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.
