Realness.

I'm trying to grasp the concept of realness and people's perceptions of what realness is in films and stories. We get so accustomed to fiction and the forms that build up a structured story, but when this structure is formed upon the real, do we want to listen? Or do we expect it to end as a story would?

I hear so many critics (not necessarily the professional kind, just anyone with an opinion, so really just anyone) talk about the way films or books end in a way they didn't want them to when they're based on the real. This seems slightly ignorant when you consider an audience expecting the sick man to die, the unhappy couple to make up or the lost girl to find her way.

When we base stories on the real, we often structure them like stories, but they don't take the same course as one, they generally take their actual paths, albeit with tweaks. So we expect them to end like a story, often the way we want them to end. But the sick man surviving, the unhappy couple splitting up and the lost girl remaining lost, often is the real. We often feel it should be like what we expect in life - or prepare ourselves for in life - whether it be good or bad.

What I guess I'm trying to get at in my roundabout way, is that we cannot expect stories to just be stories, we have to not expect, just as we do in life. Often enough, stories are lives and our lives are stories.

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