Our narrative prison
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It's pretty good considering it is his first not-non-fiction project and the narrative is a refreshing departure from typical sci-fi stories since it's written to sound like a true history with too many important figures to remember and historically disputed causes and effects of pivotal events.
The story doesn't not follow the conflict-rising-climax-resolution structure but it often refutes a listener's anticipation of satisfying narrative elements like true history many loose ends remain loose and plenty of important characters "disappear from the records" which leaves one wondering.
It's certainly unlike any fiction I had consumed prior and it's pretty good imo so I'm shining a light on it here.
I always wondered if writers do that stuff. Even with novels, I wonder if they go back and add details in or plan from them way back at the start.
I heard a rumor that what Agatha Christie (and perhaps other mystery writers) would do is to write the entire story with no perpetrator in mind; then at the end, see which character seemed the least likely suspect, and then go back and "frame" that person.
On a slightly different note, when I've played the game "Once Upon a Time", which involves structured competitive / collaborative storytelling in a group, one of the hints I always give is to never specify anything unless you need to. If you don't specify what color the sword was, or what town he grew up in, or where the horse came from, then it's easy for later storytellers to incorporate that into their story. (Since although the goal of each player is to bend the story to their own ending, the purpose of the game as a whole is to tell a good story and have a good time. It's more fun to have a satisfying story someone else ended than a stilted, unsatisfying story that you ended yourself.)
planners vs pantsers, it depends of their writing style.
(A bit harder to build a TV show that way, though not impossible; How I Met Your Mother almost pulled it off, depending on who you ask, for one instance.)
I did manage to get through the first few episodes, and I was very pleased with how effectively he recreated the level of detail he used for his real Revolutions episodes. It's not like a novel, but it captures just how many different players there are in any real-world event -- very different from conventional storytelling.
At that, I think it might be most interesting to people who see it in terms of his other Revolutions work. As a pure work of fiction, it could be quite dull -- too many players with too little characterization, too many events with both too much and too little detail.
Downfalls of civilization don't seem so appealing when you're living through them. I'm that way with media that overly focuses on mental health too, I have too many relatives dealing with that stuff to enjoy it in my media as well.
Meta-irony(?)
Likewise, I thought it would be very cool to create a show written in a hypothetical future, that is set in our time period. The nature of the future society would only be revealed by how they choose to portray our time period, and which stories are told, just like we always put our own ideological framing on shows about the past.
Although if they haven't made the Kim Stanley Robinson books into a tv series, it would seem weird to start with this one..
I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization.
And then you have My Neighbor Totoro, where all the monsters are friends, and the bad guy is just chronic illness, children who have let their imaginations run wild and fear the worst, a sibling getting lost, and at the end basically nothing happens which is the best news considering. There is no metaphor for human struggle, it’s just human struggle.
While some of his movies like Castle In the Sky, Mononoke and Nausicaä follow a modified Hollywood bad guy arc (in Castle half the bad guys practically become chosen family, in Spirited Away they become allies), a lot don’t. Up on Poppy Hill is essentially two teenagers in love discovering to their horror that they are first cousins, despair, and then discover that one of them was adopted.
But in all of them is the self-rescuing princess. The child either has to save themselves or at least demand the help that they are rightfully entitled to.
I got to introduce some kids to Ghibli right as Disney started distributing them. If you’ve seen Lasseter’s introduction to Spirited Away that’s where we were at that time - I’m telling you a secret that should not be a secret. And they in turn “forced” their friends to watch them in the same way my generation forced people to watch The Princess Bride; like it was a moral imperative to postpone other plans and rectify this egregious oversight in their education.
There’s a lot of western film where a minion is sent to infiltrate and ultimately either becomes a double agent or is convinced to do the right thing at a point of no return, by choosing to fail their task, or sacrificing themselves in a brief and tragic redemption arc, either directly or an implication of potentially fatal consequences from their boss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaku:_Japan%27s_Database_Anim...
but yeah, Haruhi Suzumiya stands out but I'd also reference the anime which contain the fantastic element of anime in an otaku frame such as Gundam Build Divers, 2.5-dimensional Seduction or Shangri-La Frontier.
I’m not ready to watch it a second time though. I’m told it’s worse the second time.
I didn't know the story going in.
At least if I was their age, I wouldn't have reacted to the end. I didn't become sensitive to tragedy until I was in my 20s, except that I cried when I read Bridge to Terabithia when I was 10 or 11.
