9 ms·

Our narrative prison

184 points by anarbadalov 1y ago

RankingMember 1y ago
I think it comes down to the current financial realities of film-making, as the article touches on. There are certainly outliers that are revered by those who seek alternatives (David Lynch's work for example), but these are a small minority. I think general financial stability in some future (hopefully soon!) iteration of society would allow more experimentation- artists who are not starving artists are much more willing to take risks and stay true to their vision, profit/marketability be damned.
PaulHoule 1y ago
It is easy to lay out criticism, hard to tell what a real answer could be. A writer friend of mine said it in a Hegelian way, that plots are thesis - antithesis - synthesis. You have some conflict and it is resolved. 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-what-everyone-gets-wrong/ https://screenrant.com/star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-hotel-...
daft_pink 1y ago
It’s not only that the films have the same basic narrative structure, but the way films these days need to check a series of boxes. You can’t have just an action movie anymore, it also must contain a romantic subplot, charismatic antagonist, light humor, diverse cast, visual effects, international marketability (topic not narrow to one countries audience) etc. 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.
- parpfish 1y ago
  I hate the fact that every film feels a need for a romantic subplot.
  - albumen 1y ago
    Check out John wick, Mad max fury road or The Banshees of Inisherin.
  - ijk 1y ago
    Is that still as much of a thing? Maybe I'm over-indexed on comparisons with 1930-1960, but it seems to me that romantic subplots have been in decline--there are quite a lot of recent films that entirely lack such a thing--especially compared to back in the day. The academy's award structure of lead actor/lead actress seems like it was a better fit for days where you had to shoehorn that into everything. To the point that they stuck romance subplots into Marx Brothers movies regardless of if it made any sense. (Which is conclusive proof why Duck Soup is their best film, since the Groucho/Margaret Dumont romance subplot is better integrated into the film.) 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.
  - hiatus 1y ago
    You might enjoy The Pervert's Guide to Cinema.
  - BeFlatXIII 1y ago
    Ruined The Hobbit
    - jes5199 1y ago
      I think it’s hard to say that any one thing ruined the Hobbit. like, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
      - BeFlatXIII 1y ago
_m_p 1y ago
Every film cited in this article is meant to cater to the existing tastes of the audience and people like having their existing tastes reaffirmed. One can watch other films. For example: https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/chantal-akerman-10-essential-films https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/chantal-akerman-10-essential-fi...
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Yep, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is one of the "1001 Movies". 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.
bee_rider 1y ago
I thought this was a pretty interesting parallel, and reflection on the idea. > 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.
mrob 1y ago
One way to get more structural variety is by watching foreign movies. For example, I think Tokyo Story (1953) is better modeled as a four-act kishōtenketsu[0] structure than a three-act hero's journey. It's widely considered one of the best movies of all time, and one that I rate very highly, but it's very different from Western movies. That difference was essential to my appreciation of it, because it's also slow paced and lacking in action; the novelty was enough to hold my attention until I could engage with the story. I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu
- klik99 1y ago
  I just learned about kishōtenketsu thanks to this great video on How To with John Wilson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-SwyF-Vvbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-SwyF-Vvbs). I'm surprised that it's not as well known in the west, considering how many great directors use it. 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.
- sjm 1y ago
  Classic Thing, Japan. There are plenty of western movies that don't follow the three-act structure (off the top of my head, Apocalypse Now, Mulholland Drive (and probably most Lynch), Boyhood (and other Linklaters), basically any Robert Altman) and plenty of foreign films that do.
  - mrob 1y ago
    >Mulholland Drive 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_gipsy 1y ago
You can deconstruct those supposedly complete sets of plot types further, into just two atoms: rise and fall. The protagonist rises, then falls, but rises again (not necessarily to the same levels, but you get the idea). Or just falls and falls, but ultimately rises. Meaningless, but so are those "7 types of story archs" taxonomies.
- SeenNotHeard 1y ago
  Sure. Another comes from Jim Thompson, who said there was only one kind of story: "Things are not as they seem."
mg 1y ago
The article complains that most movies follow the same plot: 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?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  Not a movie but most motorsports do not follow the monomyth. The cars or trucks or tractors compete, but none of them are designated protagonist. The progression is usually from slower and cheaper vehicles to more expensive and faster ones, to build excitement for the audience. 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.
  - mrob 1y ago
