Are you ready…for Christmas time to come?..sing it with me…or if you’re a monkey, hum.
I assume you’re talking about that one. And now I don’t care for you very much because it seems like I just got that out of my head from last year!
I suspect that the process of performing a Dramatica analysis itself tends to create (or elevate) meaning even when it’s not necessarily there. In other words, even if a film was deliberately written and shot so that the same all four throughlines were in the same domain, the person later examining that film would – by the very methodology of Dramatica analysis – interpret minor moments of action and dialogue as being the source of conflicts within a throughline so as to give that throughline a different domain.
Framed differently, imagine if Chris and Melany suddenly announced that, actually, multiple throughlines could have the same domain. Do you think you’d go through all the movies in the analysis database and still think they all had their throughlines in different domains? Or would you look at some – possibly many – movies and conclude that they actually had more than one throughline in, for example, Situation or Activity?
Are the analyses as they are because the films themselves present those different domains, or because the model demands they be present, and so we just interpret them that way?
I have seen enough movies that I cannot get into a storyform to know that the attempt at analysis alone can’t generate a storyform where one doesn’t exist.
Have you seen Z or Leviathan? No amount of analysis is going to give them a storyform. What about Don’t Breathe? Same there.
That said, I certainly believe some analyses suffers from forcing and confirmation bias, and that others suffer from bad technique. I mean, I screwed up in this very thread! And there are blogs out there that propose preposterous storyforms for this or that movie – you bet the author of that is seeing things because the model demands it.
But, no, I don’t think the model is as subjective as I’m interpreting you do.
Half the reason I come here is to make sure I understand, and don’t fall prey to subjectivity.
I’m not saying it’ll make you see four throughlines even if they aren’t there. I’m saying that the process will make you see four unique domains even when two throughlines actually have the same domain.
A simple way to evaluate this is just to ask if there are any movies in the database of hundreds of analyses that have all four throughlines but without all four domains.
@decastell Great thread so far. Was doing some study on characters yesterday and Melanie reminded me of something. Not all movies or books revolve around one storyform. For example you mentioned that it might not be able to accommodate a MC in situation and a OS of situation. It can. That’s the definition of a Work. And a work can harbor as many storyforms. The thing is that the focus of most stories usually rests with one storyform. This offers a tight, solid narrative drive. The rest could be subplots or other parallel stories, each with all four throughlines of their own. And it’s up to the author(depending on his/her message) to flesh out, omit any one of them.
If you look at the giant thread for the Wall-E analysis, there was a fair bit of difficulty coming to consensus on throughline domains. We seemed to find a good setup but there were niggling doubts. That setup worked pretty well down to the Issue level, but we had problems finding a full complete storyform that included the Problem level.
That might be an example, not of two throughlines being definitely in the same domain, but of what happens when the throughline domains are somewhat vague.
I think this could happen at the beginning of the analysis, but once you drill down you’ll find that things won’t work at the lower levels, especially Issue or Problem levels. Like what happened at the Problem level for Wall-E.
When you’re able to analyze a film and come to a complete storyform, you should always feel like you gained something from that process. A better understanding of the story, of the author’s intent. In my experience this doesn’t happen if you just shoehorn in examples for appreciations – everything needs to kind of click into place even if it’s not quite what you were originally expecting.
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I’m fairly certain the answer to this is no, but that can’t be used to support or oppose your proposition that we see things is a biased way because of the model.
Hey @decastell, @MWollaeger is humorously referring to The Sixth Sense-similar to your question about being stuck in a well. Being Stuck Down a Well could be compared to Being Stuck in Limbo.
This is actually where we originally thought the narrative structure lied during our first analysis of the film in 1999. It wasn’t until one of my classes at CalArts that the students there provided an excellent argument for Malcom’s problem to be in Mind and specifically, in Memory.
Sensing the greater clarity in this new storyform, I presented it to Chris and he agreed that it was a better representation of the story’s dynamics. The key in all of this is that one story point does not make a story - it’s the nature of the implied story points that let’s you know if you’re on the right track and being objective about the storyform.