Anyway, it's been a wild ride introducing to me early silent films, surreal films, art films, Italian neorealism, French new wave, etc. There very much are different narratives and structures outside "Hollywood films". Give them a watch.
Ozu is my favorite director, and learning about the 4-act structure helped me understand why - I always hated the third act of most movies, when character motivations go out the window in the interest of a big explosive ending. There is a lot of potential in kishōtenketsu structure to tell stories that are more realistic and introspective and don't require the kind of antagonistic conflict of 3-act structure.
From the article:
"One of my favourite films, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), conforms pretty closely to formulaic structure, even if it is complicated by dream sequences: the inciting incident of the car crash; Betty’s quest to help Rita rediscover her true identity. I believe that one reason we don’t object, don’t groan with boredom, is that the scaffolding is – crucially – hidden."
I liked the movie, and I approve of this kind of creativity, but a disguised 3-act structure is still a 3-act structure.
The corollary is that the framework that we tend to over-focus on is not necessarily what makes or breaks the story.
Lately I am thinking that a good and accessible story is a challenge in map-making and map-breaking. First, you speak the language the audience understands, employ some baseline map of reality that everyone gets. Then, you take them on a journey showing how it is faulty, and maybe end up with a better map.
(A good story does not have to be universally accessible, of course. It can self-select a narrower audience. I suspect a lot of Ursula Le Guin’s work is like that.)
Time is another dimension you can use to get to different tropes. Lots of old movies don't go quite how you would expect them to, given modern filmmaking plot beats.
Examples:
Rang de Basanti (India) features political corruption which causes the death of a man in a group of tight-knit friends. In revenge, they hatch a plot to assassinate the defense minister. And then they do it, and the second act of the movie takes place and they all die. What a ride!
Duck Soup (1933) is about as far away from a modern comedy as you can get, and it is entirely about sticking your thumb in the eye of the wealthy and powerful. Surprisingly watchable, for such an old film.
Loss of variety in terms of what's shown on traditional movie theater screens-- sure.
For everything else, technological advancement has lowered the price to create films of a base level of quality. And that has caused an explosion in artistic variety. I doubt the average American has enough leisure time to keep up with all the indie films produced in a year (nor even a sub-genre).
That's a great point. My recommendation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_(2019_film)
In the typical three-act structure, the protagonist must make an internal change to themselves before they are able to resolve the conflict.
In this alternate plot structure, it is the community itself that must change. The protagonist is "right all along" and serves to the be the catalyst for that change. Almost as if society is the protagonist. It looks something like:
1. Inciting incident where problem appears.
2. Protagonist attempts to tackle problem using their "true self".
3. Family/village/community smacks them down and says they can't do that.
4. Protagonist tries to conform and solve the problem the way they are told to but fails.
5. Climax: Running out of options, the protagonist unleashes their true inner self and solves the problem.
6. The community witnesses this and realizes that they should accept the protagonist for who they are.
This is very common in Disney movies (Mulan and Frozen being stellar examples) and in family movies where the protagonist is a young person that "no one understands".
It is sometimes mixed with the typical three-act structure where the protagonist also makes an internal "change", but the change is most often simply accepting who they already were at the beginning of the film before trying to deny that throughout the second act.
Moana herself is just about the only person who doesn't have a character arc, she just gets better at doing the things she was already set on doing. Both Maui and the entire village of Motunui including her family need to learn that Moana is actually right about everything.
She's effectively an avatar of the ocean's will, and the more she leans into it, the better it goes for her.
1. She starts in the ordinary world but longs to go to sea. [Just like Luke Skywalker who wants to leave Tatooine.]
2. She initially rejects the call of the sea, and tries to fit in. [Just like Luke Skywalker initially rejects Ben.]
3. But the death of her grandmother convinces her that she must leave. [Luke Skywalker decides to follow Ben after his uncle/aunt are killed.]
4. She meets Maui, a lovable rogue, and convinces him to help, despite his reservations. [Luke convinces Han Solo to rescue the Princess]
5. They defeat a few lesser enemies. [Luke and Han defeat waves of stormtroopers.]
6. Finally, she must face the final test, but the lovable rogue decides to leave. [Luke attacks the Death Star, but Han decides to leave.]