    This can be generalized to stories about any kind of real-life racing. For example, there's a whole genre of videos about the history of speedrunning video games (competing to complete the game in the fastest time), popularized by the works of Youtuber SummoningSalt: https://www.youtube.com/@SummoningSalt/videos 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.
    - noworriesnate 1y ago
      This reminds me of Dwarf Fortress, a game famous for its auto-generated stories. Boatmurdered is one such story—it’s brutal, fascinating, it’s in this uncanny valley halfway between random and an actual story. And it definitely isn’t formulaic (except for the fact that everyone always dies in the end; the game’s motto is Losing is Fun).
- hinkley 1y ago
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
The Matrix is like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. Notice the strangeness of the dream.
incomingpain 1y ago
Humans dont like change. https://www.jalopnik.com/every-car-looks-like-this-thanks-to-a-gigantic-regulato-1849837803/ 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-the-same_id124123 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.
- egypturnash 1y ago
  The politics and actions of Tesla's CEO/mascot have absolutely nothing to do with hating the Cybertruck. Nor does the fact that if you see it in person you quickly realize that it is designed so that it blinds other people on the road by reflecting an intense strip of sunlight off of the top of its hood, and that it is also designed so that if it hits a pedestrian, bicycle, or smaller car, it will throw them under its wheels rather than over the hood - that big prow is fine in something like the cartoon military vehicle from Aliens that inspired it, but it's pretty anti-human in the context of driving around a road with other people on it. It's solely because it looks different.
- immibis 1y ago
  Maybe the cybertruck is just bad though. Kei trucks don't look like American trucks and they're beloved, not hated, by the people you're saying hate the cybertruck because they just fear change.
  - incomingpain 1y ago
    >Maybe the cybertruck is just bad though. 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?
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marviel 1y ago
"Wired For Story" is a great book that discusses an alternative set of "Story Atoms" which can be combined to create unique, compelling stories.
blueflow 1y ago
These recurring patterns are called "tropes", there is a wiki of them: https://tvtropes.org/ https://tvtropes.org/ A long analysis of Stargate SG-1 as starting point: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/StargateSG1 https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/StargateSG1
- mhink 1y ago
  While I do have a lot of love for TVTropes, I think what they're talking about here is a little broader than most of the tropes we see there (although they do have an excellent article on the Hero's Journey itself [1]). IMO, tropes in the sense that we see them listed there are building blocks for a narrative structure, of which the Hero's Journey is one example. As mentioned upthread, kishōtenketsu is an alternative (and for that matter, TVTropes has an article on it as well, see [2]). 1: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHerosJourney https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHerosJourney 2: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kishotenketsu https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kishotenketsu
klik99 1y ago
One thing I've noticed in music composition (where I have more training/experience, but I suspect the same is true for narratives) is the rules get codified / standardized a generation after a style of music is popular. Bach, for example, "breaks the rules" of counterpoint at least once in every piece in Well-Tempered Clavier, which was supposed to be an educational piece so if he actually felt like there were rules to follow he'd be more likely to be "by the book" for educational purposes. 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.
- ijk 1y ago
  Hollywood has the particular problem that the executives would really like a formula to follow to make people like the films, the screenwriters would really like a formula to follow to write something that they can sell, and so on. There's a lot of commercial pressure for a factory to mass-produce plot and stamp it out into films. People liked a film? Make the exact same thing and see if they'll buy it again. Franchises help, because at least there's some incentive to shuffle around some different characters and plot elements. 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.
galacticaactual 1y ago
Articles like these, deliberately it seems, fail to recognize that in the infinite conceptspace that is reality, there are attractor zones where threads converge - archetypal stories that have been told and retold over time for a reason. Try telling a story that doesn't strike an archetypal chord and see what happens - it lands in the void. "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.
- deleted 1y ago
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pinkmuffinere 1y ago
The Hero’s Journey is useful as a writing tool, but imo it is also a lens through which we analyze stories (once we learn about it). My feeling is that _any_ story can be cajoled into matching the hero’s journey with enough imagination. For this reason, I’m not as concerned about the limited palate — i think it says more about our perspective than about the story itself. It’s like complaining that we’re missing out on math because we learn numbers in base 10. Consider this example: “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?