In our first analysis we saw Universe as the context for Malcom’s personal problems and saw the implied choices identified by Dramatica as confirmation.
Our second analysis was just as valid as the first UNTIL we looked to the nature of the implied story choices - the story points we didn’t select. Those presented a clearer picture of the source of conflict in The Sixth Sense.
In short, Malcom suddenly escaping limbo would not resolve his personal issues. Malcom escaping the mindset that he is alive DOES resolve his personal issues.
NOTE: I split this topic into a new post: [The Domains of The Sixth Sense](http://discuss.dramatica.com/t/the-domains-of-the-sixth-sense
) because some very important points were made that were not fully addressed due to the complexity of this conversation.
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I’m not saying the model creates a bias, but that there may be a flaw in the process of interpretation. I want to be really clear here because I’m trying to avoid a conversation that ends in, “either you believe in Dramatica or you don’t” – so I’m numbering each clause in my argument to make it easier to spot the places where we might agree or disagree.
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Dramatica recognizes the existence of films and books that are not Grand Argument Stories (i.e. do not contain the required aspects of a story identified by the Dramatica model) when those films or books are incomplete because they do not have four throughlines (OS, MC, IC, RS).
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It’s reasonably easy to identify a work that is missing a throughline. For example, according to the list here: http://dramatica.com/analysis/broken-stories, the movie Fletch does not have all four throughlines.
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The key point to take away is that the Dramatica model does not presume that all books or movies have the four throughlines.
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However when a story has all four throughlines, the process of analysis that I’ve seen in the D.U.G. videos as well as in the discussions on the forum then shifts to determining which throughlines fit into which domains. The majority of all the discussion I’ve seen here about any given movie or book is always about picking the domains and concerns. Nowhere have I read in the Dramatica materials the possibility that a movie or book fails to become a Grand Argument Story because it hasn’t used all four domains or that one throughline uses the same domain as another.
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The key point from this is that the Dramatica model presumes all works that contain the four throughlines to also contain the four domains.
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For example, if both the OS and the MC appear to be in Activity, the response becomes to find incidents within one of the throughlines – sometimes even just through lines of dialogue – which appear to defend a different domain for that throughline.
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I’ve never seen the possibility questioned that there are four discernible throughlines but that they don’t fit into the four domains. So far as I know, there’s no language or reference point within Dramatica for a movie or book to handle that type of book or movie.
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The result – and here’s where I’m hypothesizing – is that the process of analysis being followed is heavily biased towards fitting every movie or book that has the four throughlines into the four domains even if that book or movie doesn’t objectively support it.
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Therefore when analyzing a movie, the process almost demands confirmation bias – elevating some story details as vital to the structure and ignoring others as irrelevant, because you can’t complete the analysis of the film without assigning the four domains.
If Dramatica were presenting a subjective view of story, this would all be easy to dismiss by viewing this as a process of interpretation rather than measurement. However Dramatica is always presented (in what I read here, anyway) as an objective view of story and that there is only one correct interpretation of the storyform (or storyforms in the case of works with more than one) for any movie or book.
The question is whether a Dramatica analysis of a movie or film is an objective process or a subjective one. I recently put to @jhull the following:
If an objective storyform exists for a movie – one that isn’t about what the viewer thinks or feels but is actually objectively the correct one – then a person sufficiently trained in Dramatica should be able to independently arrive at that storyform. If you took five Dramatica Story Experts and had them independently view and analyze a film, they should arrive at roughly the same storyform. There’s always going to be a question of precision when you get down to the element level, but certainly you would expect the four throughlines, domains, and concerns to match up.
If five Dramatica Story Experts (using the term here just to mean people deemed sufficiently trained in Dramatica to correctly apply the theory) can watch the same film independently and produce different results, then one of four things is likely the case:
A. The flaw is in the belief that a storyform can be accurately reverse-engineered after it has been turned into a finished product – that the process of producing the finished work obliterates the original storyform such that all we can now see is the storytelling. Some of the characteristics of the original storyform will still be identifiable, but in most cases you will find multiple storyforms that each could be the basis for creating the same finished product that we see on the screen.