7. In the final test, she realizes that she needs to give the infinity stone (I mean, the Heart of Te Fiti) to Te Ka, but not before the lovable rogue returns to help her. [Luke realizes that he needs to use the Force, but not before the lovable rogue returns.]
8. Moana returns as a Wayfinder. [Luke returns as a hero and a leader of the Rebellion.]
9. [Oh, and I forgot about the comic relief of Heh-Heh, who only speaks in chirps and sometimes gets her out of trouble.]
It might sound like I'm making fun of it, but I really like Moana. And I do actually believe she has a character arc. The unifying theme in Moana is "knowing who you are". There is literally a song about it! Moana doesn't know who she is at the beginning. Is she supposed to stay on the island or explore? Maui doesn't know who he is--he thinks he's powerful because of his magical fishhook ("Without my hook, I am nothing!") but Moana convinces her that he is a hero even without his fishhook. Moana helps Te Ka to discover that she is really Te Fiti. And when she returns to her island, she convinces her father that they are all voyagers.
Like I said, I've really watched Moana too many times!
More satisfying (in my opinion) arcs tend to follow a psychoanalytic path: a character with some unaddressed pathological issue ends up in a serious crisis. The crisis forces them to acknowledge the issue and change slightly. The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is that in a tragedy, the change happens too late. (An interesting variant in tragedy is that the change happens in time, but unexpectedly turns out for the worse—think of the end of The Godfather.)
“I was hungry (call to action), so I went to Filipe’s to get a sandwich (transformation, now bearing sandwich) (Return is implied, I’m no longer at Filipe’s)“
Is that really constrained by the hero’s journey? Or is it just that communication discusses dilemmas and resolutions, and these can be fit into our stereotypical hero’s journey?
That’s the version of the Hero’s Journey used in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.
Be as it may, I'm not a fan of this element, because it assumes that every hero worth following is morally lacking to begin with and that that's the only thing worth writing about. First, the inner world of a well-crafted character can be so fundamentally alien to any reader that its discovery can fill any number of pages. Second, and more importantly, focusing on the accidental faults of an individual person while neglecting commentary on the vices of the world at large is asinine. It also gets very tiring as you age, because you keep reading the same story for decades.
The good news is that, in many novels (and certainly in mine, check for example "When Ra Rows through the Gates of Duat"), that inner change is elided. The character's situation changes; they may completely step out of GPS range, but they remain fundamentally the same person. The conflict can be about creatively making do in an imperfect world.
But the rules of counterpoint were codified after his death (IIRC there were two people who worked together to do it), and act like an averaging across all baroque composers. Making the rules is kind of like putting it in a glass box, sealing it off and preserving it - IE removing all life from it. A contemporary example is how punk became standardized, just wear leather jacket with safety pins and mohawk and play barre chords. The spirit of punk moved to post-punk and elsewhere but also this bizzaro copy of all the superficial aspects of punk moved elsewhere.
While I love Joseph Campbell and the heros journey, I do feel like sticking too strongly to it does the same thing for narratives. I especially hate insistence that everything needs a three act structure, not because it's inherently bad, but because stories that don't need it are shoehorned into it and given an unneeded third act with more set pieces than genuine character motivation and development. It's like people see a good movie with a three act structure, and think it's due to that specific structure.
Though the never-ending soap-opera of comics aren't really that great a fit for wrapping everything up in a three-act structure. (I'm still confused by why the Marvel films felt the need to kill off 90% of their villains in the same movie they debuted.) But the hero's journey is an attempt to answer to "how can we make a film as popular as Star Wars?" So we just follow that pattern, I guess.
Not that there weren't other patterns--the Disney animators independently arrived at their own storytelling rules, for example. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston ) has a discussion of what they found worked for them and what didn't. It's worth comparing what they say there with the actual films and reflect on how the rules bore out in practice, of course. But it's another attempt at codifying a formula for appealing stories.
There's lots of attempts to try to describe the universal appealing story pattern. Whether narrative actually works that way has become bifurcated into separate questions: "what kind of stories are effective for humans?" and "what kind of story can we produce reliably as a commercial success?" are subtly different but have become conflated.
