That's a more extreme version of me. I don't make a conscious decision, but it breaks the frame like Batman in the operating room.
I still feel like you're missing what Mr Brady was expressing. Yes, Batman showing up in the OR on MASH breaks the frame. But Batman showing up in a dark alley in Gotham City doesn't break the frame. It's implied by the frame. You're not watching a dark alley in Gotham unless you're expecting Batman to arrive. If your reaction when Batman arrives is "I was interested in the urban crime drama aspect of this, but now that I know it's a superhero movie, I'm out" then clearly you were watching the wrong movie and you have only yourself to blame.
Leonardo talking to "a guy with weird eyes" in Wolf Of Wall Street would break the frame. Leonardo talking to "a guy with weird eyes" in Inception doesn't break the frame. The premise of the movie is, I gather, the ability to enter a person's dreams to interact with their subconscious. If you're willing to accept the premise that you're watching someone's dreams, the notion that you might find weird or surreal or unsettling elements inside shouldn't break your suspension of disbelief.
Your complaint isn't about breaking the frame, it's that you feel some frames are just inherently not good at expressing mature themes.
Ally MacBeal was another example. They tried to combine serious, or serio-comic with absurd and I couldn't deal with that. I just turned it off.
I didn't watch much of Ally McBeal... I didn't like it very much. My recollection is that the images on the screen were not always literal, but were sometimes representative of Ally's perception. I recall one episode where she was on a date... the man she was with was eating a Caesar salad and got salad dressing on his lips, which she found gross. Later when she looked at him, she (and we the viewer) kept seeing him with his whole face covered with gross creamy Caesar dressing, and she couldn't date him any more.
Later in the series she became haunted by a bizarre dancing baby that only she could see... it would prance around her to the "ooga chakka, ooga-ooga" chant from Blue Suede's "Hooked on a Feeling". I gather it was intended to be a comical representation of her ticking "biological clock".
The antics of her co-workers were sometimes too bizarre to be taken literally as well. I don't think the show was ever really meant to be taken as a literal attempt to portray reality. I think it was intended as a caricature of real life. They made fun of real character traits by exaggerating them. It was satirical commentary on society and human nature, but it was never intended as a documentary. The absurdist elements were part of the commentary.
I didn't care for McBeal myself either, but I think that's where they were coming from. I think if I'd understood what they were doing at the time it was on the air, I'd have probably enjoyed it more.
Absurdity has a place in storytelling. Franz Kafka blended absurdist elements into his stories as a way of making commentary, but probably did so with a little more subtlety and gravitas than Ally McBeal.
HT is not fantasy. I'm not trying to 'make a point' about you, just wondering if we can learn from watching each others' examples and examining how we react to those.
I don't think you're trying to make a point "about me", I think you're trying to make a point that realistic settings make better vehicles for expressing mature themes.
In regard to the Handmaiden's Tale, the movie is set in a dystopian future where fertile women have become just commodities, due to widespread sterility. There are many other totalitarian aspects as well. This is speculative fiction, as we discussed earlier. It's not a realistic setting, it's a fictional setting created to advance certain premises for exploration-- like Gattaca and Jurassic Park and others in that vein.
But as I said earlier, I'm already very open to that sort of material... I feel that these kinds of settings are a great vehicle to explore all kinds of challenging ideas that could never be adequately discussed on a couch in an apartment in Paris.
-k