B. The flaw is in the belief that there was ever only one objective storyform that could lead to the creation of the end product, but that instead the various potential storyforms sit on a probability curve, with some closer to the greatest chance of producing that final film and others less likely.
C. The flaw is in not recognizing that many, many movies simply don’t have the four domains in the way we understand them in the Dramatica theory of story. In other words, fewer films than we think are actually Grand Argument Stories. So the solution is to be able to identify this rather than forcing the movies to fit to the model.
D. There is a single, discernible, objectively true storyform but that even trained experts can’t identify it independently.
Maybe there’s a fifth possibility, but I’m not seeing it. What isn’t a viable counter is the notion that you have to get everyone discussing and debating the storyform and then arrive at it by consensus: that’s not objective, but rather is producing a single subjective interpretation.
There’s nothing wrong with viewing the process of using Dramatica to analyze a movie as one of interpretation – of using logic to reason out the most compelling-sounding storyform. Philosophers do this all the time. But that’s not an empirical process and it doesn’t demonstrate the existence of a single objective storyform that is discernible from a finished product.
Hope that makes sense. Sorry for being long-winded, but it’s a tricky concept to get across.
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I understand what you are saying. I think this point is flawed:
Let me put it this way, I am sure that stories like this exist. Many people talk about needing a character that expresses an opposite view from the MC, and then follow this up by putting them in a similar situation but with a different philosophy. (Two lawyers: one works too hard, the other words too little.)
I just don’t think we’ve analyzed anything that looks like this.
There are a few reasons:
- Those stories might read poorly, so nobody makes or publishes them.
- If I give my MC blond hair in a world of brunettes & I give my IC the same problematic Situation this still wouldn’t mean that my MC and IC are both in Situation because the IC’s influence is what matters – not anything else. I think Mad Max: Fury Road is like this. Both Furiosa and Max are trying to escape and are essentially slaves, and so both in a Situation. [Apologies if I have their setup wrong, I can’t recall the specifics.] But, Furiosa’s influence is not based on her Situation. Max is influenced by her determination to get the herself and the other women out of there.
- Before the DUG meetings, most of us frequently have an idea of what we think the outcome is going to be. They are usually pretty close. None of us would ever claim they are perfect because they are usually whipped together in just a few minutes to get our minds working.
- For point #7, I reference you to A Very Christmas Monkey. I think this does have the MC and IC in the same domain. Mind you, it does not feel like a GAS when you watch it.
- I’m also certain that there are indeed several storyforms that can result in the same movie – but this is probably because most people can write better than they can stick to their storyform! So, they get pulled to the narrative in their head.
- I’m sure the fact that several movies have been “updated” does not give you much confidence, but I would argue this is happening because we are getting better at understanding the theory.
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I definitely think this is possible. I’m not a certified Story Expert yet but since taking Jim’s mentorship program, I’ve successfully got the exact same storyform as the Dramatica / Narrative First site several times without any hints. The ones I remember are Collateral, Star Trek (2009), Whiplash*, and Up In The Air**. I also came close with Iron Giant but was a bit off at the Problem level.
Now, there’s definitely some bias, because I’ve only tried this when I felt there was a strong storyform that’s worth going for. Still, the fact that someone can independently get the exact one storyform out of 32,768 possible means that it can’t be so subjective, right?
Now, the films in my list definitely strike me as the easier ones to analyze. So there remains the issue that some stories are more difficult than others, and those ones often need that group participation and consensus. But I think this is because the theory is still young (esp. compared to how long narratives have been around), and because even experts have blind spots that are difficult for them to account for, but are apparent to others. We’re all still learning.
* With Whiplash I was off on Driver and PS Style but that was because I was stupid and did the analysis at one a.m. immediately after watching the film. I’m pretty sure I would’ve got them right if I’d slept on it.
