[HN Gopher] Our narrative prison
___________________________________________________________________
Our narrative prison
Author : anarbadalov
Score : 101 points
Date : 2025-05-14 16:27 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| RankingMember wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-...
| daft_pink wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I _hate_ the fact that every film feels a need for a romantic
| subplot.
| albumen wrote:
| Check out John wick, Mad max fury road or The Banshees of
| Inisherin.
| ijk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You might enjoy The Pervert's Guide to Cinema.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Ruined The Hobbit
| jes5199 wrote:
| I think it's hard to say that any one thing ruined the
| Hobbit. like, there's plenty of blame to go around.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Children's animated films also require a fart joke or two.
|
| My parents don't enjoy seeing films in theaters. So when they
| took us out as children, it was under exceptional
| circumstances. We went to see _E.T._ when it premiered. I
| remarked about Drew Barrymore 's young character shouting
| "penis-breath" and my mother explained that if they didn't
| throw in a few profanities, the film would have been rated "G"
| and dismissed as a children's film. A "PG"-rated film was
| likely to gain more screenings in more theaters and capture a
| broader audience.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yes, it is formulaic and boring.
|
| I generally have had to go back to movies pre-Raiders-of-the-
| Lost-Ark to find film less formulaic.
| _m_p wrote:
| 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-fi...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 kishotenketsu[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
| klik99 wrote:
| I just learned about kishotenketsu thanks to this great video
| on How To with John Wilson
| (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 kishotenketsu structure to tell stories
| that are more realistic and introspective and don't require the
| kind of antagonistic conflict of 3-act structure.
| sjm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| card_zero wrote:
| OK, now let's find a way to see it as a four-act structure.
| Introduction: car crash. Development: woman with amnesia
| and blue key. Turning point: take your pick, remembering a
| name, the corpse maybe. Outcome: silencio.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, not sure it is a three-act structure. That's a
| stretch.
| klik99 wrote:
| Kubrick frequently uses a two act - Barry Lyndon where he
| rises from nothing to peak at the exact midpoint and then
| falls to nothing at the end, or Clockwork Orange where he
| does a bunch of horrible things in the first half and the
| consequences are mirrored around the midpoint of the movie.
| hinkley wrote:
| In children's movies the antagonist/monster is often meant as a
| metaphor for the child's lack of autonomy in an ambivalent
| world that they do not fully understand.
|
| And then you have My Neighbor Totoro, where all the monsters
| are friends, and the bad guy is just chronic illness, children
| who have let their imaginations run wild and fear the worst, a
| sibling getting lost, and at the end basically nothing happens
| which is the best news considering. There is no metaphor for
| human struggle, it's just human struggle.
|
| While some of his movies like Castle In the Sky, Mononoke and
| Nausicaa follow a modified Hollywood bad guy arc (in Castle
| half the bad guys practically become chosen family, in Spirited
| Away they become allies), a lot don't. Up on Poppy Hill is
| essentially two teenagers in love discovering to their horror
| that they are first cousins, despair, and then discover that
| one of them was adopted.
|
| But in all of them is the self-rescuing princess. The child
| either has to save themselves or at least demand the help that
| they are rightfully entitled to.
|
| I got to introduce some kids to Ghibli right as Disney started
| distributing them. If you've seen Lasseter's introduction to
| Spirited Away that's where we were at that time - I'm telling
| you a secret that should not be a secret. And they in turn
| "forced" their friends to watch them in the same way my
| generation forced people to watch The Princess Bride; like it
| was a moral imperative to postpone other plans and rectify this
| egregious oversight in their education.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a standard trope in a _mahou shoujo_ anime such as
| _Sailor Moon_ or _Futari wa Precure_ that the enemy tries to
| infiltrate the hero group and ultimately gets domesticated by
| Japanese society. I think of how the antagonist joins the
| party in _Tales of Symphonia_ as a playable character.
| hinkley wrote:
| And the tsundere: person initially thought to be an asshole
| is either just having the worst day possible, or softens
| and grows as the story progresses.
|
| There's a lot of western film where a minion is sent to
| infiltrate and ultimately either becomes a double agent or
| is convinced to do the right thing at a point of no return,
| by choosing to fail their task, or sacrificing themselves
| in a brief and tragic redemption arc, either directly or an
| implication of potentially fatal consequences from their
| boss.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In the high postmodern of anime about visual novels (
| _Saekano_ or _Date-a-Live_ ) the Tsundere is confronted
| with being a Tsundere and violently denies it. (Whacks
| you with their twintails or something)
| card_zero wrote:
| I watched _The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya_ recently.
