“No #!%?ing way can anyone outrun a boulder without losing his hat!”

That was my dad’s reaction to the first 15 minutes of the first Indiana Jones film.  The first Indiana Jones film! Hearts plucked out of living victims.  Centuries-old knights guarding Holy Grails.  Escaping nuclear explosions in fridges.  My dad never even made it to those feats of derring-do because he couldn’t get past the genre-defining idea that Harrison Ford’s fedora never falls off his head.  That’s my dad’s threshold of disbelief (mine, along with 90% of Indy fandom’s, would be the genre-destroying Fridgidaire).

As audience members, we’re all suspending our disbelief just by sitting down in front of a TV or movie screen.  Documentaries aside, we know what we’re watching is make-believe.  We willingly embrace this as our collective threshold of disbelief.  Beyond that, however, we each have individual thresholds, and this is where things get interesting.

My dad greets any over-the-top story beat with a variation of his Raiders of the Lost Ark reaction:

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“No #!%?ing way can the same guy survive 4 impossible missions!”  “No #!%?ing way can anyone see all of Chicago in one day off!”

My mom, on the other hand, embraces them with her crutch phrase, “It’s just a movie.”

“High school kids singing about their problems?  Sure, it’s just a movie.”  “Wild-eyed scientists driving DeLoreans into the past?  Just a movie.”

My mother’s viewing habits are more open-minded than my father’s, but she has her threshold too.  Wizards and aliens need not apply (though she did like Avatar so go figure).

For some people, it’s the high concept that’s hard to swallow.  I own Star Trek and Harry Potter DVDs, so you’d think Pixar’s Cars would be right up my alley.  Me too, but while watching it, all I kept thinking was:

“No #!%?ing way humans don’t exist in this world when there’s a mattress tied to a van’s roof!”

If I shared John Lasseter’s love for automobiles than perhaps I could embrace an Earth populated solely by anthropomorphic vehicles, but I don’t.  What kind of car do I drive?  Blue.  That’s how little interest I have in cars.  And that’s why I can’t suspend my disbelief in the Cars concept.

On the flip side, some folks find it easier to believe the extraordinary than the ordinary.  Christopher Reeve leaping tall buildings in a single bound? No problem.  Margot Kidder renting a palatial penthouse on a reporter’s salary?  No way.

And then there’s coincidence, perhaps the biggest threshold threat of them all.  Years before DVR technology, a buddy and I unwound with some TV.  I picked up the remote, said “I want to see a Daffy Duck cartoon,” pressed the power button, and, as if on cue, the Looney Tunes logo popped up, followed by a Daffy classic.  We couldn’t believe our eyes.  My pal said, “That could only happen in a movie.”  Ironically if it did happen in a movie, we would roll our eyes and say, “That could never happen in real life.”

Suspension of disbelief extends to aspects of storytelling other than the story itself.  Casting, for example.  I can buy Orlando Bloom in a costumed period piece and so can the masses as evident by the success of the Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises.  Even Troy made money.  But I couldn’t accept Orlando in a quirky modern day dramedy and, as evident by the financial failure of Elizabethtown (Elizabeth who?), neither could any of you.

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There are thousands of different thresholds out there.  Luckily there are also thousands of different movies.  My father can’t believe that an archeologist always keeps his fedora on, but I can.  Likewise, I can’t believe that the same archeologist survives a nuke.  Your threshold is part of your identity.  It’s part of what makes you unique.  Embrace it, be proud of it, and don’t hate me if I’ve crossed it (“No #!%?ing way can he still be babbling on about thresholds! No #!%?ing way!!”).

COMING SOON:  How to make a film in 48 hours and live to tell the tale.