** Although Jim didn’t seem to have any issues with it, I felt Up In The Air screwed up the Judgment. My wife and I both disliked it because they left the Judgment too “up in the air” – maybe that was on purpose, but it screwed up the story for us.
decastell, this is in response to your question, “[Are] there… any movies in the database of hundreds of analyses that have all four throughlines but without all four domains?”
I’m hoping Bob Raskoph (who often contributes his highly mathematical and statistical perspectves to the discuss.dramatica forum) will notice this thread and answer.
True, but the big question for me is whether there’s really a single objective storyform that’s independently discernible from a finished movie or book by multiple people with sufficient training.
But would you say that you could take a new movie – not something especially out there but a reasonably mainstream and reasonably well-made film – give it to five people from the group and have them independently come up with, say, the same four throughlines in the same four domains with the same concerns? I’m not talking about getting down to the level of problem/solution/symptom/response or benchmarks, but just down to the level of concerns?
That’s certainly theoretically possible, but it actually seems more likely that many films simply don’t adhere to the four unique domains consistently through a movie. From an analytical standpoint, I think it would be more useful to identify “broken domains” within a film rather than treating them as if they’re all fitting perfectly into the model.
I would definitely agree, but again, that would be contingent on multiple people being able to do that.
I’m not sure one can have both an absolute certainty that every story has a single objective storyform and that storyform can be discerned from a finished product while simultaneously saying that because the theory is only around twenty years old, everyone’s still learning to apply it. Confidence in the former is contingent on the latter.
My hypothesis is that multiple storyforms can result in the same finished film because of the exigencies of the storytelling process (or as @MWollaeger put it: “most people can write better than they can stick to their storyform”). Because of this, once the film is made, in many if not most cases there is no longer a single objective storyform that can be identified at the exclusion of all others. In some cases there might be 2 or 3 storyforms that could account for the particular finished film, in others it might be much more.
My reason for thinking this is specifically because it seems as if independent experts come up with different storyforms and only later make them conform to each other specifically because there’s a belief that there must be one true objective storyform.
It would also make sense (to me at least) that there wouldn’t be a single objective storyform to be derived from a finished product precisely because most creators are allowing a wide range of factors into their decisions about each beat of a story. If you really go through in complete detail in all the movies in the database, would you really expect to find that the MC throughline of a given movie that’s been assigned the domain of Manipulation precisely follows the signpost sequence of “Developing a Plan” to “Conceiving an Idea” to “Playing a Role” to “Changing One’s Nature” (or whatever sequence the model dictates given the other variables)? Doesn’t it seem more likely that many if not most films have an act in which, for example, that MC domain isn’t fulfilled as it should but instead ends up with a signpost of “Doing” when the model would have said it should be “Playing a Role”? If that’s the case, then the absence of the perfectly formed film means there’s no singular objective storyform to be derived from the finished product. You’re going to get a number (sometimes very small, sometimes large) of storyforms that could have been the reasonable basis for the final result.
This doesn’t negate the value of Dramatica at all, nor even the value of analyzing films using the model. It just argues that in most cases there probably isn’t one absolute objective storyform to be identified from a finished product.
It seems likely that should be the case, but it’s probably rare for two main reasons.
First, strong narratives are self-reinforcing. If you have a story where lots of things are off, you can tell it’s not right but it’s hard to know how to fix it. But if you have a story where everything’s right except for MC Signpost 2, you’ll sense the problem in exactly that place and intuitively know how to fix it because everything else in the story will help guide you.
Second, even if there is a whole bunch of “doing” that happens in that act related to the MC, it would be the one moment of Being that would feel important – the part of the story’s skeleton that’s discernible beneath its fancy storytelling clothes.
Now, I’m assuming that your example is talking about a story where nearly everything fits a single storyform. It is certainly likely that there will be lots of movies where creators butt heads and don’t agree on things, have different visions of the story, or just aren’t telling a solid narrative from the get-go. But in these cases they don’t end up with every story point right except one; they end up with a bigger mess.