We already have spaces for broader or more experimental narratives, they're called novels. Music videos gave us popularized short form experimentation for a while. TV series give us longer form audio/visual storytelling. But there's a hard limit to how much complexity or diversity you can pack into a 90-120 minute block while still keeping it cohesive and broadly engaging. TV gets away with slower pacing and more meandering structures because viewers can dip in and out. People like/recommend a series even if one episode didn't keep their interest. If 30 minutes of a movie don't keep someone's interest they aren't going to recommend it, it sucks to spend 30 minutes in a theater detached from what you are watching. Movies have to convince audiences to stay locked in for the entire runtime, which naturally narrows the kind of stories that can work.
And part of the problem now is that movies were once novel. They evolved from stagey, non-gritty recorded plays basically to gritty, photorealistic stories. That leap kept things feeling fresh for a long time. But now that the tech curve has plateaued, now that dark/gritty has run it's course, it's like people want movies to somehow figure out how to be... not movies.
Punk was new/novel fresh. Then what was new/novel/fresh was identified and expanded upon. Then it become not new/novel/fresh. Other music genres were kept fresh by technical limitations slowly being removed by new tech/monetary limits limited who could do what/knowledge gatekeeping. Now that every tool is available to every person along with deeper knowledge of music theory, which theoretically should make it more interesting, music has gotten more boring. Because we don't want good. We want novel new experiences.
also pop and indie pop, rock and indie rock.
Before we had the same basic recycled narratives, but a film didn’t need to check every single box and some films were more directed at romance or certain audiences and only checked a few of these boxes.
Modern tent poles need to check every single box and it just feels so formulaic and boring.
My parents don't enjoy seeing films in theaters. So when they took us out as children, it was under exceptional circumstances. We went to see E.T. when it premiered. I remarked about Drew Barrymore's young character shouting "penis-breath" and my mother explained that if they didn't throw in a few profanities, the film would have been rated "G" and dismissed as a children's film. A "PG"-rated film was likely to gain more screenings in more theaters and capture a broader audience.
I'd be interested in seeing someone do a breakdown of the frequency of romantic subplots in films; I have some guesses as to the possible pattern but this seems like a moment for hard data.
I generally have had to go back to movies pre-Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark to find film less formulaic.
You might make experiences that are about spending some time in a loved imaginary world with loved characters (The Star Wars Holiday Special or Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser [1]) but inevitably people who aren't superfans are going to feel it doesn't appeal to them. You can make a profitable game (Azur Lane) which is all about fanservice, collecting, and little narratives -- and people are going to say it is degenerate and compare it unfavorably to normal single player games like, say, Hi-Fi Rush or even mobile games which have a clear story like Love Nikki. All the complaints that people have around big media franchises will still stand.
[1] https://screenrant.com/star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-hotel-...
A long analysis of Stargate SG-1 as starting point: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/StargateSG1
1: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHerosJourney 2: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kishotenketsu
It's not easy to get away from the three parts of introduction, development and conclusion, in any work that exhibits sequence. Not even in something abstract like music. (I should say, it's certainly easy to forcibly get away from it, if you don't care about the result being boring.)
There is also comedy. If you manage to make people laugh throughout the work, the plot doesn't have to necessarily follow the formula.
The second half of the film reveals the hero's journey to be a self-serving narrative constructed by the protagonist to retell her own tragic and shameful history, casting herself as a hero instead of a villain. By extension, the film is a critique of Hollywood, American myth-making, and the exact trope it supposedly conforms to.
After all, if there is some clump of tension/action in the middle of the story, and less of that at the story's ends (which is almost always true), then it quite naturally slices into three parts; does it mean it is a three-act narrative? Not necessarily.
> Le Guin wrote, is ‘a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were’.
I read the Iliad my first year of college and it was unlike anything I had read before. There aren't really good guys and bad guys in the traditional sense and the story is largely things happening to people and how they react to events. There's no protagonist. There's a bunch of characters and their feelings and experiences. A lot of most beautiful parts are little asides like Glaucon and Diomedes exchanging armor, Hector leaving his wife and child, and Helen talking to the old men of Troy as they watch a battle.
> Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances are used to manipulate mass society into passivity.
> Adorno and Horkheimer theorized that the phenomenon of mass culture has a political implication, namely that all the many forms of popular culture are parts of a single culture industry whose purpose is to ensure the continued obedience of the masses to market interests.
What he meant by it is that some unconscious features are collective, meaning they are genetically programmed in all people. Jung believed this also includes certain thought patterns, which can be inferred from stories. For example, he would have argued that a paragon of wisdom is typically an older man with a white beard (Gandalf and Dumbledore come to mind) because we have a genetically programmed inclination to see older men with white beards as paragons of wisdom.
