Abstract
- Storytelling creates aesthetic pleasure by cuing viewers to resolve separate narrative elements. Hollywood generally makes the resolution process fairly easy by following time-tested storytelling principles, especially principles of clarity and causality, that increase the viewer’s processing fluency and result in calm pleasure. Some Hollywood movies, however, exhilarate our aesthetic experience by straining our ability to resolve their stories. Pleasure is most exhilarated when cognitive activity is athletic and resolution distant but still tangible. Using abductive reasoning processes—or what cognitive psychologists term “insight”—viewers are able to resolve disunities in Hollywood narratives and even repair incongruities in story logic. As long as a movie does not put so much strain on our cognitive resources, reasoning capacity, or imagination that we are unable or unwilling to resolve a movie’s separate narrative elements, then pleasure is liable to intensify with the degree of difficulty at resolution.