From a thread discussing the Domains of a Guy Stuck in a Well, reposting here because its an important concept of the theory–the importance of implied story points when determining perspective:
I know that movie like the back of my hand, and I’m not at all convinced that Malcolm is a be-er. While he may seem passive on the surface, that’s not a function of him preferring to adapt himself to his environment – it’s because he’s a ghost. He never tries to adapt himself internally to his inability to act upon the world – in fact, he does everything possible to make a difference externally. He’s determined to save Cole (an external solution) in order to make up for failing to save his previous patient.
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.
No, I read it, but I didn’t find the argument convincing (I’m pretty sure if you took Malcolm out of limbo – made it so he wasn’t dead – that his problems would be resolved.) However maybe it is correct. I can see an argument for both because, ultimately, the proximate source of Malcolm’s problems is in how he perceives himself rather than his actual state of affairs. Both make sense, both are defensible in the material that’s actually in the movie itself, and so for me neither is the one true storyform. They exist on a probability curve, with some possible storyforms having a 0% chance of resulting in that movie, and others having much higher ones.
I think there’s merit to this way of thinking, but I don’t agree with the idea that it’s either absolutely true or renders a single objective storyform. Think of the massive effect an editor has on the final film. Even just that: the role of the editor, can completely alter what the film appears to be saying. Each editor, almost as much as anyone else in the process, can radically affect what will later be perceived as the underlying storyform. Blade Runner (the original) has a half-dozen different “director’s cuts”, and each one, I believe, alters the story in important ways. You could argue that the editor is also following the mind’s problem-solving process, which is fine, but then you can’t refer to the single objective storyform that represents the author’s intent – what you’re identifying is the editor’s intent. Maybe in some cases it only alters something at the element level, perhaps the benchmarks or signposts, but it does change the perceived storyform.
Have you ever done this as a formal experiment? Take five Dramatica users group members, give them each the same three films that none have watched, and then have everyone independently upload their storyforms? When I watch the user’s group videos, it doesn’t sound like everyone’s starting with the same domains and concerns. Maybe I’m only hearing the outliers speak up, but I usually get the sense that people started from a range of ideas about what the domains and concerns were.
This is what is meant by the implied story points.
Yes, you can make an argument for both, absolutely. But when you look at the implied story points, the other arguments don’t hold up.
If the area of conflict from Malcom’s perspective is in Mind, that implies Cole’s influence on him comes from Universe. This holds up: Cole can’t help but be in the presence of dead people…this problematic perspective eventually draws Malcom to his Changed Resolve.
If the area of conflict from Malcom’s perspective is in Universe–as you suggest with taking him “out of limbo”, that implies that Cole’s influence on him emanates from Mind. This does not hold up: Cole’s mindset and the mindset around him does not directly challenge Malcom to draw him to a place of a Changed Resolve.
It’s the relationship between all the perspectives and story points within that create the storyform.
Totally disagree. If you take Cole out of his situation (as you put it, “Cole can’t help but be in the presence of dead people”) you still have a sad, lonely kid – the same kind of kid who Malcolm failed to save in the beginning of the story. Malcolm doesn’t become involved in Cole’s case because he thinks the kid’s haunted. He does it because he thinks Cole’s got psychological issues stemming from his inability to relate to other kids. It’s only when Cole starts to reach out to people: taking the risk on the ghost girl in his tent and such, that he solves his problems – coincidentally, that’s also how he solves his problems of isolation as we see at the end in the school when he’s running off to hang out with the other kids.
Now, I’m pretty sure you’re going to tell me I’m wrong, or misinterpreting what I’m seeing in the movie, and that’s fine. At the end of the day, the question of objectivity isn’t whether or not I agree with something, but whether it’s objectively measurable. If five people trained to use a thermometer get the same result, the thermometer is producing an objective measurement. If five people trained to use a thermometer don’t get the same result until they’ve all debated what they think they saw and reach consensus, then the thermometer ain’t doing the job.
This is why I keep coming back to the same point: if five dramatica experts all independently come up with the same throughlines, domains, and concerns after watching a movie, then the process of interpretation is producing an objective result. We might debate whether the model is wrong in some other sense, but not whether or not it produces objective measurements of a story. But I’m really not seeing evidence for that – either in forum discussions on movies or in the DUG videos.