- jimbokun 1y ago
  > “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)“ That’s the version of the Hero’s Journey used in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.
- lee-rhapsody 1y ago
  This is one of the more insightful comments in the thread.
- golol 1y ago
  Reminds me of another frequently poasted/discussed story arc classification attempt where the author basically draws some graphs that look like "down-up", "up-down", "down-up-down", "up-down-up" and so on. Well after a down you must have an up and after an up a down, if you aren't planning to quantify things...
- dsign 1y ago
  Though I agree with you to an extent, the hero's journey includes an element of inner change in values or moral disposition. That, and not the subject's situation (or GPS coordinates), is what makes it the hero's journey. 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.
jari_mustonen 1y ago
The article mentions Jung's "collective unconscious," which is often misunderstood. 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.
munificent 1y ago
There is another film structure that is super common but is often overlooked. It is perhaps not coincidental that the protagonist is more often a woman. I found a blog post describing it once, but can't find it now. 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.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  I think that is exactly the plot in Ne Zha 2, a chinese animation that is breaking records. The trailer is awesome.
- Slava_Propanei 1y ago
  [dead]
- bossyTeacher 1y ago
  princess mononoke fits the bill
- viridian 1y ago
  Moana might actually be a better example than Mulan or Frozen, because there's not even any inner turmoil outside of the very beginning. 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.
kazinator 1y ago
We have that choice now. If movies based on human-versus-{human,nature,aliens,supernatural,...} conflict is not your thing, you can go to YouTube (or similar) and watch, say, people collaborate in making something. It's still a kind of conflict with resolution: people or a person versus the tooling and materials, using their knowledge and skills to show solutions, and then it's all resolved when the thing is made. At every turn, you don't quite know what they are going to do next, or sometimes even what they are working on and how it will fit into the big picture. (E.g. it something that will be a part of the finished work, or is it a tooling jig?) 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.
plank 1y ago
A variation of the theory that there are only 7 different stories told in (fiction) books.
adzm 1y ago
Save the Cat is also one of those things like kerning where once you know about it you start seeing it everywhere. I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned here yet. Many, many movies follow it almost exactly. 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!
bob1029 1y ago
> The story is resolved either in the protagonist’s favour or against them: they triumph or else fail tragically. 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.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  Because if you are looking for those kinds of stories it’s easier to find them in the news.
- ghssds 1y ago
  As the spectator, you get to determine who is the bad guy. A classic example in The Lion King. Mufasa the bloodthirsty king succeed, despite his assassination, in maintaining the order he lived, and killed, for. Meanwhile, his mistreated brother, failed to create a new better order by liberating the oppressed hyennas. Simba had a fair chance at changing things for good after he met Timon and Pumbaa who teach him the true way of life but by the end he has forsaken everything he learned and we see a completely brainwashed Simba accomplish Mufasa's biding. Or you can watch the movie the way you are told and in this case you are right.
oersted 1y ago
I don't know... I cannot disagree, but isn't this like moaning about how there is no innovation in: - 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.
- deleted 1y ago
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- Vapormac 1y ago
  You're totally right. I think the article is just inherently too reductionist, which is like of a foundation of analysis in general, is to reduce and then reason about some process/object. However, I think a lot of analysis is (for lack of a better term) critically reductionist, and they see that as a virtue of their analysis, they toss out nuance and details in favor of studying the "structure" of some process without considering that particular nuance or detail changes the structures meaning and possibly the structure itself.
- 1y ago
acc_297 1y ago
Related comment - Mike Duncan who made a name for himself doing long form multi episode history podcasts recently produced a fiction project of the false history of a class revolution on mars ~200 years in the future that is told through the lens of long form multi episode history podcast from a narrator in the distant future. 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.
- nonameiguess 1y ago
  It'd be interesting to see if something like that could be adapted to the screen formats the author is complaining about here. House of the Dragon faced a similar problem. The source material is a lot like what you describe, a fictional history written as if it was real historical research, with multiple conflicting sources, disputed accounts, and no way to resolve the truth of what really happened. The HBO television adaptation kind of just threw that out the window and presented what is supposed to be seen as the "real" history through a normal God's eye third-person narrator. It also showed what happens in situations that the fictional history had no account of, resolving mysteries of what happened to people who disappeared without anyone involved witnessing how and writing it down.
