I always felt like we could mathematically define stories but I wasn’t sure how until I learned about Chaos Theory. There are some stories that seem to be very

I always felt like we could mathematically define stories but I wasn’t sure how until I learned about Chaos Theory. There are some stories that seem to be very simple geometric, discrete shapes, but I think if you look at any story you’ll find a level of noise and chaos in there somewhere. The more a story approaches real life, the more chaotic it gets. I think Cassavetes is a great example of this. Recently I’ve been thinking about narrative in terms of lossy compression, which can then be connected to our everyday perception, which uses compression to understand reality since we can’t ingest all the information we receive. Narratives differ in how much detail they delete, which then makes each narrative a compression algorithm. Movies with more detail like Cassavetes or the Italian Neorealists are usually considered “artsy” while movies with very little detail are considered “trashy.” This realization helped me talk about movies without prejudice.