books was reducing prejudice. They found that reading the books improved attitudes toward stigmatized groups (immigrants, homosexuals, refugees) in elementary-school children as well as high-school and university students in Italy and the United Kingdom.
Similarly, films like Twelve Years a Slave, The Help, and Remember the Titans raise consciousness about the horrors of slavery and racism and offer a glimpse of hope in the actions of young people using sports to connect.
Fiction Addresses Our Fear of Death and Destruction
These days we spend a lot of time in fictional post-apocalyptic neighborhoods dealing with The Walking Dead and other threats. One hypothesis is that this is actually a counterphobic solution to what terrifies us: death. We are so anxious about death, we can’t stop dealing with it, denying it, rounding up other survivors, or watching it in fiction.
There is a story for everyone because we are part of the stories we need and love.
“Tell me the facts and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.” – Native American proverb
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