As audiences become increasingly conditioned to dissect films for logic, ideology and technical flaws, are we losing our willingness to surrender to imagination — and with it, an essential part of the experience of fiction?
A huge mansion on the outskirts of Chandni Chowk in Delhi. An alien who uses sunlight to enhance the mental and intellectual abilities of a developmentally challenged man. A girl who receives letters written by her late mother, one for every birthday.
Put like this, these stories may sound absurd.
Yet, place the same ideas within a fictional world and, as audiences, we accept them. We allow ourselves to enter the universe created for us and, for a while, believe in what it presents.
Any form of fictional creativity depends on this willingness. Creators trust their audiences to believe in the worlds they construct, while audiences agree, consciously or otherwise, to temporarily set aside the limits of everyday reality.
It is an unspoken understanding between the storyteller and the viewer.
When an individual consciously lets go of their conventional understanding of reality and logic in order to engage with a fictional work, they practise what is known as the suspension of disbelief.
It is a concept that benefits both creator and audience, allowing a work of imagination to be experienced on its own terms.
But there now appears to be a growing and selective resistance to this very act.
Cynicism and scepticism increasingly shape the way audiences engage with fiction. Instead of first allowing a fictional work to exist within the world it has created, viewers often approach it as something to be dissected — examining inconsistencies, improbabilities and contradictions under a magnifying glass.
Critical analysis is undoubtedly an essential part of contemporary media consumption. Audiences should question what they watch, particularly when films and other forms of storytelling influence social attitudes and public culture.
But somewhere along the way, criticism also seems to have created a reluctance to grant creativity and imagination the freedom they require.
The idea behind the suspension of disbelief has long helped bridge the distance between reality and fiction.
Even before the phrase itself came into use, questions surrounding emotional participation in drama were explored in classical thought. Aristotle, for instance, wrote about the emotional experience of drama and the catharsis it could produce in an audience.
Centuries later, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge articulated the idea of a “willing suspension of disbelief”, describing the relationship between audiences and imaginative works through what he called poetic faith.
The audience knows that what it is watching is fictional. Yet, for the duration of the experience, it agrees to enter a world governed by its own possibilities.
This willingness forms one of the foundations of storytelling.
It allows viewers to immerse themselves in the world of a film and invest emotionally in its characters and conflicts. Once that connection is established, fictional people begin to feel personal. Their happiness can make us smile; their losses can move us to tears.
That emotional connection transcends genre.
We laugh with comedy, fear what unfolds in a thriller and grieve alongside characters in tragedy. Fiction becomes meaningful precisely because imagination allows us to recognise something of human life within invented worlds.
In that sense, the familiar idea of art imitating life — and life occasionally imitating art — depends greatly on our willingness to participate in imagination.
The audience, of course, has always had the final say in whether a fictional work succeeds in convincing it.
What one viewer considers possible within a story may appear completely implausible to another. Our understanding of credibility is subjective, shaped by experience, culture and expectation.
Yet the manner in which films are consumed appears to have changed.
Many films of the 2000s and even the 2010s were often approached, at least initially, simply as pieces of entertainment or fiction. Today, social media has turned instant criticism into an integral part of the viewing experience.
A film is no longer merely watched. It is analysed, clipped, debated, fact-checked, memed and judged — sometimes within hours of its release.
The rise of this culture of criticism is not inherently negative. In many ways, it is an important development.
Examining a work of fiction for ideological, social or technical shortcomings can hold creators accountable for the wider influence of their art. Fiction does not exist entirely outside society, and storytelling can reinforce ideas, stereotypes and attitudes that deserve scrutiny.
But there is a difference between questioning what a work communicates and rejecting imagination simply because it does not conform perfectly to real-world logic.
If every fictional possibility must survive the test of literal realism, audiences risk becoming reluctant participants in imagination itself.
Perhaps the answer lies not in abandoning criticism, but in finding a balance between interrogation and immersion.
Audiences can remain alert to what stories communicate while also allowing themselves to experience the world a storyteller is attempting to create. Criticism does not necessarily require emotional distance, just as immersion does not require intellectual surrender.
It may instead require us to examine our own relationship with fiction: what are we willing to believe, what are we unwilling to believe — and why?
The suspension of disbelief is both the anchor and the helm of fiction.
It allows stories to sail into imaginative territory while keeping them connected closely enough to human experience for audiences to follow.
Without that willingness to temporarily believe in the impossible, fiction risks becoming merely something to interrogate rather than something to experience.
And perhaps, occasionally, watching a story should still begin with the simple willingness to believe.