Jung liked to use these kinds of methods to analyze the human psyche and its structures. Interesting guy. If anyone is interested, I recommend his collection of essays, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, as a first read.
https://www.jalopnik.com/every-car-looks-like-this-thanks-to...
Everyone hates the cybertruck because its different than the generic white ecobox.
https://www.phonearena.com/news/Why-do-all-smartphones-look-...
What happened to flip phones and physical keyboards?
Can you go into a mall anywhere in the world and go buy a starbucks before you go to H&M? Doesnt even matter if you go to H&M or zara because its all the same clothing.
Getting back to film and tv context. The skill of the author is what lets the change or difference come through. Goerge RR Martin had a different take and did well. How did he do it? Game of thrones is empathy. Empathy lets you escape the narrative prison. Show the trauma of the villian to make them a victim.
The Fairphone still looks like a generic smartphone but they sell it via empathy of ethical, sustainable, and repairable parts.
'The Road' changed things up. Technically good story telling, good movie craft. I would never watch it or another movie like it again. I felt like crap for a week after. Much success in being different and eliciting feelings, horrible at being entertainment (to me at least).
I love it in theory(cant afford it), but I also love the delorean. We need way more stainless steel options.
>. Kei trucks don't look like American trucks and they're beloved, not hated
I hate them. They shouldnt even be legal to drive but by a 15 year import rule they can? They are total death traps but only because they might be marginally more safe than a motorcycle they are allowed?
I was surprised at how this part is presented in the conclusion. This is a lot more obvious to my eyes, I wonder if people really see it as subtle.
To back my point: art was initially commanded by rich and powerful people/entities. Even if you had original popular stories, are those being formated into art required a skilled person being kept afloat by a patron. Nowadays I'd argue it's not that different, a movie studio backing a multi-million project has specific constraints.
Subversive art only existed for the pleasure of the higher class (thinking Voltaire for instance) or in closed socieities, with limited diffusion and was extremely risky for the author. That's not what would stay in history as classics or see wider adoption.
In comparison a government will helpfully propagate tales that promote social harmony and align the population with the nation's values. Classic hero tales and storytelling structure converging on tropes and the same messages hammered again and again is exactly how it is supposed to work.
This is also why foreign tales have different structures and landing points: they don't promote the same values nor need to anchor the same points. But they also have their tropes and carcan.
I don't deny creativity and authorship, but if we're looking at wide public entertainment that typically require wide distribution, these aspects cannot be overstated.
PS: outside of the narrative structure, the very fact that a story is centered around a set of protagonists, making decisions and being responsible for what happens in the plot is itself deeply cultural and polarized.
For instance showing a revolution as something triggered and lead by heroes, instead of a phenomenon that raises from a social situation, and would happen in some way regardless of who lead it, is a very specific and coded social choice.
This is what makes Pulp Fiction[1] such a masterpiece. Three interwoven story lines chopped up and served out of order make for a wild ride.
Restating TFA's question, then: why are we not seeing more art of Pulp Fiction caliber? Instead, the bulk of what is on offer seems a regression to the franchise mean.
But is it worse than that? Has technology begotten an epidemic of ADD, where few have the attention span to re-compile Pulp Fiction in their heads, much less, sit through a 90min flick?
It makes me wonder to what extent this less usual narrative arch was the reason for their success & continuing appeal.
1. https://variety.com/2008/tv/news/the-wire-david-21043/
"According to Simon, the best way to understand “The Wire” is to think Greek — not the nefarious Greek characters who dominate the illicit trade in Baltimore’s ports, but the storytelling tradition of the ancient Greek tragedies, where the heroes and anti-heroes always face a dramatic downfall, usually as a result of their own hubris."
One can watch other films. For example: https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/chantal-akerman-10-essential-fi...
I confess, I was not patient with the film. I scrubbed a bit to move the film along at a faster pace — almost skipped right over the wild ride that is the end of the film.
- Designing vehicles because every one of them is a thing that carries people or things from A to B, with some propulsion mechanism and a way to steer it.
- Designing software because it's all about providing an interface to manipulate objects in a database, or values in memory.
- Designing drugs because it's all some kind of chemical you take that suppresses biological processes.
- ...
