Stories kick babies

You're sat on the sofa, or maybe your favourite armchair, in front of the TV. You select what you feel like watching. You settle back and prepare to leave the real world behind. For the next hour or two, the story will be your reality.

We enter the world of the story with ease - like hypnosis, we slip into it without notice. While we exist in this unreal world it is more real than the one in which the sofa continues to exist. If the baby cries or the doorbell rings or the moon falls from the sky we are annoyed at the disturbance, delaying any reaction in the hope that it will just go away all by itself.

So caught up are we in the world we have entered, we share the emotions of the people whose lives we observe.

Until that moment when they do something so obviously stupid - fans of horror films will know this feeling.

It's the feeling we get, in 'Paper Hearts', when Mulder runs out of the motel room to save his sister. He knows it isn't Samantha as well as we do. But off he goes, leaving, so he thinks, John Lee Roche safely handcuffed to his bed.

It's a plot device. It has to happen to move the story forward. Not only does it build to the gripping finale, but it gives us that moment we share with Mulder as he realises that his stupidity may cause harm to another - in this worst of possibilities, an innocent child.

While we share in Mulder's distress, we know that what just occurred was a TV moment, something that wouldn't happen in real life. Unless you are inexperienced and the clever buggers have access to peanut butter.

At such moments, however caught up in the drama of what we are watching, we are reminded that it is a story and, in the case of the X Files, it only has fifty minutes in which to tell that story. But isn't it amazing that a moment like Mulder's attempt to save his still eight year old sister - she would be 32 really - can jar us out of our fantasy without actually destroying our belief in the story? Maybe if the baby cried at this point we wouldn't be quite so ready to kick it. (cf. Douglas Adams 'The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul' "I've had the sort of day that would make St. Francis of Assisi kick babies.")

Story is a quagmire, once you become stuck you're not getting free - not without leaving a part of your self behind, though even then it may still devour you!