  - empath75 1y ago
    I think there is a pretty significant chance that someone _does_ make a TV series out of it, and it's almost ideally suited for it because it's all background material, so there's a lot of space for a showrunner to actually put their mark on it, and you could probably mine seasons of drama out of it. Although if they haven't made the Kim Stanley Robinson books into a tv series, it would seem weird to start with this one..
jimbokun 1y ago
> Like Le Guin, he believes that we must ‘fundamentally think about how we rebuild structures’, because those we are living under ‘are literally killing us … whether that be patriarchy or racism or the climate catastrophe.’ 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.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  Racism and climate denial are both narratives, and people die because of them every day. (If you're not aware of how many people are already dying because of climate change, it's not because the facts aren't available to the curious and interested.) 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.
  - jimbokun 1y ago
    I think the argument that watching movies with a different narrative structure will solve major geopolitical issues requires more evidence.
alfor 1y ago
What I find tiring is propaganda and "the message" (if you watch the critical drinker) The structure of the myth is not a problem if you respect the personages playing it. I just watched Firefly, a sci-fi serie done on a small budget decades ago, it's so much better than the slop we have these days with 100X the budget. 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.
deleted 1y ago
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appleorchard46 1y ago
Sigh. It's like one of those clickbait YouTube videos (10 Reasons Why Modern Movies SUCK!) but with big words and literary citations to make it seem more respectable. The author completely disregards historical and traditional storytelling to squeeze every possible type of story into a vague narrative of commercialism. > 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.
sapphicsnail 1y ago
This article got me thinking about the Iliad > 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.
- kragen 1y ago
  Yeah, I was thinking about that too. A kind of amusing thing about this juxtaposition is that basically no modern fiction I know of has anywhere near as much bashing, thrusting, raping, and killing as the Iliad. A lot of the modern translators like Pope shrink from translating the crueler parts, resorting to vague euphemisms.
sgentle 1y ago
Very strange choice to use Mulholland Drive as an example of conforming to the hero's journey "complicated by dream sequences" (?!) 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.
- Joker_vD 1y ago
  "Three-act storytelling, three-act storytelling everywhere — especially if you squint hard enough to ignore parts that don't fit into the three-act storytelling framework". 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.
makeitdouble 1y ago
> While it captures something profound about human needs and wants, it can be subtly conservative and its dominance is symptomatic of a worrying turn against analysis and critique. 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.
smitty1e 1y ago
> almost every film and TV series, as well as a good many plays and novels, have exactly the same plot? 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? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_Fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_Fiction
- cubefox 1y ago
  There are probably many such movies, but most people don't know about them, because they usually never become popular. Pulp Fiction is an exception insofar it is (was) very popular.
  - smitty1e 1y ago
    But even the age of social media hasn't supported any breakthroughs.
dvaun 1y ago
Maybe it's a universal abstraction describing any type of change? Consider it in another frame: Beginning state -> Catalyst -> Mutation -> New state -> Reaction -> Outcome or: Pre-process -> Event -> Logic -> Result -> Post-process -> Deliverable
blackbear_ 1y ago
This idea was already picked up and elaborated in the 50s and 60s by the Frankfurt school: > 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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
scajanus 1y ago
This is partially why I like The Wire, which mirrors a Greek tragedy (1). The dysfunctional organizations play the role of the gods, against whose whims the mere mortals battle against and break. Another show that also competes for a spot as the best series of all time, Breaking Bad, is also a tragedy rather than hero's journey. 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/ 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."
wuj 1y ago
The part on stories reminded me of Neil Postman's arguments in Amusing Ourselves to Death. > 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."
- cubefox 1y ago
  Good point. This is why truly great stories do have some content beyond entertainment, maybe they make indirectly some plausible "argument", or model a thought experiment.
fellowniusmonk 1y ago
I think this is big part of the appeal of "A good man is hard to find" and other Flannery O'Connor works. 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.
musicale 1y ago
Didn't someone (Aristotle, mentioned in TFA, or perhaps Aeschylus, Sophocles, ???) enumerate several dozen (or more?) classical dramatic plot structures?