But they’re still trying to tell a good story…
I agree that it does seem absolutely crazy and insane that Dramatica can predict what it does – until you accept that it’s a model of the mind’s problem-solving, as is narrative itself. (It was hard for me to accept in the beginning, but then I did this experiment, which had only a 1 in 32 chance of succeeding.)
I apologize that most of my post is just assertions rather than ways you can verify things yourself. Maybe we need to design experiments where we validate Dramatica statistically? I’m sure it could be done. Teams of 2+ people analyzing films independently…
Down to the concern level? Sure.[quote=“decastell, post:48, topic:1266”]
That’s certainly theoretically possible, but it actually seems more likely that many films simply don’t adhere to the four unique domains consistently through a movie.
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You clearly have been spared the amount of “can you read my script” that many people in LA have endured. These are replete with poorly designed ideas, and the stories they produce are worse.
Anyway, and maybe this is your point – some authors let the storytelling overwhelm the storyform and the result is that things are not perfect. I think Hitchcock has a bunch of things like this, but I’ve never investigated it for sure.
Absolutely. This happens all the time. In fact, most of us watch the film several days before and kind of try and figure it out on our own (the way you suggest) and then we come in and see where we all think the source of conflict is.
When our arguments fall flat - when they don’t hold up to scrutiny from others - that’s when we come to an overall consensus.
This sort of independent analysis happens all the time. I’ve been doing it for years as a means of improving my understanding of narrative.
I will concede that labeling them “Broken Storyforms” is not the best – probably “Insufficient Storyforms” would be better, but at the time I wanted to be more obvious about the deficiencies of those films. At one time @crayzbrian came up with a quad of these that might clear up any confusion (hopefully he’ll share it here).
This isn’t what we do–we conform because the storyform we come up with is actually better than any other storyform. It’s actually demonstrably better BECAUSE of those implied story points. I feel like my post above about the implied story points was skipped over, but it’s really the most important part of this conversation.
True, but the whole concept of Dramatica is that it is based on the mind’s problem-solving process and therefore each and every one of us instinctively constructs creative works based on this process. The theory is, we can’t help but organize narrative into a storyform because we want it to conform to the way we think. We’re not intuitive storytellers – stories are intuitively us.
The line between these two is fuzzier than you might think, and ‘evidence via consensus’ is part of many otherwise “hard” sciences.
We have proof that the brain exists. There is extensive knowledge about synapses and brain functions and more than enough proof that the brain is the ‘thinking’ organ.
But we haven’t proved, in a lab, the existence of “The Mind.”
Yet that hasn’t stopped the fields of psychology or psychiatry from studying how the “Mind” works and how to help it when it breaks down. Narrative theory (Dramatica) finds itself in a similar place because it’s studying the same subject.
So why do people continue in these fields? Why are they trying to do hard science on a ‘soft’ subject? Because for the most part, they work.
Asked another way, why do I stick to Dramatica as it currently is? Because nothing else comes remotely close to explaining and unifying the wide variety of narratives that I have loved over the years.
The first Jim Hull article I read used the four throughlines to show why typical “Hero’s Journey” films feel related, and then within the same framework, it showed why decidedly non-hero’s journey films were also compelling. I’ve been hooked since.
Except that a storyform is not an instruction manual for building a Lego set, or any object you can easily observe, measure, and quantify. A storyform is a model of a single “Mind.” How do you discover what’s on someone’s mind?
You talk to them. You argue. You have a conversation.
And like a clinical psychologist, you have to separate what’s conscious (storytelling) from what’s unconscious (storyforming), and sometimes figure out if the patient is actually lying to you (obscuring the storyform). The average person is terrible at parsing this.
My point is that your suggestion for how to empirically prove the “one storyform to rule them all” hypothesis rests on the assumption that people can perfectly and robotically translate unconscious processes into conscious data sets, all on the first try. This is difficult even for trained professionals in ‘psych’ fields. It requires conversation, argumentation, revision, and yes consensus, to come to a final appreciation.