You can always come up with an abstract definition that puts a set of things into the same bucket. Isn't this just semantics? Movies are not remotely all the same story. If you say they are all about: humans reacting to conflicts which leads to some changes in the state of things. I mean, that's what a story is, that's what a 3-act structure is.
Sure there are engaging stories with different structures, but isn't it all just omitting one of the acts, or chaining multiple stories in an overlapping manner, starting or ending at a different point, or stretching one of the acts for longer?
And more often than not you need to bend-over-backwards to make such stories as engaging as the standard structure, it's really hard, because to an extent you are breaking the very core of what makes a story engaging, and the novelty can only carry you so far.
It can be distracting actually, shaking up the structure can detract from the craft of filling it with good content, it's a bit gimmicky. There's a certain purity and merit to making a prototypical story truly excellent and innovative, obfuscating and shuffling that basic structure is a cheap path to innovation.
Regardless, you can always shoehorn any story into one or more introduction-conflict-resolution blocks and complain about it.
Movies are nowdays very predictable. You know how it is likely to end from the start. You can even guess when exactly big fights happen.
I've always been a huge fan of the bad guy winning decisively. It is relatively rare.
We have subplots from the action hero films where some pretty bad things happen, but I feel like movies like Se7en and Arlington Road take it to a completely different level.
Or you can watch the movie the way you are told and in this case you are right.
Meaningless, but so are those "7 types of story archs" taxonomies.
I don't like gore in cinema and it's really annoying to me that the only works that are narratively interesting are in the horror genre.
> Ironically, the monomyth is now being stretched out of shape by commercial forces, too. Franchises, sequels and box-set formats are extending stories in multiple directions to eke out ever more revenue, bringing to mind Musk’s intergalactic ambitions, which imply there’s a franchise option for human life: late capitalism, it would seem, respects neither narrative nor planetary boundaries. ‘It’s outrageous, really,’ Yorke says of endless sequels. ‘If you think of it in basic terms, a story is a question and answer, dramatised. And when the question is answered, there is nowhere else to go.’ Not surprisingly, Hollywood is working hard to combine narrative boundlessness with satisfying, self-contained stories: the Marvel ‘Multiverse’ is a kind of vast conglomerate of autonomous (super)heroes’ journeys.
The piece seems a bit critical of the monomyth, but it does flag the current, massive alternative as quite stupid as well. Instead of a hero’s journey for a hero, we have a franchise journey, degrading the typical arc to put it in service of the whole.
Consider it in another frame:
Beginning state -> Catalyst -> Mutation -> New state -> Reaction -> Outcome
or:
Pre-process -> Event -> Logic -> Result -> Post-process -> Deliverable
> Being told a story is to be infantilised, somewhat: to suspend one’s critical faculties.
One key argument in the book is that TV shows offer significantly less information density nor coherence as that of written mediums. They are optimized to reduce cognitive load. Thus our ability to think and process information diminishes greatly when there's nothing to think about. This is essentially what storytelling is - piecing together loosely related information to elicit an emotional response. The more harmful aspect is that they give us an illusion of learning, which the author also articulated with this quote:
> ‘The story wouldn’t be any good if you came back to your normal life completely unchanged, and having learned nothing, or having had no new observation,’ Vogler told me. ‘I think that we are always searching for upgrades, improvements in our behaviour, in our performance, in our relationships with other people.’ Films, he says, offer the opportunity for ‘slight improvement’.
TV shows wrap thin veils of lessons around stories. We feel like doing something fun and learning while learning something. Why not do more? So we consume more of it and spirals down into a self-reinforcing loop. But it is often not the case in real world. Learning is challenging. It's meant to confuse you and question your preexisting beliefs. We are numbing ourselves by associating what we watched in flashy media as concrete and substantial knowledge. The real takeaway is the experience and the emotional response from those dopamine-inducing flash cuts. When we associate learning and by extension, thinking, with emotions, that's when our critical thinking degrades and we become "infantalised."
Why? Because the personages are different (really diverse) pursue their own goals and try to do good (mostly) in their own weird and incompatible ways.
To see that and enjoy it realy show what we lost recently, we are demoralized by our own culture.
This is why the right is surging around much of the world.
A critique of lazy story telling somehow ends up declaring lazy story telling a genocidal act that is “literally killing us.”
Or maybe it’s just a bunch of movies pandering to an audience that wants to see more of the same and if you want to see something more innovative seek it out or make it yourself.