184 points by anarbadalov 1y ago

I think it comes down to the current financial realities of film-making, as the article touches on. There are certainly outliers that are revered by those who seek alternatives (David Lynch's work for example), but these are a small minority. I think general financial stability in some future (hopefully soon!) iteration of society would allow more experimentation- artists who are not starving artists are much more willing to take risks and stay true to their vision, profit/marketability be damned.

PaulHoule 1y ago

It is easy to lay out criticism, hard to tell what a real answer could be. A writer friend of mine said it in a Hegelian way, that plots are thesis - antithesis - synthesis. You have some conflict and it is resolved. 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-what-everyone-gets-wrong/ https://screenrant.com/star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-hotel-...

daft_pink 1y ago

It’s not only that the films have the same basic narrative structure, but the way films these days need to check a series of boxes. You can’t have just an action movie anymore, it also must contain a romantic subplot, charismatic antagonist, light humor, diverse cast, visual effects, international marketability (topic not narrow to one countries audience) etc. 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.

parpfish 1y ago
I hate the fact that every film feels a need for a romantic subplot.
- albumen 1y ago
  Check out John wick, Mad max fury road or The Banshees of Inisherin.
- ijk 1y ago
  Is that still as much of a thing? Maybe I'm over-indexed on comparisons with 1930-1960, but it seems to me that romantic subplots have been in decline--there are quite a lot of recent films that entirely lack such a thing--especially compared to back in the day. The academy's award structure of lead actor/lead actress seems like it was a better fit for days where you had to shoehorn that into everything. To the point that they stuck romance subplots into Marx Brothers movies regardless of if it made any sense. (Which is conclusive proof why Duck Soup is their best film, since the Groucho/Margaret Dumont romance subplot is better integrated into the film.) 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.
- hiatus 1y ago
  You might enjoy The Pervert's Guide to Cinema.
- BeFlatXIII 1y ago
  Ruined The Hobbit
  - jes5199 1y ago
    I think it’s hard to say that any one thing ruined the Hobbit. like, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
    - BeFlatXIII 1y ago

_m_p 1y ago

Every film cited in this article is meant to cater to the existing tastes of the audience and people like having their existing tastes reaffirmed. One can watch other films. For example: https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/chantal-akerman-10-essential-films https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/chantal-akerman-10-essential-fi...

JKCalhoun 1y ago
Yep, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is one of the "1001 Movies". 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.

bee_rider 1y ago

I thought this was a pretty interesting parallel, and reflection on the idea. > 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.

mrob 1y ago

One way to get more structural variety is by watching foreign movies. For example, I think Tokyo Story (1953) is better modeled as a four-act kishōtenketsu[0] structure than a three-act hero's journey. It's widely considered one of the best movies of all time, and one that I rate very highly, but it's very different from Western movies. That difference was essential to my appreciation of it, because it's also slow paced and lacking in action; the novelty was enough to hold my attention until I could engage with the story. I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu

klik99 1y ago
I just learned about kishōtenketsu thanks to this great video on How To with John Wilson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-SwyF-Vvbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-SwyF-Vvbs). I'm surprised that it's not as well known in the west, considering how many great directors use it. 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.
sjm 1y ago
Classic Thing, Japan. There are plenty of western movies that don't follow the three-act structure (off the top of my head, Apocalypse Now, Mulholland Drive (and probably most Lynch), Boyhood (and other Linklaters), basically any Robert Altman) and plenty of foreign films that do.
- mrob 1y ago
  >Mulholland Drive 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_gipsy 1y ago

You can deconstruct those supposedly complete sets of plot types further, into just two atoms: rise and fall. The protagonist rises, then falls, but rises again (not necessarily to the same levels, but you get the idea). Or just falls and falls, but ultimately rises. Meaningless, but so are those "7 types of story archs" taxonomies.

SeenNotHeard 1y ago
Sure. Another comes from Jim Thompson, who said there was only one kind of story: "Things are not as they seem."

mg 1y ago

The article complains that most movies follow the same plot: 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?

