walking slowly in the direction of a conclusion
today I watched “don’t fuck with cats” on netflix. it’s a doc about Luka Magnotta, a Canadian murderer, and how a group of people on the internet basically tracked and solved his crimes while they were happening.
the ending isn’t a twist necessarily - but filmmakers walk you right up to the edge of a conclusion that, within the universe of the film, is both impossible to avoid and impossible to disagree with.
it’s one of those theories that wouldn’t work at all without the context of 90+ minutes of buildup and storytelling to support it. if you told it to somebody on the street they’d rightfully ask for a lot more evidence than is provided in the doc. BUT when you’re /in/ the film the conclusion seems both undeniable and entirely surprising.
that combination or surprise and certainty is interesting for its rarity in the real world. surprise and certainty exist almost in opposition to one another by definition. it’s not often that you immediately believe completely new information. you almost never go from not thinking about something as a possibility to buying into it as the only logical one.
BUT the reason it works in this film is because you’re dying for something to make sense. and so when you’re presented with any /compelling/ (note I said compelling not even plausible) evidence, your brain is ready to throw in the towel and accept it immediately.
this isn’t a strategy that’s useful or even advisable in any other context but it /is/ something that you see in documentary quite often - where a filmmaker builds you up with hours of evidence from which to draw your /own/ conclusion and then robs you, at the last minute, of the freedom to do so.
but the less logical the details, the lower the bar is for what’s considered a logical explanation. or, in other words, logic is relative. it’s the reason people believe conspiracy theories, personal mythologies, and anything at all. people want the world to make sense because it so infrequently does. one way to convince people of an idea is to convince them of the absurdity of the alternative. the alternative - to not believe it would be to believe that the world makes no sense. and there’s very few people brave enough to do that.