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Where's All the Light Coming From? And Suspension Of Disbelief

Updated: Jun 5, 2023



A common trope in movies, especially fantasy, is that even in nighttime scenes there will be a "twilight" level of light. The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers is a famous example of this. In the Battle of the Hornburg, the armies are seen in partial light, more than even the full Moon could probably provide.


I have heard (from the excellent source "a screenshot of a Tumblr comment") that during the filming of The Lord Of the Rings, Elijah Wood asked something to this effect. The questioned person replied "Same place as the soundtrack."

This, then, was the opinion of this person: Don't question it. It's just a movie.


However, a much better understanding can be reached by thinking in this manner:

  • According to Suspension of Disbelief, we must take everything actually shown at face value.

  • The best way to think of it this way is to view fictional movies and TV as "Documentaries," at least while analyzing them.

  • We should still take everything at face value when possible, but when reaching a contradiction, or paradox, within the canon, we can resolve it by using the "documentary" explanation.

  • For instance, in the original release of Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope, Han Solo shoots Greedo from beneath the table. In the special edition, he is fired upon first. While generally we should go with the more recent edition, in this case the special edition is (in Suspension of Disbelief mode) a "fake". Han's movements are sloppy and fake-looking, allowing us to write this off as a forgery. Thus, there is no contradiction.

Tolkien's writing style worked this way: Any chronology errors could be chalked up to "sloppy translation" from the original Red Book.


In this mindset, the unrealistic amount of light can be explained by color grading on the part of the documentary production team (who also added music and subtitles, as well as—in the case of LOTR—re-dubbed the dialogue from Westron to English and digitally altered the footage to match the lip movements).


So, when watching a work of fiction, keep in mind that there are documentary teams editing what you see. It is not straight footage of these "events".

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