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Films

Nurse Betty

What happens when the barrier between our ‘real’ world and the fantasy world of film starts to crumble? Our man in the front row with the popcorn Thomas Wartenberg watches Nurse Betty succumb to madness.

One of the pleasures afforded by films is the voyeuristic one of looking unseen into a world. Even though we know, at some level, that that world is no more than a cinematic construct, we enjoy the feeling of being unobserved spectators, eavesdropping on a world that we pretend is real. Theorists have talked of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in an attempt to characterize the sort of attitude that viewers bring to the experience of watching a film. Although we know that we are only watching actors pretending to be characters – even this is more than we often get these days, when sometimes there aren’t even real actors behind the images we see on the screen – when we watch a film we are supposed to will ourselves into ignoring this, as we pretend we are looking through a window into a world of actually existing people, places, and things.

Whatever such disbelief might amount to, it can’t be the total denial of any awareness that we are watching a fiction, for we don’t react to the events portrayed on the screen as we do to real events.

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