The Responsibilities of the Audience

The+Responsibilities+of+the+Audience

C.D. Calderon, Staff Writer

While taking a look at the Amnesia: The Dark Descent video game, G. Christopher Williams made the following observation:

“It seems to me that of many conventionally understood narrative genres, horror is a genre that has some particular peculiarities in regard to the relationship between its audience and whatever form of media that horror takes, be it film, novels, or video games. What I want to describe, I could probably also connect to other genres as well, but I think that horror (and, perhaps, comedy as well) requires more of its audience in regard to the attitude with which that audience approaches its material to begin with. There is a kind of contract, perhaps, that horror seems to almost require its audience to sign off on, a responsibility towards the form, that often is not so explicitly asked of the audiences of other narrative genres.

“What I mean by this is that horror is somewhat more easily “ruined” in some way if the audience chooses to take the wrong attitude towards the material of horror itself. The audience of a film or reader of a novel or player of a video game can potentially and quite deliberately wreck the mood and atmosphere that horror intends if they want to. If, for example, one approaches a work of horror with the idea that horror is in itself necessarily campy, it is pretty easy to break the mood intended by a slasher film. You can laugh off the situations the characters find themselves in (and allow themselves to get into), the gore, the grotesqueness, etc., etc. by simply taking the proper pose in relation to these elements of that subgenre. Frankly, simply throwing open the windows to let sunshine explode into the room while one plays a survival horror game can rend the atmosphere of a horror game apart rather readily (web)”.

What is striking about Williams’ ideas is how close they are to the words of horror author Stephen King in his 1983 non-fiction book Danse Macabre, where he admits:

“I think that only people who have worked in the field for some time truly understand how fragile this stuff really is, and what an amazing commitment it imposes on the reader or viewer of intellect and maturity.  When Coleridge spoke of “the suspension of disbelief” in his essay on imaginative poetry, I believe he knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lad weight, which has to be hoisted with a clean and a jerk and held up by main force.  Disbelief isn’t light; it’s heavy.  The difference in sales between Arthur Hailey and H.P. Lovecraft may exist because everyone believes in cars and banks, but it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night.  And whenever I run into someone who expresses a feeling along the lines of, “I don’t read fantasy or go to any of those movies; none of it’s real,” I feel a kind of sympathy.  They simply can’t lift the weight of fantasy.  The muscles of the imagination have grown to weak (King 104)”.

King’s thoughts are a very close match for the opinions expressed by Williams.  The differences start to creep in the instant Williams makes clear his analytic – problem – solving approach to the genre.

“It may be that I simply often tend to view games of this sort in what I can best describe as a mechanistic sort of way. Enemies, grotesquely monstrous or not, are problems to be surmounted, problems to be solved, more than they are anything else to me in games with monsters or enemies that are essentially faceless (or lacking in characterization). Running over an old lady in Grand Theft Auto actually gives me pause, but being mauled by a monster for a few seconds? Not so much. Instead, I don’t panic in a firefight when playing Call of Duty, I don’t button mash in response to being spotted by a thug during a stealth mission in a Batman game, and I just don’t really freak out that much when I see the twisted monstrosity that haunts the ancient manor that is the setting of Amnesia lumbering towards me. I tend to assess the situation and figure out a way to deal with them or it. I may die trying, which may sour my mood, but my mood doesn’t change much in the heat of the moment, during play itself. Problems call for solutions, not panicked response.”

It may be going too far, yet it seems that Williams might bring this same frame of reference to others genres, forms, and platforms of art as well.  This presents a problem, not just for Williams, but for any member of the audience in a similar frame of mind.  The problem is that approaching any work of fiction from such a realist – naturalist frame of reference places too many limits on the ability to enjoy a good yarn as entertainment.  If telling a story is an enterprise in joint cooperation between a writer and the audience, then an equal amount of imagination is demanded from both sides.  This is a fundamental criterion of all art that not everyone is capable of meeting on either side of the equation.

This idea applies to all genres and art-forms besides just horror.  However it is horror that best acts as gauge for a person’s imaginative abilities.  One could almost venture to say that if parents want to interest their kids in reading and the arts in general, then a work by Poe, Hawthorne, Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, or even R.L. Stine would serve as decent gateway drug.

The trick is that the experience of strong emotions in themselves is not enough if a person has no imaginative capabilities.  Without imagination all that a sharp sock of fear can do is tend to make a person more insulated, isolated, and suspicious of life in general, leaving no benefits behind.  However, if you take the experience of fear and combine it with even a halfway decent work of art, then the artist will have engaged the reader or viewer on a personal level.  The book or film will “speak” to that person, or their condition.  Such a thing happened to me with Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg’s An American Tail.  Children in audience should have no trouble identifying with that film’s young protagonist and the struggles he goes through.  It’s possible for the right work of horror to engage its audience in just the same way.  The trick is keeping that moment of engaged awareness in the memory of the audience, and then, finding some way of making the audience realize how the work speaks to them on a conscious level.