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
Not a movie but most motorsports do not follow the monomyth. The cars or trucks or tractors compete, but none of them are designated protagonist. The progression is usually from slower and cheaper vehicles to more expensive and faster ones, to build excitement for the audience. 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.
- mrob 1y ago
  This can be generalized to stories about any kind of real-life racing. For example, there's a whole genre of videos about the history of speedrunning video games (competing to complete the game in the fastest time), popularized by the works of Youtuber SummoningSalt: https://www.youtube.com/@SummoningSalt/videos 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.
  - noworriesnate 1y ago
    This reminds me of Dwarf Fortress, a game famous for its auto-generated stories. Boatmurdered is one such story—it’s brutal, fascinating, it’s in this uncanny valley halfway between random and an actual story. And it definitely isn’t formulaic (except for the fact that everyone always dies in the end; the game’s motto is Losing is Fun).
hinkley 1y ago

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago

The Matrix is like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. Notice the strangeness of the dream.

incomingpain 1y ago

Humans dont like change. https://www.jalopnik.com/every-car-looks-like-this-thanks-to-a-gigantic-regulato-1849837803/ 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-the-same_id124123 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.

egypturnash 1y ago
The politics and actions of Tesla's CEO/mascot have absolutely nothing to do with hating the Cybertruck. Nor does the fact that if you see it in person you quickly realize that it is designed so that it blinds other people on the road by reflecting an intense strip of sunlight off of the top of its hood, and that it is also designed so that if it hits a pedestrian, bicycle, or smaller car, it will throw them under its wheels rather than over the hood - that big prow is fine in something like the cartoon military vehicle from Aliens that inspired it, but it's pretty anti-human in the context of driving around a road with other people on it. It's solely because it looks different.
immibis 1y ago
Maybe the cybertruck is just bad though. Kei trucks don't look like American trucks and they're beloved, not hated, by the people you're saying hate the cybertruck because they just fear change.
- incomingpain 1y ago
  >Maybe the cybertruck is just bad though. 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?

deleted 1y ago

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marviel 1y ago

"Wired For Story" is a great book that discusses an alternative set of "Story Atoms" which can be combined to create unique, compelling stories.

blueflow 1y ago

These recurring patterns are called "tropes", there is a wiki of them: https://tvtropes.org/ https://tvtropes.org/ A long analysis of Stargate SG-1 as starting point: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/StargateSG1 https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/StargateSG1

mhink 1y ago
While I do have a lot of love for TVTropes, I think what they're talking about here is a little broader than most of the tropes we see there (although they do have an excellent article on the Hero's Journey itself [1]). IMO, tropes in the sense that we see them listed there are building blocks for a narrative structure, of which the Hero's Journey is one example. As mentioned upthread, kishōtenketsu is an alternative (and for that matter, TVTropes has an article on it as well, see [2]). 1: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHerosJourney https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHerosJourney 2: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kishotenketsu https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kishotenketsu

klik99 1y ago

One thing I've noticed in music composition (where I have more training/experience, but I suspect the same is true for narratives) is the rules get codified / standardized a generation after a style of music is popular. Bach, for example, "breaks the rules" of counterpoint at least once in every piece in Well-Tempered Clavier, which was supposed to be an educational piece so if he actually felt like there were rules to follow he'd be more likely to be "by the book" for educational purposes. 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.

ijk 1y ago
Hollywood has the particular problem that the executives would really like a formula to follow to make people like the films, the screenwriters would really like a formula to follow to write something that they can sell, and so on. There's a lot of commercial pressure for a factory to mass-produce plot and stamp it out into films. People liked a film? Make the exact same thing and see if they'll buy it again. Franchises help, because at least there's some incentive to shuffle around some different characters and plot elements. 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.

galacticaactual 1y ago

Articles like these, deliberately it seems, fail to recognize that in the infinite conceptspace that is reality, there are attractor zones where threads converge - archetypal stories that have been told and retold over time for a reason. Try telling a story that doesn't strike an archetypal chord and see what happens - it lands in the void. "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.