I don’t want to harp on this forever. I’m getting the sense that you and @MWollaeger are pretty sure that the group does independently and consistently come up with identical storyforms down to the concern level. So if that’s the case, my theory about storyforms being on a continuum of probability in their likelihood of resulting in the finished movie is moot until such time as that assertion about people all coming up with the storyform is either shown to be true or false.
Parents are divorced, he’s got no friends. Note the scene early on with Tommy who pretends to be taking him to school and then later reveals it’s an act. More importantly, as the IC, his influence on Malcolm comes from Malcolm’s belief that the kid’s got an emotional disorder, not that he sees ghosts. Cole only tells him at about the 49min mark. Cole pressures Malcolm to change not because he’s in the situation of having this ability, but because of his fixed attitude that ghosts are real and are haunting them. Even if Cole wasn’t haunted, but still believed ghosts were out to get him, he’d still be pushing against Malcolm.
I’m not saying your assignment of the situation domain to Cole as the IC is necessarily wrong, only that it’s not objectively the only way to arrive at this finished movie. It also doesn’t negate the possibility that Malcolm is also in situation (except in so far as there’s a conviction that the model doesn’t allow for that.) The fact that for a long time the “official” storyform had Malcolm in situation would seem to corroborate that possibility. As you said, you proposed a better storyform, but the boundaries of what is allowed to be proposed requires that only one throughline be in situation. Thus the model is requiring a specific outcome that’s actually different from what might otherwise be how people would interpret it: that both Cole and Malcolm are in troublesome situations.
YAY!!!
(I know this discussion is about objectivity rather than Sixth Sense, but I’ll make a point to that at the end)
If Malcolm was alive the whole time, wouldn’t he still have the problem that he couldn’t help Vincent? And wouldn’t he still need to help Cole as a way to make up for that?
If you take Cole out of his situation, he’s no longer afraid, no longer keeping a secret[quote=“decastell, post:54, topic:1266”]
Malcolm doesn’t become involved in Cole’s case because he thinks the kid’s haunted. He does it because he thinks Cole’s got psychological issues stemming from his inability to relate to other kids.
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Malcolm thinks that. But that doesn’t mean the Story Mind agrees. Malcolm thinks Cole has a psychological problem, but we know that he has a ghost problem. Malcolm doesn’t end up helping Cole by getting him to relate to other kids in his class. He helps him by showing him how to deal with the scary ghosts so that they’re no longer scary.
Once Cole is able to deal with his situation of being surrounded by dead people, he’s no longer afraid and can share his secret. Hanging out with other kids isn’t the resolution of his problem, it’s showing that his part of the story ended in success (or maybe good? not sure which you use to describe an IC). If he never started helping the ghosts and was still afraid of them, but other kids didn’t think he was weird and hung out with him, he’d still have the problem of being afraid of the ghosts.
Once Cole realizes that he can help the ghosts in order to deal with his own situation, he is then able to help Malcolm by telling him to talk to his wife while she’s asleep. He’s using knowledge gained from his own situation to influence Malcolm. It’s this conversation Malcolm has with his sleeping wife that leads directly to Malcolm seeing what he didn’t want to see so that he flips from a Fixed Attitude perspective to a Situation perspective.
I’m pretty sure the reason that Cole can be seen in Situation and Fixed Attitude and that Malcolm can be seen in Fixed Attitude and Situation is because having an inequity means the whole quad is upset. So even at the Domain level you can see things that look like problems in all four corners, but only one of those is the source of the problem. A Situation of seeing ghosts leads to a Mindset of being afraid and keeping secrets. But that problem looks like an Activity of being chased/haunted by ghosts. A response of helping the ghosts work through their issues and changing one’s Psychology-way one thinks about ghosts-follows.
A mindset that you need to help someone to make up for the one you didn’t help leads to a situation of being stuck in limbo. But it appears as a problem of giving psychological advise and a response of helping the kid to go around town showing tapes to dead girls dads and doing things to help the ghosts follows.
