suspend disbelief

suspend (one's) disbelief

To ignore or look past one's incredulity at the improbability of some piece of fiction, especially a film or video game, in order to better enjoy the experience of the work. I'm more than willing to suspend my disbelief a little for a cheesy action film. I find that I can never really suspend my disbelief when I watch a movie that's crammed full of CGI.
See also: disbelief, suspend
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

suspend disbelief

To accept as plausible something one knows to be untrue, especially the setting and plot of a drama or fiction so as to allow the appreciation of art.
See also: disbelief, suspend
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition.
See also:
  • disbelief
  • suspend
  • suspend (one's) disbelief
  • never in my life
  • why in God's name
  • ghost
  • ghost someone
  • Who would have thought it?
  • believe one's own eyes, one cannot
  • my, my
References in periodicals archive
It would be only sensible to recognise a doubt, but this is the horse who makes us suspend disbelief.
The Hollow Crown (BBC2, 8pm) This is one of the better adaptations of Shakespeare - TV directors tend to have a tough time because they can't suspend disbelief in the same way a theatre can.
The two main protagonists played by Muna Fairooz and Abdulla Saad actually manage to make us suspend disbelief and accept that they really are youngsters growing up in the lanes of Manama or Muharraq.
But the reality is that Lila and the characters she meets, from stereotypical surfer dude Kody to mysterious market plant man David Exley and surreal laundromat owner Armand, are not credible and the reader has to suspend disbelief when the plants' magical properties come to life.
"On the positive side, the ability suspend disbelief is part of the enjoyment of art and many leisure activities...
Marketers are going to have to step back and suspend disbelief."
Pieces of concrete could never be pub regulars, but some jests demand that we suspend disbelief. For instance: two pieces of concrete are sitting in a pub when in walks a piece of Tarmac.
She makes it easy to suspend disbelief because she makes Flora sound ordinary even while the story is extraordinary.
Where the novel does become problematic is in the author's expectation that the reader will suspend disbelief and gloss over holes in the story that just don't make sense.
The show - if you can suspend disbelief for long enough to think that a raft of compelling, if completely unrelated, ideas can somehow hang together as a coherent performance - is part laugh-fest and part post-modern social critique.
That's the most successful way to get an audience to suspend disbelief."
The wall texts and catalogue do not always tell us, unless we are meant to suspend disbelief and give some credit to occult concepts like "vital fluid" and ectoplasm.
What makes the Amish such an odd and appealing object of cultural tourism is that the visitor is asked to suspend disbelief, trusting that the Amish are of today, not faux relics of a manufactured past, like Colonial Williamsburg.
As a mutual rethinking of phenomenology and theology, this turn may require some readers to suspend disbelief in order to appreciate it, but to do so is well worth the effort.
The fact is that a lot of people suspend disbelief that we could lose a right in the United States--we don't lose rights in the United States; Roe isn't going to be overturned; Bush isn't really going to do this.