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pinkmuffinere 1y ago

The Hero’s Journey is useful as a writing tool, but imo it is also a lens through which we analyze stories (once we learn about it). My feeling is that _any_ story can be cajoled into matching the hero’s journey with enough imagination. For this reason, I’m not as concerned about the limited palate — i think it says more about our perspective than about the story itself. It’s like complaining that we’re missing out on math because we learn numbers in base 10. Consider this example: “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?

jimbokun 1y ago
> “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)“ That’s the version of the Hero’s Journey used in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.
lee-rhapsody 1y ago
This is one of the more insightful comments in the thread.
golol 1y ago
Reminds me of another frequently poasted/discussed story arc classification attempt where the author basically draws some graphs that look like "down-up", "up-down", "down-up-down", "up-down-up" and so on. Well after a down you must have an up and after an up a down, if you aren't planning to quantify things...
dsign 1y ago
Though I agree with you to an extent, the hero's journey includes an element of inner change in values or moral disposition. That, and not the subject's situation (or GPS coordinates), is what makes it the hero's journey. 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.

jari_mustonen 1y ago

The article mentions Jung's "collective unconscious," which is often misunderstood. 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.

munificent 1y ago

There is another film structure that is super common but is often overlooked. It is perhaps not coincidental that the protagonist is more often a woman. I found a blog post describing it once, but can't find it now. 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.

owebmaster 1y ago
I think that is exactly the plot in Ne Zha 2, a chinese animation that is breaking records. The trailer is awesome.
Slava_Propanei 1y ago
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bossyTeacher 1y ago
princess mononoke fits the bill
viridian 1y ago
Moana might actually be a better example than Mulan or Frozen, because there's not even any inner turmoil outside of the very beginning. 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.

kazinator 1y ago

We have that choice now. If movies based on human-versus-{human,nature,aliens,supernatural,...} conflict is not your thing, you can go to YouTube (or similar) and watch, say, people collaborate in making something. It's still a kind of conflict with resolution: people or a person versus the tooling and materials, using their knowledge and skills to show solutions, and then it's all resolved when the thing is made. At every turn, you don't quite know what they are going to do next, or sometimes even what they are working on and how it will fit into the big picture. (E.g. it something that will be a part of the finished work, or is it a tooling jig?) 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.

plank 1y ago

A variation of the theory that there are only 7 different stories told in (fiction) books.

adzm 1y ago

Save the Cat is also one of those things like kerning where once you know about it you start seeing it everywhere. I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned here yet. Many, many movies follow it almost exactly. 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!

bob1029 1y ago

> The story is resolved either in the protagonist’s favour or against them: they triumph or else fail tragically. 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.

jimbokun 1y ago
Because if you are looking for those kinds of stories it’s easier to find them in the news.
ghssds 1y ago
As the spectator, you get to determine who is the bad guy. A classic example in The Lion King. Mufasa the bloodthirsty king succeed, despite his assassination, in maintaining the order he lived, and killed, for. Meanwhile, his mistreated brother, failed to create a new better order by liberating the oppressed hyennas. Simba had a fair chance at changing things for good after he met Timon and Pumbaa who teach him the true way of life but by the end he has forsaken everything he learned and we see a completely brainwashed Simba accomplish Mufasa's biding. Or you can watch the movie the way you are told and in this case you are right.

oersted 1y ago

I don't know... I cannot disagree, but isn't this like moaning about how there is no innovation in: - 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.

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Vapormac 1y ago
You're totally right. I think the article is just inherently too reductionist, which is like of a foundation of analysis in general, is to reduce and then reason about some process/object. However, I think a lot of analysis is (for lack of a better term) critically reductionist, and they see that as a virtue of their analysis, they toss out nuance and details in favor of studying the "structure" of some process without considering that particular nuance or detail changes the structures meaning and possibly the structure itself.
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acc_297 1y ago

Related comment - Mike Duncan who made a name for himself doing long form multi episode history podcasts recently produced a fiction project of the false history of a class revolution on mars ~200 years in the future that is told through the lens of long form multi episode history podcast from a narrator in the distant future. 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.