I love the talk about probability waves. It’s very Quantum Dramatica. I think I’m more on the side of “there’s one objective storyform” but I wondered for a while if one story might not be able to come from multiple storyforms. I think part of the reason it’s so hard to find the objective storyform is partially because, as I said above, I think all four boxes in a quad are upset by inequity and that can make it difficult to determine the source. But also, because all of the quads consist of different views of/perspectives on KTAD. That means an objective exploration of a single problem is going to look very similar to many other similar explorations of that problem.
The way I see it, a piece of alien technology would be made in a single objective manner, but in reverse engineering it, we might come up with many ways to approximate the same technology. We might even come up with an approximation that’s so close that we think we’ve replicated it. But only one way would actually replicate it.
Once Einstein released his theory of relativity, did everyone immediately have an objective way to measure their use of it? Or did they have to explore the theory and discover objective ways to measure things? (this question isn’t making a point, i’m just asking, i really don’t know)
Malcolm helps Cole by getting him to see the ghosts not as enemies but as people he can help if he listens to them. If Cole were simply imagining the ghosts, Malcolm might well use the same technique, because the root of Cole’s problem is how he sees those outside himself, not the situation he’s in. Again, though, the opposite holds equally true to me – that Cole’s in a troublesome situation and Malcolm just needs to stop seeing himself as alive. Thematically that seems kind of shallow to me, but heck, I can go with it.
But I really don’t want to get into an extended debate about the Sixth Sense (though I’m not saying anyone else shouldn’t be go ahead and do so, though perhaps it warrants its own thread), simply because that wouldn’t be any more helpful to the argument than reopening the dreaded Captain America: Civil War debate. People come in with various positions, all of which are defensible from little pieces here and there in the film, and it ends when everyone gets tired enough to accept one particular storyform (or at least, to stop disputing it.)
I’ll repeat again: the only real question (for me) is whether the Dramatica analytical process reliably produces the same storyform across independent observers. Whether people later convince each other to take a different position is irrelevant to that question.
Dramatica has two principal uses: enabling writers to create more coherent stories, and analyzing existing works. For me, the latter has no utility other than that it’s constantly, constantly referred to as the means to understand how to use the model for creating new stories. But that’s only helpful if the analytical process consistently produces the same results across observers. Otherwise you don’t arrive at the right understanding, you simply have to accept it as coming from a higher authority.
You’re always supposed to be looking for the source of conflict from each perspective. The difference is really simple:
a) I’m sad and lonely because I see dead people (IC in Universe)
b) I see dead people because I’m sad and lonely (IC in Mind)
The fact that you bring up Cole not telling him until the 49 minute mark is really telling: you’re thinking of structure subjectively, from the point of view of the characters, which always seems to be at the root of these conversations.
it doesn’t matter that Malcom doesn’t know the extent of Cole’s influence until the 49 minute mark–when it does happen it reframes everything that happened before giving Malcom a better understanding.
I seriously don’t get this higher authority angle.
The only higher authority is the storyform for which the implied choices more accurately portray the source of conflict in the story.
We were inaccurate about The Sixth Sense–with Chris Huntley in the room!
He signed off on the original storyform in '99 and it was fine until a bunch of twenty-year olds made a more convincing argument.
If anything, I feel like this openness towards a better argument, IS the best higher authority.
The Terminator’s original storyform was off, but again – this was '96. Dramatica was only two years in the making.
I was off about Doubt and Moonlight and The King’s Speech. @keypayton was the one who pointed out a more convincing argument for that last film and I was pissed! I had ten years on him and really beat myself up over how wrong I was and how this new guy basically schooled me.
But that’s when I decided I wanted to be accurate–not right–with all these things and just opened myself up to being wrong occasionally (only occasionally!).
I’m sure there are other ones - personally, I think the official Reservoir Dogs storyform is off and when I have the time will develop the argument to support my claim. I’m sure there are more, in fact–if anyone finds something deficient about the storyforms I post on my site or on the official site, by all means, come back with something better. I jotted down @mlucas comment about Up in the Air because I respect his comprehension of the theory and will revisit that film to see what he said.
With that in mind, I don’t agree with this at all:
But that’s only helpful if the analytical process consistently produces the same results across observers
I’d much rather have writers argue their points-of-view and see for themselves the deficiencies in their line of thinking.
