Thanks, @jhull, for reading and providing your thoughts! It’s much appreciated!
One of the things I see in my head is that field between structure and what’s on the page (or screen) and the audience as being something of a house of cards, each card representing an appreciation. Now, think of each being illuminated to the degree it’s resonating with the audience: the lower the engagement, the dimmer the light. The higher the engagement, the brighter. As mentioned in the theory itself, a film like The Room can still be engaging despite its obvious story issues. It has “cards” completely missing, but for those trying to tell something more meaningful, the Quality of illumination gives caution to where the story’s coherence is under stress.
The visual popped into my head as it reminded me of my plans to create “heat” maps for a campus of buildings’ health at a glance, back when I was integrating a bunch of software for Facilities Management.
As for appreciations, I’m going to go off the top of my head from the story creation I shared here for Far End of the Black script creation. Mapping out the appreciations you noted might look like this:
1. Issue vs. Counterpoint: The “Value” Dissonance
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The Issue (Survival): This is the Static Quality (Pirsig). It is the biological drive to stay alive at any cost.
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The Counterpoint (Sacrifice): This is the Dynamic Quality. It introduces the “Greater Good” argument that challenges the base instinct of survival.
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The Dissonance: When the scientist infects herself, she forces the audience into a neurochemical “split.” We want her to Survive (Dopamine/Self-preservation), but her Sacrifice triggers a moral valuation (Oxytocin/Social cohesion). The dissonance is the friction between these two internal “circuits.”
2. Problem/Symptom/Response: The “Engine” Dissonance
This is where the audience’s Predictive Processing (Neuroscience) gets hijacked.
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The Problem (Faith): This is the root “leak.” Because there is a lack of faith (in the science, in each other, or in the future), the system is broken.
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The Symptom (The Disease/Infected): This is what everyone thinks is the problem. It’s the visible “red light” blinking on the dashboard.
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The Response (The Lottery): This is the “House of Cards” in action. The characters respond to the disease (Symptom) with a lottery, but because they aren’t addressing the root Faith (Problem), the lottery actually increases the dissonance.
The Mapping: The “Lottery” creates a biological stress response. The audience’s brain is trying to “solve” the story by looking for a cure, but the characters are busy “responding” with a forced sacrificial lottery. That gap between what the audience knows is needed (Faith/The Antigen) and what the characters are doing (The Lottery) is engineered to be a pressurized engagement field — not to mention the audience’s own doubts based on the events that take place.
3. MC vs. IC: The “Mirror” Pressure
By making the scientist and the husband estranged, the Relationship Story (RS) is engineered with maximum resistance.
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The Husband (MC): He is tasked with Survival (protecting the group).
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The Wife (IC): She embodies Sacrifice (infecting herself to save the work-in-progress vaccination when their compound comes under attack).
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The Pressure: Every time he tries to save her, he’s fighting against the “Greater Good.” Every time she pushes for the antigen, she’s “killing” her family of scientists. This becomes a structural mandate that keeps the lightbulb burning at 100% because the two perspectives are mutually exclusive.
Much of what I just wrote was structured with Dramatica, but much of the cognitive dissonance angle, save the conceit of survival/sacrifice, never really crossed my mind at the time until this theory with dissonance being an engine. People have had very strong reactions to the script. As you can see, its construct brings about a moral quandary that only deepens as the surviving pool gets smaller — and yet, what plays out is exactly what happens naturally in our bodies every moment of our lives: programmed cellular suicide to ensure the survival of new, healthy cells.
I think, perhaps more than anything, this might help writers to focus on dissonance in their story conceit to ensure it plays out entirely and in a way that keeps the proverbial house of cards not just standing, but fully illuminated.
The story’s genesis was essentially taking The Shawshank Redemption’s idea of hope in a hopeless place, and turning it into faith in a faithless place, where man has lost faith in his humanity.
I’m down for pressure-testing. As noted in the essays, this theory is, by Pirsig’s Quality standard, a work in progress. Everything that’s Dynamic was once Static. The goal should be to keep pushing forward.