Our Narrative Prison

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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-...

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

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.

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 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.