I seem to have done you a disservice here. My apologies.
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I wasn’t sure where you were going with the first couple posts so my comments probably weren’t valid anyway. You said you weren’t doing it as a fun exercise, but I totally was.
Maybe it’s because I’ve just read through a 7 part series on Dramaticapedia about Narrative Dynamics and now everything is going to look like a dynamic, but I’m going to say that bulk of time spent feels more like a dynamic than part of the structure.
My sense is that it’s about which issue is being dealt with. All the non-Situation examples you gave still felt like they were dealing with being stuck in a well because they were about either changing the Situation or accepting it.
For the record, this is the question I think was being answered. How being stuck in a well might not be in Situation.
And this one.
Yes, because if the MC throughline is about being stuck in a well, then any other problems (whether they appear attitudinal, psychological, or physical, like self esteem or falling) necessarily find their source in being stuck in a well. That’s what being an MC throughline means.
But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have an MC with a psychological problem as the source of his inequity also be stuck in a well for the entirety of the story. I’m not looking at a particular storyform, but I can see a Benchmark being about this guy with low self esteem measuring his progress by how close he is to telling the Universe to jump off a cliff with its signs that he should give up and die and then he goes ahead and climbs out. And then getting out of the well might illustrate a judgment of Good. So being stuck in a well can still be structurally important to the MC throughline without being the source of the problem. At least I think it can.
Holy Crap, this is an astonishingly bad example of a Mind:Contemplation story. I’m going to open up a new thread about it.
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I know there’s already a thread where Sixth Sense is thoroughly discussed, but I wasn’t a part of it and would love to discuss the movie more if anyone cares to. Just leaving that out there…
I think that particular phrasing is tautological (in other words, “about” is being used to mean the same thing as “finding their source in”.
Maybe there’s a different and more practical way for me to pose this question about domain delineation within Dramatica:
We can probably all name movies that fail to be Grand Argument Stories because they’re missing a throughline (there’s a big OS about aliens hunting humans for sport, an MC who’s being hunted, but maybe there’s no IC who ever challenges the MC to change his approach, or perhaps there’s no meaningful RS).
Can anyone, however, name any movie that has all four throughlines but which fails to be a Grand Argument Story because more than one of those throughlines is in the same domain?
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Here’s my take. I started to say this earlier but didn’t really think it applied until now.
Let’s say you have an idea about a guy stuck in a well and you jot that down as an MC Situation. Then you have an idea about an asteroid headed right toward earth that you want to add to this story. Now you have an OS of Situation.
I don’t think this necessarily gives you two throughlines in the same domain. I think instead the OS cannibalizes the MC meaning your MC player’s problem with the well is now an OS problem because they’re both Situation. The “they” perspective is that they are dealing with a Situation even if everyone isnt dealing with the same Situation.
So now you have a broken story not because you have two throughlines in the same domain, but because you have no personal problem for the MC.
You eventually add a problem that only the MC player is dealing with and write the story. Then I try to analyze your idea and I see that your MC player is the only one dealing with being stuck in a well. But he’s also the only one dealing with low self esteem. Now I have to try to pull those threads apart to see which is the MC throughline and which the OS, which is difficult because I suck at analyzing things and I’m still not sure if the OS about the asteroid is Situation or Activity.
(Edit: I realize this doesn’t fully answer your question, didn’t necessarily mean it to)
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This is a fantastic question.
It is possible that “Curious George: A Very Monkey Christmas” falls into this description. It is perhaps more likely that there is an OS, and the two major characters (George, the Man in the Yellow Hat) have threads that would both be the same domain, and there is no RS.
Does anyone here have very young kids and want to watch it and find out? It’s almost the season!
Edit: I think one reason this might not happen very often, is that broken stories can be seen from multiple perspectives… they aren’t locked down, so to speak. Which means they no longer always feel like they have four clearly delineated domains.
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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.