| The main character can bend reality to her wishes. She is
| unaware of this. But it makes her basically a monster,
| because the other characters are locked in a constant
| struggle to prevent her from getting bored or angry, in
| case she remakes the world without them in it. By the end
| of the series this is not resolved at all, she is still a
| monster with the other characters in her thrall, it 's
| just that the last episode is somewhat calmer as if
| they've arrived at a kind of stability. Also there's
| eight episodes in the middle that are all nearly
| identical, because they get stuck in a time loop due to
| her unwillingness to permit the end of summer.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| My kids (8 and 6) snuck out of bed and ended up watching
| Grave of the Fireflies with me. I originally didn't watch it
| with them because of the subtitles, but they were hooked.
| underlipton wrote:
| I'll be the guy to mention Grave of the Fireflies, which is
| also Ghibli, and which is the Totoro flipside as another,
| "There is no metaphor for human struggle, it's just human
| struggle," situation. In fact, IIRC, they were released as a
| double feature (imagine being in THAT theater). As with
| Totoro's joy, GotF's devastation lies in its lack of concern
| for fitting events to any overarching metaphor. People make
| choices and there are consequences. That's all. The story
| ends when the viewpoint characters have nothing else to say.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Agree on foreign films having tropes/plot beats which were
| locally grown, instead of borrowed from Hollywood.
|
| Time is another dimension you can use to get to different
| tropes. Lots of old movies don't go quite how you would expect
| them to, given modern filmmaking plot beats.
|
| Examples:
|
| Rang de Basanti (India) features political corruption which
| causes the death of a man in a group of tight-knit friends. In
| revenge, they hatch a plot to assassinate the defense minister.
| _And then they do it_ , and the second act of the movie takes
| place and they all die. What a ride!
|
| Duck Soup (1933) is about as far away from a modern comedy as
| you can get, and it is entirely about sticking your thumb in
| the eye of the wealthy and powerful. Surprisingly watchable,
| for such an old film.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Some years back I started wading into the "1001 Movies to See
| Before You Die". I'm still consuming -- perhaps another 3 years
| and I'll be done? (Can die.)
|
| Anyway, it's been a wild ride introducing to me early silent
| films, surreal films, art films, Italian neorealism, French new
| wave, etc. There very much are different narratives and
| structures outside "Hollywood films". Give them a watch.
| jancsika wrote:
| > I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes
| homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization.
|
| Loss of variety in terms of what's shown on traditional movie
| theater screens-- sure.
|
| For everything else, technological advancement has lowered the
| price to create films of a base level of quality. And that has
| caused an explosion in artistic variety. I doubt the average
| American has enough leisure time to keep up with all the indie
| films produced in a year (nor even a sub-genre).
| the_gipsy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sure. Another comes from Jim Thompson, who said there was only
| one kind of story: "Things are not as they seem."
| mg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > meet someone who shows them a different way of being
|
| Enter the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
| lwo32k wrote:
| Before Sunrise / Before Sunset
| munificent wrote:
| I find this plot structure tired and boring so I'm always on
| the lookout for movies that don't follow it. They are hard to
| find! (Also, I probably don't have an excellent memory to
| recall them later when I do find them.)
|
| Horror movies in general seem to have more freedom to play with
| plot structure than other genres. Every film, regardless of
| plot, needs to have _something_ that makes the audience want to
| watch to the end of the film. With horror, it 's often putting
| the question in the audience's mind "what is happening?" That
| can be compelling enough to propel the viewer to the end so the
| film often doesn't need to have a protagonist go through some
| emotional journey.
|
| It's been a while since I've seen them, but I don't think The
| Ring or The Grudge follow this plot form. It's probably telling
| that both of those are adaptations of non-Western films. I
| don't think Alien follows this structure either: Ridley is
| basically right all along and just has to survive.
|
| I think Goon is an underrated comedy, and it doesn't really fit
| the three-act structure well. It certainly has conflict and
| climax, but Doug doesn't really go through any internal crisis.
| Instead, he's more often the catalyst for internal change in
| other characters.
| rprenger wrote:
| One thing about horror movies is that even though they
| usually pretty much follow a three act structure they at
| least usually have to have a prologue to set the mood before
| the "regular life" part. But recent ones I've noticed that
| don't follow the structure closely are
|
| "Skinamarink" and "I Saw the TV Glow"
| munificent wrote:
| I need to watch "Skinamarink".
|
| "I Saw the TV Glow" is one of my favorite movies of the
| past few years. After way too many souless IP franchise
| cashgrabs, it reminded me that some people are still making
| film as art to connect with people.
| amiga386 wrote:
| _Twelve Angry Men_
|
| _Primer_
|
| _Holy Motors_
|
| _Le Voyage dans la Lune_
|
| _Irreversible_
| sdwr wrote:
| Primer follows the classic story structure pretty well, even
| though the literal timeline is jumbled up.