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There’s a lot of stuff to unpack there and terms that are getting conflated. I’ll start by confessing that I’m not a scientist, but having at least basic exposure to science in university, I’ll do my best.
In my life I’ve never heard of “evidence via consensus”. You have evidence and then it gets interpreted and that can lead to a consensus. Evidence is, pretty much by definition, outside of the interpretation.
Psychology validates hypotheses through empirical studies. It’s not done simply by theorizing or debating, but by devising experiments specifically designed to produce an objective measure (the evidence) that can then be interpreted.
Things may have changed since I was taking psych courses in university, but back then, there were no studies that showed that psychiatry was more effective at managing mental illness than any other active attempt on the part of the patient to seek help (e.g. seeing pastors, talking to spirit guides, or whatever else) except for drug therapies.
And doing “hard science” specifically means empirical studies, not philosophical reasoning or debate. When psychologists are performing ‘hard science’ on a ‘soft subject’, they’re subjecting theories to rigorous empirical experiments.
Again, a couple of things are really getting conflated here. You’re interchangeably using the Dramatica conceptual term of the “story mind” with a human mind. You talk to, argue with, and have a conversation with a human because that one person is the only one who can describe their thoughts. That’s what’s meant by ‘what’s on someone’s mind.’
Dramatica isn’t a person. You can’t “talk to, argue with, or have a conversation” with a movie. You’re having it with other people, none of whom are inside the movie or the figurative ‘mind’ that you’re referring to.
I don’t think this metaphor is serving you well here, which is why it’s generally not a good idea to construct a metaphor from something that’s similar to what it’s attempting to refer to (describing a cat through the metaphor of a cartoon cat isn’t likely to work well.)
Look, there’s a movie. It’s a real thing. It exists, can be watched and can be measured. It’s delivering a story – a subjective experience interpreted by the audience. Some aspects of a movie present a widely shared experience: most people watching Die Hard can tell you when you’re seeing the hero versus when you’re seeing the villain. Other aspects of a movie are less widely shared, such as whether the cause of the breakdown in the hero’s magic is his fault for his actions or his wife’s for not accepting him for who he is (or vice versa). Then you have a storyform – an abstract construct intended to map out the underlying characteristics of the story. Some aspects of a storyform will be easily discerned by those examining the movie, for example, almost everyone would readily identify the MC of Die Hard as Bruce Willis’s character. Other aspects will be less widely accepted, such as whether there’s only one IC (the cop), or two (the wife). I’m not saying it’s the latter – I’m just saying it’s not as self-evident.
The question is whether there’s a single, absolute, objective storyform that can be discerned from a finished movie.
No, because the psychiatrist doesn’t pretend to know with absolute certainty what your thoughts are even after talking to you. And the psychiatrist who goes and debates it with ten other psychiatrist also doesn’t know with absolute certainty what your thoughts are. They work on probabilities. Given what the patient is describing and other measurable factors, there’s strong evidence to suggest diagnosis A. There’s also evidence that it could be diagnosis B. Or C. They choose one based on a balance of probabilities and the relative risk of applicable treatments.
There’s a term for a psychiatrist who claims that through conversation they can discern with absolute certainty the precise thought in your head: a quack.
I’m not saying that for Dramatica to have value any five people have to instantly be able to independently achieve the same storyform after watching a movie. I’m saying that without that you need to be very hesitant about insisting that there’s a single, absolute and objective storyform behind a movie.
Dramatica provides tons of insights and benefits in the story creation process. It also poses fascinating and illuminating questions about finished works – ways for someone to reconsider what they thought they saw. You don’t have to treat it as a religious certainty to derive value from it. But if you do want to insist that it provide the one true explanation for the underpinnings of a film and that this manifests as a single, correct storyform, you aught to be able to demonstrate that with at least some attempt at empirical objectivity.
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