Incredible!

There’s something missing.

You sense it even when you’re not entirely sure what it is.

It nags at you like something you’re meant to remember and just can’t quite access from the recesses of your mind’s vast storage system.

You’re sitting there taking in a story — a book in your hands, in front of your TV, or in an uncomfortable theater seat — and you’re just not buying it. Maybe you’re not even sure why, but something’s just not working for you.

What’s missing? Credibility.

Credibility is “the quality or power of inspiring belief.”

And we want to believe.

As a reader or a moviegoer we participate in the “willing suspension of disbelief.”

The phrase “willing suspension of disbelief” has come to be widely applied to a reader’s or viewer’s participation in fiction, but it was coined in 1817 by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge posited that if a writer could infuse a “human interest and a semblance of truth” into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative.

Fiction has been defined as “a lie that tells the truth.” And, like all myths and enduring tales, its credibility comes from the credibility of telling the truth—not necessarily literal, factual truth, but human truth and the semblance of truth in every scene and scenario, in a character’s motivations and actions.

Credibility is missing from much of the trite, transient fiction we consume — in movies, on TV, even in too many of our novels.         

I remember recommending a novel to a friend many, many years ago and him saying when he returned it that “it was OK, but not much happened.” He may or may not have been right about how much happened in the novel, but I do know this — what did happen in the book was credible, was honest and true.

The problem we have with credibility is not just in our entertainment, but our culture at large. We have so-called journalists making a mockery of unbiased reporting, who instead of credible (there’s that word again) sources say “people say” or “some people say.”

We have so little credibility left these days we just expect to be lied to. We assume politicians lie. We expect attorneys to lie. We know that businesses lie — both about their products and their bottom line.

We have special effects capabilities that ooh and aah. We call them “incredible” because they are. They lack credibility. They leave us empty and malnourished because our souls need true, credible stories about recognizably human beings in credibly portrayed plots.

I wanted to like Fox TV’s “The Following.” I like Kevin Bacon. I liked the early writing of Kevin Williamson. And I like smart, well-made thrillers. But from the very beginning, the show has strained credibility — and it’s only gotten worse. The show’s makers are coming up with cool plot twists, but they’re not then asking themselves how to make them credible. They’ve come up with some interesting characters, but again, they’re not keeping them credible.

This reminds me of something Ian Malcolm said in “Jurassic Park” about cloning dinosaurs: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

The writers of “The Following,” like so many others, are so preoccupied with whether they can create certain characters and scenarios that they haven’t stopped to ask if they should.

That’s why I find “Jurassic Park,” a story about cloning dinosaurs far, far more credible than “The Following.”

Let the greedy, money and power hungry politicians and CEOs and attorneys lie to us, but not our storytellers.

Story matters. We start telling true, credible stories and we’ll begin to demand and get more credibility and truth from our corporations, politicians, journalists, religious leaders, teachers, and ultimately ourselves.