|
| The main characters start in a familiar place, are thrust
| into a new world, and learn about themselves as they are
| tested by circumstance and each other. The stakes rise to a
| crescendo where everything is on the line, then resolve to a
| "new normal" informed by their different personalities.
| narag wrote:
| In biology one thing is made _similar_ to other (
| "assimilated") in order to absorb it. In the same way, some
| ideas are packed in some format known to be easy to digest.
|
| The trick in this topic is how dissimilar to some vague canon
| should a story be to qualify for an answer to your question.
|
| Would you say _Alien_ is a good example?
| ijk wrote:
| Where do we draw the line?
|
| Does an anthology approach like _Playtime_ (1967, dir. Jacques
| Tati) count? It 's got kind of an arc to it, but doesn't really
| have anything like a recognizable struggle with an antagonist.
| Unless you view brutalism as the antagonist, I guess.
|
| _81/2_ (1963, dir. Federico Fellini) could, likewise, be
| shoehorned into a discussion of the arc of the film--which it,
| itself deconstructs in the third scene or so. It 's primarily a
| film about making the film. There's _kind of_ a journey the
| protagonist goes on, but does it really count as being this
| same plot?
| ijk wrote:
| _Adaptation_ (2002, dir. by Spike Jonze) features Charlie
| Kaufman (played by Nicholas Cage) and his brother Donald
| (played by Nicholas Cage 's twin brother) trying to struggle
| with this exact question of how to adapt a book that doesn't
| seem to conform to any usable pattern. I'm really not sure
| where it falls in this classification.
| ijk wrote:
| _Rashomon_ (1950, dir. Akira Kurosawa) is more of a multi-
| faceted mystery; we go through a progression of new
| information but no one really goes on a recognizable hero 's
| journey--unless it's the listeners at the gate who are
| hearing the story.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| The Matrix is like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.
| Notice the strangeness of the dream.
| incomingpain wrote:
| Humans dont like change.
|
| https://www.jalopnik.com/every-car-looks-like-this-thanks-to...
|
| Everyone hates the cybertruck because its different than the
| generic white ecobox.
|
| https://www.phonearena.com/news/Why-do-all-smartphones-look-...
|
| What happened to flip phones and physical keyboards?
|
| Can you go into a mall anywhere in the world and go buy a
| starbucks before you go to H&M? Doesnt even matter if you go to
| H&M or zara because its all the same clothing.
|
| Getting back to film and tv context. The skill of the author is
| what lets the change or difference come through. Goerge RR Martin
| had a different take and did well. How did he do it? Game of
| thrones is empathy. Empathy lets you escape the narrative prison.
| Show the trauma of the villian to make them a victim.
|
| The Fairphone still looks like a generic smartphone but they sell
| it via empathy of ethical, sustainable, and repairable parts.
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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?
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Goerge RR Martin did not and could not tell his stories in a 90
| minute mass market movie. People are ignoring the limits of the
| medium. Limited to 90-120 minutes of all inclusive
| storytelling, must keep mass market audiences attention the
| continuous 90-120 minutes. Must have a payoff to the audience.
|
| 'The Road' changed things up. Technically good story telling,
| good movie craft. I would never watch it or another movie like
| it again. I felt like crap for a week after. Much success in
| being different and eliciting feelings, horrible at being
| entertainment (to me at least).
| marviel wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| These recurring patterns are called "tropes", there is a wiki of
| them: https://tvtropes.org/
|
| A long analysis of Stargate SG-1 as starting point:
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/StargateSG1
| mhink wrote:
| 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, kishotenketsu 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
| 2: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kishotenketsu
| klik99 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| klik99 wrote:
| Yes, that's a really good point. I had this nagging feeling
| of there was a commercialization aspect driving when I was
| writing that, since that's obviously what happened to punk,
| and you hit the nail on the head. I do think students are
| taught the 3-act structure / heros journey as if it was the
| ideal structure, but the true reason for it's ubiquity is an
| attempt to commoditize art.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| You're missing the constraints: what kinds of stories
| actually work for humans and can be told clearly, with mass
| appeal, in a 90-120 minute audio/visual format.
|
| We already have spaces for broader or more experimental
| narratives, they're called novels. Music videos gave us
| popularized short form experimentation for a while. TV series
| give us longer form audio/visual storytelling. But there's a
| hard limit to how much complexity or diversity you can pack
| into a 90-120 minute block while still keeping it cohesive
| and broadly engaging. TV gets away with slower pacing and
| more meandering structures because viewers can dip in and
| out. People like/recommend a series even if one episode
| didn't keep their interest. If 30 minutes of a movie don't
| keep someone's interest they aren't going to recommend it, it
| sucks to spend 30 minutes in a theater detached from what you
| are watching. Movies have to convince audiences to stay
| locked in for the entire runtime, which naturally narrows the
| kind of stories that can work.
