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.
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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.
The lore in the game Morrowind has a similar feel, though in a mythology-history instead of modern history sense, with a lot of Rashomon-style ambiguity.
It does feel like that, but apparently after this he's going to take the podcast right back into more historical revolutions, like maybe the Cuban Revolution, as if nothing happened. Which will be hilarious if he does it.
I had similar thoughts about it, and the thing it's actually closest to is world building chapters in RPG books. It's almost pure world building without any actual story. Super interesting experiment.
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.
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..
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.
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 Nausicaä follow a modified Hollywood bad guy arc (in Castle half the bad guys practically become chosen family, in Spirited Away they become allies), a lot don’t. Up on Poppy Hill is essentially two teenagers in love discovering to their horror that they are first cousins, despair, and then discover that one of them was adopted.
But in all of them is the self-rescuing princess. The child either has to save themselves or at least demand the help that they are rightfully entitled to.
I got to introduce some kids to Ghibli right as Disney started distributing them. If you’ve seen Lasseter’s introduction to Spirited Away that’s where we were at that time - I’m telling you a secret that should not be a secret. And they in turn “forced” their friends to watch them in the same way my generation forced people to watch The Princess Bride; like it was a moral imperative to postpone other plans and rectify this egregious oversight in their education.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps worth pointing out, that GotF was written and directed by Isao Takahata without involvement (afaik) of Miazaki who has written and/or directed most of the stories with more of a well-known 'Ghibli' feel to them.
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). 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
Having watched Moana more times than I can remember (we have two young kids), I think Moana is a classic example of the monomyth. It is basically a re-skinned version of Star Wars:
1. She starts in the ordinary world but longs to go to sea. [Just like Luke Skywalker who wants to leave Tatooine.]
2. She initially rejects the call of the sea, and tries to fit in. [Just like Luke Skywalker initially rejects Ben.]
3. But the death of her grandmother convinces her that she must leave. [Luke Skywalker decides to follow Ben after his uncle/aunt are killed.]
4. She meets Maui, a lovable rogue, and convinces him to help, despite his reservations. [Luke convinces Han Solo to rescue the Princess]
5. They defeat a few lesser enemies. [Luke and Han defeat waves of stormtroopers.]
6. Finally, she must face the final test, but the lovable rogue decides to leave. [Luke attacks the Death Star, but Han decides to leave.]
7. In the final test, she realizes that she needs to give the infinity stone (I mean, the Heart of Te Fiti) to Te Ka, but not before the lovable rogue returns to help her. [Luke realizes that he needs to use the Force, but not before the lovable rogue returns.]
8. Moana returns as a Wayfinder. [Luke returns as a hero and a leader of the Rebellion.]
9. [Oh, and I forgot about the comic relief of Heh-Heh, who only speaks in chirps and sometimes gets her out of trouble.]
It might sound like I'm making fun of it, but I really like Moana. And I do actually believe she has a character arc. The unifying theme in Moana is "knowing who you are". There is literally a song about it! Moana doesn't know who she is at the beginning. Is she supposed to stay on the island or explore? Maui doesn't know who he is--he thinks he's powerful because of his magical fishhook ("Without my hook, I am nothing!") but Moana convinces her that he is a hero even without his fishhook. Moana helps Te Ka to discover that she is really Te Fiti. And when she returns to her island, she convinces her father that they are all voyagers.
Like I said, I've really watched Moana too many times!
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.
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.
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?
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...
> “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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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]).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
What happened to flip phones and physical keyboards?
Can you go into a mall anywhere in the world and go buy a starbucks before you go to H&M? Doesnt even matter if you go to H&M or zara because its all the same clothing.
Getting back to film and tv context. The skill of the author is what lets the change or difference come through. Goerge RR Martin had a different take and did well. How did he do it? Game of thrones is empathy. Empathy lets you escape the narrative prison. Show the trauma of the villian to make them a victim.
The Fairphone still looks like a generic smartphone but they sell it via empathy of ethical, sustainable, and repairable parts.
The 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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
Some that I've watched that I think qualifies, depending on how loosely you want to interpret it. Been a while since I watched most of these, so won't fight anyone if they disagree. Also didn't consider comedies or war, horror and very low budget movies as there are so many that fit from those categories.
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.
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
"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.
Does an anthology approach like Playtime (1967, dir. Jacques Tati) count? It's got kind of an arc to it, but doesn't really have anything like a recognizable struggle with an antagonist. Unless you view brutalism as the antagonist, I guess.
8½ (1963, dir. Federico Fellini) could, likewise, be shoehorned into a discussion of the arc of the film--which it, itself deconstructs in the third scene or so. It's primarily a film about making the film. There's _kind of_ a journey the protagonist goes on, but does it really count as being this same plot?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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).
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.
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.
>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.
>wondered if writers do that stuff
planners vs pantsers, it depends of their writing style.
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.
>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.
>Maybe in four years.
Meta-irony(?)
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.
Check out The Peripheral.
The lore in the game Morrowind has a similar feel, though in a mythology-history instead of modern history sense, with a lot of Rashomon-style ambiguity.
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
It does feel like that, but apparently after this he's going to take the podcast right back into more historical revolutions, like maybe the Cuban Revolution, as if nothing happened. Which will be hilarious if he does it.
I had similar thoughts about it, and the thing it's actually closest to is world building chapters in RPG books. It's almost pure world building without any actual story. Super interesting experiment.