Patriarchy is more complex. I dislike the feminist tendency to use it as shorthand for "Everything wrong with the world" - as if the world was naturally a utopia until patriarchs took over.
But there are certainly elements that are immensely destructive.
The point is that narratives define morality and self. If every movie you see features the Good Guy heroically struggling to kill the Bad Guy, that becomes the unconscious default narrative that defines your sense of self and your moral choices.
Which is why Main Character Energy is a real thing - and often not in a good way.
If you are exposed to a much wider range of plots, with more ambiguity, more complex outcomes, much richer and more challenging social relationships, and so on, you're less likely to believe that you can fix any problem with muscles, a gun, and some wisecracks.
I'll admit I don't think Le Guin manages to do this. I think she's very on-the-nose as a moralist - she's almost the anti-Heinlein.
And being a moralist is - ironically - very much a hero's journey trope itself, with the violence sublimated into words instead of weapons.
> Franchises, sequels and box-set formats are extending stories in multiple directions to eke out ever more revenue, bringing to mind Musk’s intergalactic ambitions, which imply there’s a franchise option for human life: late capitalism, it would seem, respects neither narrative nor planetary boundaries. ‘It’s outrageous, really,’ Yorke says of endless sequels. ‘If you think of it in basic terms, a story is a question and answer, dramatised. And when the question is answered, there is nowhere else to go.’
Arthurian legend, Robin Hood, the Greek pantheon, Sun Wukong, Coyote? Trash. No, shared worlds are a modern invention by commercial entities looking to make a quick buck. A story is a question and an answer after all.
> Annabel ends the day much as she started it, the essay incomplete (although Brown does not reject story structure altogether: Annabel relaxing her grip on her timetable is an enlightenment of sorts).
> [...]
> Even art-house films that self-consciously depart from the three-act structure nonetheless define themselves against it.
So we're using 'three act structure' to mean 'something changes between the beginning and end'. By that definition, yes, movies do tend to be pretty samey in structure.
> Being told a story is to be infantilised, somewhat: to suspend one’s critical faculties. In contrast to polemic, stories are covertly persuasive. Even if their message is good for us, the sugaring of the pill represents a lowering of intellectual expectations.
I don't have a snarky comment for that bit, it's funny enough on its own.
It's hard to make a substantive and non-nitpicky comment on the article because there is no cohesive point being made here. It's a random collection of vague ideas that don't mean anything at all when put together, using criticism of modern film as a loose framework - yet written by someone who clearly is not interested in exploring the wide world of film and its fringes where the interesting stuff accumulates.
Here is an overview:
Opening Image – A visual that represents the struggle & tone of the story. A snapshot of the main character’s problem, before the adventure begins.
Set-up – Expand on the “before” snapshot. Present the main character’s world as it is, and what is missing in their life.
Theme Stated (happens during the Set-up) – What your story is about; the message, the truth. Usually, it is spoken to the main character or in their presence, but they don’t understand the truth…not until they have some personal experience and context to support it.
Catalyst – The moment where life as it is changes. It is the telegram, the act of catching your loved-one cheating, allowing a monster onboard the ship, meeting the true love of your life, etc. The “before” world is no more, change is underway.
Debate – But change is scary and for a moment, or a brief number of moments, the main character doubts the journey they must take. Can I face this challenge? Do I have what it takes? Should I go at all? It is the last chance for the hero to chicken out.
Break Into Two (Choosing Act Two) – The main character makes a choice and the journey begins. We leave the “Thesis” world and enter the upside-down, opposite world of Act Two.
B Story – This is when there’s a discussion about the Theme – the nugget of truth. Usually, this discussion is between the main character and the love interest. So, the B Story is usually called the “love story”.
The Promise of the Premise – This is the fun part of the story. This is when Craig Thompson’s relationship with Raina blooms, when Indiana Jones tries to beat the Nazis to the Lost Ark, when the detective finds the most clues and dodges the most bullets. This is when the main character explores the new world and the audience is entertained by the premise they have been promised.
Midpoint – Dependent upon the story, this moment is when everything is “great” or everything is “awful”. The main character either gets everything they think they want (“great”) or doesn’t get what they think they want at all (“awful”). But not everything we think we want is what we actually need in the end.
Bad Guys Close In – Doubt, jealousy, fear, foes both physical and emotional regroup to defeat the main character’s goal, and the main character’s “great”/“awful” situation disintegrates.
