Photo by Jamie Campbell
One of the most important reasons that we love entertainment such as dramatic movies and sports events is that they are suspenseful. If one football team leads another by 63 points in the third quarter, most spectators will lose interest in the contest, because there is no suspense about the outcome. Likewise, a dramatic movie has to make us wonder about the fate of the hero; without such suspense we will experience the movie as flat and boring.
This leads to an obvious question that, strangely enough, is rarely asked: Why the heck should we find such pleasure in not knowing how things are going to turn out? Generally speaking, don’t we prefer security and understanding to insecurity and uncertainty? Why do we so enjoy putting ourselves in situations in which we feel anxiety about the outcome?
The first clue to the answer here is that we don’t really put ourselves in such situations, because the circumstances that produce suspense are always in some sense imaginary or fictional. We can feel suspense about the outcome of a game, even if we are playing in it ourselves, but we don’t say that we feel suspense about whether the boss is going to fire us in the meeting later this morning (Our feelings in this case are more likely to be anxiety and uncertainty). So it must be something about experiencing uncertainty in an imaginary situation that is the basis for the pleasure of suspense.
Some authors have concluded that since the situation in a fiction (like a movie or a book) or a game is imaginary, the emotions we feel themselves have an imaginary quality, and that is why we can enjoy what would otherwise be an unpleasant emotion, such as anxiety or uncertainty. The problem with this position, among other things, is that it is difficult to understand what an imaginary emotion is, and how it could be clearly distinguished from a real emotion.
There’s a simple solution to this problem: As any anxiety sufferer will tell you, it is completely possible to generate very real emotions just by thinking about certain situations, you don’t have to actually be in those situations. The limbic system, the part of the brain that produces the basic feeling of anxiety, reacts to thoughts that the more advanced parts of the brain can recognize as imaginary.
So this is at least part of the answer to our question. Suspense is real emotion that is provoked by a situation that we recognize as not real. Because we recognize that the situation is not real, we can allow ourselves to feel enough of the anxiety to feel stimulated, but then control that anxiety by reminding ourselves that the situation is imaginary.
But there is another part of the question—why should that be so much fun? I can’t say that I know the answer the answer to that one, but I have a guess: Conscious human beings can’t avoid at least occasionally confronting the fact that the future is uncertain and that in fact the current moment could be their last. We love stories and other situations that have happy endings because they provide a sense of relief. They give us hope that the uncertainty and anxiety we often feel may be simply temporary, and in the end everything will work out just fine.
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This is a wonderful set of articles and raises some major questions. As I was reading this my cat was playing with its tail, clearly displaying anxiety, relief, suspense and total engagement – which seemed a bit of a metaphor. The combination of article and cat prompted a couple of questions – Do we play hide and seek with ourselves? Can we even admit that we play hide and seek with ourselves? What would be the consequences to the way we live if we did admit?
I look forward to see this develop.
I agree, these are interesting questions, and I’m going to have to think about them. I wish I knew something about cats. Some researchers have claimed that animals can be hypnotized, I wonder if that’s more what’s going on as cats seem to become engaged in their play. Give me some time, I’d like to return to this.
I’ve been traveling lately and have been slow to return to this question. But I do think it touches on the very basic matter raised by Gregory Bateson in his famous essay on the nature of play (the precise name of which escapes me at the moment, it’s reprinted in his Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. He points out that mammals who engage in mock fighting must have a way of signalling and understanding that certain actions (bites, say) are not real bites but harmless imitations of bites. In your terms, such playmates hide something even though they know where it is, and then proceed with a game based on the fiction it is hidden. This suggests that yes, we do always play hide and seek with our selves, it is far deeper than our species.
Thanks Peter,
A battered copy of “Steps” has been a constant companion for many years.
The hide and seek idea I find very intriguing because it runs counter to the prevailing representations of the “self”. And it just struck me that in entertainment there is almost a complete absence of characters who play hide and seek with themselves (or am I wrong?).
The main characters may go through travail and strife, they may be conflicted, the baddies may be devious but we engage with them as them as whole, unpartitioned entities. Maybe it is this wholeness that has an equal appeal, along with the happy ending.
I suspect we are closer to Batesons idea of a more or less stable, but capable of shifting ecology of mind(s) operating in a wider environment.
Another thought about suspense and anticipation: it is an almost paralyzingly, debilitating and non creative state of being. You can’t actually do much when you are in these states? So why is so much entertainment built on this state?
There’s a lot here that I find very evocative, but if you have the time I think we need some examples, because that will help pin things down. I’ve been thinking about the ways I might play hide and seek with myself, for instance. Since I’ve been hiking in the mountains with my daughter for the last few days, that came to mind. It’s fair to say that this hiking is a form of play. I think it is possible to say that it entails an element of suspense, not so much in that there is actual danger involved (freak accidents aside) but in the sense that it is a challenge (my daughter disagrees, by the way). Is this activity a form of cat-like hide and seek in that I conspire to present myself with a challenge? That is, this hiking can get a bit tricky and certainly rather strenuous, there is the possibility I might give up, make a fool of myself by getting lost, or get killed by a falling meteor. But really, I know it’s going to turn out fine. But if I knew that for certain, it wouldn’t be any fun. This sort of duality may be included in your conception of hide and seek, but I sense you mean something more tied to our emotional lives, a form of self-deception?
In either case, I’m with you–our everyday conceptions of selfhood are overly unitary, insufficiently attentive to the multiple voices and layered motives that underlie our thought and activity. (Perhaps this is related to what one could call our worship of the self, our conviction that the unique self is sacred). And that in turn may indeed be related to the fact that the human-like figures that populate our stories are more like the everyday conception of selfhood, unitary beings. Even the tortured hero is never as all over the place as we real humans. (or was this the idea behind Mrs. Dalloway? Should have paid attention in English class).
Does suspense inhibit creativity? Seems plausible. How about this: A suspenseful story is a ritual event which pulls one into a collective fantasy and provides, for awhile, a blissful experience, maybe even a form of ecstasy. But that mental state is not conducive to originality, rational inquiry, etc. This is total speculation, of course, although I think I may be channeling Piaget here (assimilation and…?)
Have you written about any of these issues elsewhere?