A kind of sci-fi version of Jack London's Iron Heel?
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.
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..
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
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 Nausicaä follow a modified Hollywood bad guy arc (in Castle half the bad guys practically become chosen family, in Spirited Away they become allies), a lot don’t. Up on Poppy Hill is essentially two teenagers in love discovering to their horror that they are first cousins, despair, and then discover that one of them was adopted.
But in all of them is the self-rescuing princess. The child either has to save themselves or at least demand the help that they are rightfully entitled to.
I got to introduce some kids to Ghibli right as Disney started distributing them. If you’ve seen Lasseter’s introduction to Spirited Away that’s where we were at that time - I’m telling you a secret that should not be a secret. And they in turn “forced” their friends to watch them in the same way my generation forced people to watch The Princess Bride; like it was a moral imperative to postpone other plans and rectify this egregious oversight in their education.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps worth pointing out, that GotF was written and directed by Isao Takahata without involvement (afaik) of Miazaki who has written and/or directed most of the stories with more of a well-known 'Ghibli' feel to them.
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). 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.
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.
> One way to get more structural variety is by watching foreign movies.
That's a great point. My recommendation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_(2019_film)
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Yeah, not sure it is a three-act structure. That's a stretch.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
Having watched Moana more times than I can remember (we have two young kids), I think Moana is a classic example of the monomyth. It is basically a re-skinned version of Star Wars:
1. She starts in the ordinary world but longs to go to sea. [Just like Luke Skywalker who wants to leave Tatooine.]
2. She initially rejects the call of the sea, and tries to fit in. [Just like Luke Skywalker initially rejects Ben.]
3. But the death of her grandmother convinces her that she must leave. [Luke Skywalker decides to follow Ben after his uncle/aunt are killed.]
4. She meets Maui, a lovable rogue, and convinces him to help, despite his reservations. [Luke convinces Han Solo to rescue the Princess]
5. They defeat a few lesser enemies. [Luke and Han defeat waves of stormtroopers.]
6. Finally, she must face the final test, but the lovable rogue decides to leave. [Luke attacks the Death Star, but Han decides to leave.]
7. In the final test, she realizes that she needs to give the infinity stone (I mean, the Heart of Te Fiti) to Te Ka, but not before the lovable rogue returns to help her. [Luke realizes that he needs to use the Force, but not before the lovable rogue returns.]
8. Moana returns as a Wayfinder. [Luke returns as a hero and a leader of the Rebellion.]
9. [Oh, and I forgot about the comic relief of Heh-Heh, who only speaks in chirps and sometimes gets her out of trouble.]
It might sound like I'm making fun of it, but I really like Moana. And I do actually believe she has a character arc. The unifying theme in Moana is "knowing who you are". There is literally a song about it! Moana doesn't know who she is at the beginning. Is she supposed to stay on the island or explore? Maui doesn't know who he is--he thinks he's powerful because of his magical fishhook ("Without my hook, I am nothing!") but Moana convinces her that he is a hero even without his fishhook. Moana helps Te Ka to discover that she is really Te Fiti. And when she returns to her island, she convinces her father that they are all voyagers.
Like I said, I've really watched Moana too many times!
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.
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.
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.
I think that is exactly the plot in Ne Zha 2, a chinese animation that is breaking records. The trailer is awesome.
princess mononoke fits the bill
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?
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...
> “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.
This is one of the more insightful comments in the thread.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I hate the fact that every film feels a need for a romantic subplot.
Check out John wick, Mad max fury road or The Banshees of Inisherin.
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.
You might enjoy The Pervert's Guide to Cinema.
Ruined The Hobbit
I think it’s hard to say that any one thing ruined the Hobbit. like, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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
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 2: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kishotenketsu
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"Wired For Story" is a great book that discusses an alternative set of "Story Atoms" which can be combined to create unique, compelling stories.
> 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.
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.
Because if you are looking for those kinds of stories it’s easier to find them in the news.
> 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
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.
Sure. Another comes from Jim Thompson, who said there was only one kind of story: "Things are not as they seem."
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.
A variation of the theory that there are only 7 different stories told in (fiction) books.
The Matrix is like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. Notice the strangeness of the dream.
> 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.
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.
I think the argument that watching movies with a different narrative structure will solve major geopolitical issues requires more evidence.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
Wait, are you measuring safety by how heavy the car is compared to the average?
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).
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!
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.
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.
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?
Some that I've watched that I think qualifies, depending on how loosely you want to interpret it. Been a while since I watched most of these, so won't fight anyone if they disagree. Also didn't consider comedies or war, horror and very low budget movies as there are so many that fit from those categories.
Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8518302/
Good One - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30319516/
Hard to Be a God - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2328813/
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100519/
The Wanting Mare - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2267554/
In a Savage Land - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151047/
Welcome the Stranger - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5716280/
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340800/
The Hourglass Sanatorium - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070628/
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.
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"
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.
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.
8½ (1963, dir. Federico Fellini) could, likewise, be shoehorned into a discussion of the arc of the film--which it, itself deconstructs in the third scene or so. It's primarily a film about making the film. There's _kind of_ a journey the protagonist goes on, but does it really count as being this same plot?
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.
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.
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?
> meet someone who shows them a different way of being
Enter the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Twelve Angry Men
Primer
Holy Motors
Le Voyage dans la Lune
Irréversible
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.
Before Sunrise / Before Sunset
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.
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.
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).