All is Lost – The opposite moment from the Midpoint: “awful”/“great”. The moment that the main character realizes they’ve lost everything they gained, or everything they now have has no meaning. The initial goal now looks even more impossible than before. And here, something or someone dies. It can be physical or emotional, but the death of something old makes way for something new to be born.
Dark Night of the Soul – The main character hits bottom, and wallows in hopelessness. The Why hast thou forsaken me, Lord? moment. Mourning the loss of what has “died” – the dream, the goal, the mentor characters, the love of your life, etc. But, you must fall completely before you can pick yourself back up and try again.
Break Into Three (Choosing Act Three) – Thanks to a fresh idea, new inspiration, or last-minute Thematic advice from the B Story (usually the love interest), the main character chooses to try again.
Finale – This time around, the main character incorporates the Theme – the nugget of truth that now makes sense to them – into their fight for the goal because they have experience from the A Story and context from the B Story. Act Three is about Synthesis!
Final Image – opposite of Opening Image, proving, visually, that a change has occurred within the character.
THE END!
We meet the protagonist in their ordinary world, then an inciting incident changes everything, they are pulled into a new quest, meet someone who shows them a different way of being, they struggle with a powerful antagonist, and in the end the protagonist either triumphs or fails tragically.
HN to the rescue! What are some movies that do NOT follow this plot?
Does an anthology approach like Playtime (1967, dir. Jacques Tati) count? It's got kind of an arc to it, but doesn't really have anything like a recognizable struggle with an antagonist. Unless you view brutalism as the antagonist, I guess.
8½ (1963, dir. Federico Fellini) could, likewise, be shoehorned into a discussion of the arc of the film--which it, itself deconstructs in the third scene or so. It's primarily a film about making the film. There's _kind of_ a journey the protagonist goes on, but does it really count as being this same plot?
Horror movies in general seem to have more freedom to play with plot structure than other genres. Every film, regardless of plot, needs to have something that makes the audience want to watch to the end of the film. With horror, it's often putting the question in the audience's mind "what is happening?" That can be compelling enough to propel the viewer to the end so the film often doesn't need to have a protagonist go through some emotional journey.
It's been a while since I've seen them, but I don't think The Ring or The Grudge follow this plot form. It's probably telling that both of those are adaptations of non-Western films. I don't think Alien follows this structure either: Ridley is basically right all along and just has to survive.
I think Goon is an underrated comedy, and it doesn't really fit the three-act structure well. It certainly has conflict and climax, but Doug doesn't really go through any internal crisis. Instead, he's more often the catalyst for internal change in other characters.
"Skinamarink" and "I Saw the TV Glow"
"I Saw the TV Glow" is one of my favorite movies of the past few years. After way too many souless IP franchise cashgrabs, it reminded me that some people are still making film as art to connect with people.
Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8518302/
Good One - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30319516/
Hard to Be a God - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2328813/
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100519/
The Wanting Mare - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2267554/
In a Savage Land - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151047/
Welcome the Stranger - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5716280/
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340800/
The Hourglass Sanatorium - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070628/
The adventure of the individual vehicle is that it prepares for the races, it practices, it tunes, then it competes, and then it either wins or loses. And then, budget permitting, it prepares for the next race.
https://www.youtube.com/@SummoningSalt/videos
These are presented in an entertaining way that's full of twists and drama, but because they're non-fiction they can't be forced into any pre-existing structure.
The trick in this topic is how dissimilar to some vague canon should a story be to qualify for an answer to your question.
Would you say Alien is a good example?
Enter the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Primer
Holy Motors
Le Voyage dans la Lune
Irréversible
The main characters start in a familiar place, are thrust into a new world, and learn about themselves as they are tested by circumstance and each other. The stakes rise to a crescendo where everything is on the line, then resolve to a "new normal" informed by their different personalities.
"A mechanical engineer created a new kind of baseball bat and made the baseball bat companies more money."
See? No one gives a shit.
"A mechanical engineer created a new kind of baseball bat, it changed baseball forever into a minmax-optimize-at-all-costs bore show that killed a cultural icon of a sport and while the engineer got rich in the process, he couldn't have predicted the cultural effect his invention would have or how we would lose himself in the process."
Ok, now we're onto something.
Stories are anchored to conceptspace attractors and condescending them as simply "Western constructs" belies how humans actually come to care about things.