nonameiguess 1y ago
It'd be interesting to see if something like that could be adapted to the screen formats the author is complaining about here. House of the Dragon faced a similar problem. The source material is a lot like what you describe, a fictional history written as if it was real historical research, with multiple conflicting sources, disputed accounts, and no way to resolve the truth of what really happened. The HBO television adaptation kind of just threw that out the window and presented what is supposed to be seen as the "real" history through a normal God's eye third-person narrator. It also showed what happens in situations that the fictional history had no account of, resolving mysteries of what happened to people who disappeared without anyone involved witnessing how and writing it down.
- empath75 1y ago
  I think there is a pretty significant chance that someone _does_ make a TV series out of it, and it's almost ideally suited for it because it's all background material, so there's a lot of space for a showrunner to actually put their mark on it, and you could probably mine seasons of drama out of it. Although if they haven't made the Kim Stanley Robinson books into a tv series, it would seem weird to start with this one..

jimbokun 1y ago

> Like Le Guin, he believes that we must ‘fundamentally think about how we rebuild structures’, because those we are living under ‘are literally killing us … whether that be patriarchy or racism or the climate catastrophe.’ 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.

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
Racism and climate denial are both narratives, and people die because of them every day. (If you're not aware of how many people are already dying because of climate change, it's not because the facts aren't available to the curious and interested.) 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.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  I think the argument that watching movies with a different narrative structure will solve major geopolitical issues requires more evidence.

alfor 1y ago

What I find tiring is propaganda and "the message" (if you watch the critical drinker) The structure of the myth is not a problem if you respect the personages playing it. I just watched Firefly, a sci-fi serie done on a small budget decades ago, it's so much better than the slop we have these days with 100X the budget. 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.

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appleorchard46 1y ago

Sigh. It's like one of those clickbait YouTube videos (10 Reasons Why Modern Movies SUCK!) but with big words and literary citations to make it seem more respectable. The author completely disregards historical and traditional storytelling to squeeze every possible type of story into a vague narrative of commercialism. > 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.

sapphicsnail 1y ago

This article got me thinking about the Iliad > 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.

kragen 1y ago
Yeah, I was thinking about that too. A kind of amusing thing about this juxtaposition is that basically no modern fiction I know of has anywhere near as much bashing, thrusting, raping, and killing as the Iliad. A lot of the modern translators like Pope shrink from translating the crueler parts, resorting to vague euphemisms.

sgentle 1y ago

Very strange choice to use Mulholland Drive as an example of conforming to the hero's journey "complicated by dream sequences" (?!) 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.

Joker_vD 1y ago
"Three-act storytelling, three-act storytelling everywhere — especially if you squint hard enough to ignore parts that don't fit into the three-act storytelling framework". 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.

makeitdouble 1y ago

> While it captures something profound about human needs and wants, it can be subtly conservative and its dominance is symptomatic of a worrying turn against analysis and critique. 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.

smitty1e 1y ago

> almost every film and TV series, as well as a good many plays and novels, have exactly the same plot? 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? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_Fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_Fiction

cubefox 1y ago
There are probably many such movies, but most people don't know about them, because they usually never become popular. Pulp Fiction is an exception insofar it is (was) very popular.
- smitty1e 1y ago
  But even the age of social media hasn't supported any breakthroughs.

dvaun 1y ago

Maybe it's a universal abstraction describing any type of change? Consider it in another frame: Beginning state -> Catalyst -> Mutation -> New state -> Reaction -> Outcome or: Pre-process -> Event -> Logic -> Result -> Post-process -> Deliverable

blackbear_ 1y ago

This idea was already picked up and elaborated in the 50s and 60s by the Frankfurt school: > 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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry

scajanus 1y ago

This is partially why I like The Wire, which mirrors a Greek tragedy (1). The dysfunctional organizations play the role of the gods, against whose whims the mere mortals battle against and break. Another show that also competes for a spot as the best series of all time, Breaking Bad, is also a tragedy rather than hero's journey. 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/ 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."

wuj 1y ago

The part on stories reminded me of Neil Postman's arguments in Amusing Ourselves to Death. > 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."

cubefox 1y ago
Good point. This is why truly great stories do have some content beyond entertainment, maybe they make indirectly some plausible "argument", or model a thought experiment.

fellowniusmonk 1y ago

I think this is big part of the appeal of "A good man is hard to find" and other Flannery O'Connor works. 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.

musicale 1y ago

Didn't someone (Aristotle, mentioned in TFA, or perhaps Aeschylus, Sophocles, ???) enumerate several dozen (or more?) classical dramatic plot structures?