You want to hear something super embarrassing? Listen to the podcast for Ida up until the point about the Main Character Resolve. You would think someone who has been studying the theory for twenty years, taught it for ten, and makes a living engaging with the theory every single day would be able to get something as simple as that right.
a) I think I’m alive because I’m in limbo (MC in Universe)
b) I’m in limbo because I think I’m alive (MC in Mind)
Try this thought experiment: if the Dramatica model allowed for two throughlines to be in the same domain, would you still be absolutely convinced that the MC for Sixth Sense was in Fixed attitude (Mind)?
If your answer to that question is yes, keep in mind that people were equally absolutely sure about Sixth Sense when the MC was in Situation (Universe) before.
I would argue that it’s at the root of these conversations because it’s the thing that’s actually real – it’s on the screen – which makes it very different from the idea of a theoretical abstract structure underpinning the movie that the interpreter is projecting onto the movie.
I’d also make the argument that the point is not subjective: the IC’s role only exists in terms of their influence on the MC. Until that point in the movie (when Cole is in hospital), the external reality of him seeing ghosts has never had an impact on Malcolm – it’s always been Cole’s belief that he’s haunted that’s impacted Malcolm.
Again, we can go back and forth on this till the cows come home, with me identifying things happening or being said in the movie and you telling me they’re irrelevant to the objective structure because they’re happening from the point of view of characters, but that objective structure exists only as a though experiment in the mind of the interpreter if it can’t be identified through the things that are actually on the screen and – most importantly – the impact of those elements on the audience.
I’ll try to explain it better
No, in this context it’s the storyform for which the implied choices (which is a somewhat dubious term here – implication by definition requires subjectivity for interpretation) more accurately portray the source of conflict in the story within the bounds set by the current version of Dramatica.
That conviction that there must always be all four domains uniquely represented across throughlines means you’re automatically excluding explanations in which, for example, both the IC and MC are in situation. I’m not saying they should be, or that it makes a movie equally good, but simply that it’s entirely possible that many if not most finished movies or books don’t perfectly conform to any one storyform, and thus that more than one storyform can have a near-equal probability of being the foundation, engine, or whatever other metaphor we might choose, for creating that finished product.
At which point what happened? You went to Chris, presented the new storyform, and once he agreed, it became canon. That’s the definition of there being a single authority (nothing against Chris here – I’d happily pick him as a sole authority for many things). An objective fact is not dependent on any ultimate human arbitrator but rather on the empirical replicability of that experiment. I’ll say it again, and a thousand times more if needs be: it’s whether multiple trained people consistently and independently arrive at the same measurement.
A group coming together to revisit and then redefine the single true objective storyform for a movie isn’t an objective process – it’s a conclave. It’s how they elect popes and change church doctrine. It’s a response to changes in interpretation, but not the interpretive act itself. That’s the thing I’m getting at here: the interpretive process for arriving at a storyform using Dramatica as the microscope, and whether people trained to use that microscope will consistently see the same thing independently.
We’re talking about the difference between philosophical reasoning and empirical measurement. The former is about identifying possibilities that make logical sense, the latter about measuring external reality. When you assert that there’s a single absolute objective storyform to be found in each finished movie, you need to demonstrate that empirically, not through argumentation. In other words, you start with the hypothesis: “We surmise that every film or book containing a complete story is based on a single, objective storyform that conforms to the Dramatica model.” You then devise the experiment that would confirm or deny the hypothesis.
My hypothesis is that there are multiple Dramatica storyforms that can account for a finished film or book. The basis of this is in the way that when multiple users discuss a particular movie on the forums, they generally come up with differing storyforms. That’s in no way conclusive, but it does provide a reason to question the idea of there being a single objective storyform.
I left out the other Throughline because I figured it was already understood but:
a) I think I’m alive because I’m in limbo (MC in Universe)
a) I see dead people because I’m sad and lonely (IC in Mind)
OR
b) I can’t communicate with my wife because I think I’m alive (MC in Mind)
b) I’m sad and lonely because I see dead people (IC in Universe)
Is there anyone reading this who thinks Cole sees dead people because he is sad and lonely? If so, can you please point me to evidence of this within the film?
I modified the definition of the MC in the second example because his problem is the apparent dissolution of his marriage, not that he’s in limbo.
