March 29, 2005 Ted's Rule
As you browse through the types and examples of folding, various types of folding, you'll find a couple things stay constant no matter how clever or baroque the folding. The first is that there _is_ folding of a recognizable kind. That means that there are always at least three levels: the one you live in as a human, a primary one in which the story exists or is rooted, and a third of differing substance depending on the type of folding.
The second thing you'll find is my own discovery I think, so I'll immodestly call it "Ted's law."
The law works this way: the "distance" of abstraction is always equal among layers.
In other words, if you are watching a cartoon, say the popular "South Park," and it has a cartoon within it as part of the story, as nearly all episodes do. There will be a "distance" of sorts between your world and the world of South Park, an extent to which it is simplified and exaggerated, what is often call "abstracted." So the degree to which "South Park" differs from you, that same difference in all important respects will be between the world of "South Park" and the cartoon within it.
This seems to be a matter of hard wiring in our brain, in fact something similar appears in psychological studies in cognition. So that even if the artists involved didn't spend a lot of attention on this detail of distance (and few do), we make it equal in our mind.
"Moulin Rouge" has more than three levels, as an example of deep, deliberate folding. It is a movie about a guided tour about a book about an absinthe vision about a play within (which incidentally acknowledges all these layers (or more if your are observant). Each of those levels is equally more abstract than the previous one, and in this case it _is_ a matter of careful engineering.
This must be so if you think about it, The effect of abstracting these layers is to make us jump out of our layer (the boring old real world) and into the first layer of the movie (a special place made for us). This can best be done when we willingly trick ourselves into thinking that the relationship between us and that layer is the same as the "relationship" of that layer and the one below. Equal distance is mandated, hence Ted's law.
