“A dog comes with our hotel!” I
enthusiastically told my friends who were staying in a separate hostel, “We
have to feed and walk it and everything!” My friends acted surprised and a
little skeptical but I proved our ownership of the dog by showing them the
three hundred pictures I had taken of the beautiful Siberian husky. “That’s
weird the landlords just left strangers to take care of their dog” one of the
gullible fools commented. “Yeah, I know right” I responded, and proceeded to
drop the subject and enjoy my day in Scotland. A couple days later my
hotel-mates and I dropped the bomb that the owners did not, in fact, leave us
with their new puppy, and though we had seen, pet and had a photo-shoot with
this dog, we weren’t taking care of it. Their reactions were less than
satisfying with nothing more than an “oh… okay”, while I was almost on the
floor with sore ribs.
It was this moment that I thought
to myself, “why did I tell them I was taking care of a dog?” It’s not very
clever, funny or effective in any purpose…so why did I do it? There’s a certain
satisfaction in “fooling” someone, or in other words, lying to him or her, that
doesn’t have to do with my particularly childish sense of humor. Knowing the
truth while the person in front of you does not puts the liar on a higher plane
of knowledge, which for some reason ends up being comical. The comedy can stem
from a range of events, mostly involving the reactions of the party being lied
to, but fundamentally comes from their plain ignorance. We lie to others to
bask in their lack of knowledge. So if we, as humans, enjoy fooling, or lying
to, people, why do we also enjoy being lied to?
As I finished reading An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, chills
raced down my spine when the story was flipped on its head. The fact of his
actual immediate death shifted the story completely from events transpiring
over a full day to a stream of consciousness lasting no more than three
minutes. This made me think about movies like Shutter Island, and Inception
(semi-spoiler alert) whose endings shift the perspectives of the movie from
the very first second. These are my favorite types of movies, books and short
stories: tales with twists. So, while I love fooling others, I also love being
fooled because of the satisfaction of enlightenment, or of the sudden
realization of the truth I gain.
Allison brings up an interesting point, why do we sometimes like to be fooled and other times get mad about it? Does it have to do with the length of time we're lied to? How emotionally invested we are in the characters? Or maybe how the ending turns out? Maybe this was just me but at the end of Fight Club I wasn't mad at all that I had been tricked, I thought it was cool that the perspective of the movie had changed. It almost makes it feel like two movies, one before you know, and one after. Maybe that's why we like it, because it gives us more to look for. It's not just, sorry, but that whole story you read didn't actually happen. With An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, we're inclined to feel mad because we don't get anything more out of it. He's dead, that's it. It makes you realize how careful movie makers and authors have to be when they want to do a big plot twist. They walk a thin line between it being a huge success, or everyone hating them because they'd been lied to.
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