|
| And part of the problem now is that movies were once novel.
| They evolved from stagey, non-gritty recorded plays basically
| to gritty, photorealistic stories. That leap kept things
| feeling fresh for a long time. But now that the tech curve
| has plateaued, now that dark/gritty has run it's course, it's
| like people want movies to somehow figure out how to be...
| not movies.
|
| Punk was new/novel fresh. Then what was new/novel/fresh was
| identified and expanded upon. Then it become not
| new/novel/fresh. Other music genres were kept fresh by
| technical limitations slowly being removed by new
| tech/monetary limits limited who could do what/knowledge
| gatekeeping. Now that every tool is available to every person
| along with deeper knowledge of music theory, which
| theoretically should make it more interesting, music has
| gotten more boring. Because we don't want good. We want novel
| new experiences.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| > 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-pun
|
| also pop and indie pop, rock and indie rock.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > "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 wrote:
| This is one of the more insightful comments in the thread.
| jari_mustonen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think that is exactly the plot in Ne Zha 2, a chinese
| animation that is breaking records. The trailer is awesome.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| princess mononoke fits the bill
| viridian wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| I haven't seen Moana but this seems like the narrative arc of
| a lot of mythology, where the protagonist has to learn to
| submit to the will of God/the gods, or can only succeed with
| divine intervention.
| frmersdog wrote:
| Weirdly, Unicorn Store was the first thing that came to mind.
| Which is funny when you consider that it was essentially a sort
| of weird meta-prequel to Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson's
| turns in Captain Marvel.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| You can regard this is a story with a flat character arc. It's
| still pretty much a 3-act structure, sort of a dual version of
| it.
| kazinator wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A variation of the theory that there are only 7 different stories
| told in (fiction) books.
| adzm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Because if you are looking for those kinds of stories it's
| easier to find them in the news.
| oersted wrote:
| 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.
| Vapormac wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| The worst thing about schematic stories is that they trained
| people to believe nothing else is even possible. Even as those
| other stories actually exist and are not even that niche.
|
| Movies are nowdays very predictable. You know how it is likely
| to end from the start. You can even guess when exactly big
| fights happen.
| acc_297 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| In the audio-track commentary for Angel, which is a TV series
| that has some very long story arcs, one of the writers mentions
| that they would insert superfluous details into the script (i.e
| names of people and places) so that they could tie future story
| developments back to earlier episodes and seasons, making it
| seem to the viewer like the entirety of the show had been
| worked out from the start, and that the writers had been
| dropping hints along the way.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >one of the writers mentions that they would insert
| superfluous details into the script (i.e names of people and
| places) so that they could tie future story developments back
| to earlier episodes and seasons, making it seem to the viewer
| like the entirety of the show had been worked out from the
| start, and that the writers had been dropping hints along the
| way.
|
| I always wondered if writers do that stuff. Even with novels,
| I wonder if they go back and add details in or plan from them
| way back at the start.
| homarp wrote:
| >wondered if writers do that stuff
|
| planners vs pantsers, it depends of their writing style.
| psalaun wrote:
| A kind of sci-fi version of Jack London's Iron Heel?
| jfengel wrote:
| I've listened to all of his Revolutions and Rome podcasts. I
| look forward to getting to his Mars Revolution podcast, but I
| just can't stomach the thought of it right now. Maybe in four
| years.
|
| I did manage to get through the first few episodes, and I was
| very pleased with how effectively he recreated the level of
| detail he used for his real Revolutions episodes. It's not like
| a novel, but it captures just how many different players there
| are in any real-world event -- very different from conventional
| storytelling.
|
| At that, I think it might be most interesting to people who see
| it in terms of his other Revolutions work. As a pure work of
| fiction, it could be quite dull -- too many players with too
| little characterization, too many events with both too much and
| too little detail.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >but I just can't stomach the thought of it right now. Maybe
| in four years
|
| Downfalls of civilization don't seem so appealing when you're
| living through them. I'm that way with media that overly
| focuses on mental health too, I have too many relatives
| dealing with that stuff to enjoy it in my media as well.
| valorzard wrote:
| I love love LOVE the Martian revolution series In many ways it
| feels like the narrative climax of every revolution he's
| covered so far lol
| patapong wrote:
| Fascinating! Will check this out.
|
| Likewise, I thought it would be very cool to create a show
| written in a hypothetical future, that is set in our time
| period. The nature of the future society would only be revealed
| by how they choose to portray our time period, and which
| stories are told, just like we always put our own ideological
| framing on shows about the past.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| alfor wrote:
| 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.
| appleorchard46 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-14 23:00 UTC)