you don't read hansel and gretel and start analyzing how a house can be made of candy. stories work according to their own internal logic. they don't have to be realistic, or airtight, or straightforward. they can tarry in the strange forests of dreams.

here's david lynch breaking it down. i've never known another writer who feels this stuff the way i do.

I still love Lady in the Water, and I think it operates in similar ways: it explicitly couches itself as fiction, it dares you to challenge it by explicitly showing you that everything is a set up for emotional catharsis - Bob Balaban's film critic character provides that.

The movie gives you the keys to understand it., and then tells you you didn't at all. You were looking for logic, and the movie gave you strangeness and shadows instead. Thats why everyone hated it. They wanted something neater instead of a mystery that isn't there to be solved.

Snowpiercer is FANTASTIC but it doesn't make a lick of sense. Human civilization reduced to a speeding train because a little boy loved trains. It's absurd on its face, and it *leans into* the absurd.

Mel Brooks movies don't even attempt realism; they're blocked and paced like stage plays, reality bends in the service of a joke on a whim, and everyone knows theyre in a movie anyway. It undercuts its stakes at every turn to remind you that this is silly fun.

The unreality of film has always kind of been the point; Clash of the Titans isn't even TRYING to fool you. It's just giving you what its got.

Stories aren't reality. That is the entire point of them.

As a writer, the work I want to do is to give the reader an emotional experience that communicates something to them, and the tools at my disposal are those of drama and comedy, bare approximations of reality, heightened for effect. Real life is stupid, and boring, and dumb.

Asking a story to be ultrarealistric -- "how do lightsabers even WORK??? -- is to fail to understand that reality is negotiable in stories in the service of impact, or image, or meaning, or soul.

[insert pithy conclusion]