The Domains of a Guy Stuck in a Well

theory
#21

Okay, fair enough.

I think your question is almost too simple to yield a relevant answer. So, the answer you got from Jim is right, but I’m not sure it’s exactly useful. Did it clarify anything for you?

You have set up a rigid inequity (he’s stuck in a well) but since it’s isn’t grounded in anything, it’s too easy to make into something else when put into the context of a richer story. That’s why I can’t give a Yes or No answer.

A Situation is a problem when a fixed, external thing forces a character into a perspective. After this, I have to go with examples:

A guy falls into a well. He gets saved from the well. Now he’s got the reputation of a guy who fell into a well. He’s no longer in the well, but he’s still in the same Situation. But the only real way to know this, to express it, is to do something where this is a problem. He can’t get into a club, because the bouncer thinks it will make the club look bad.

A guy falls into a well. (I’m going to write out a Mind:Contemplation story here.) He thinks of himself very highly, so much so that he can’t imagine people won’t come looking for him. But time passes and he starts to doubt. The problem, he realizes, is that he has reduced his understanding of the situation as something based entirely on his ego and how much he thinks other people like him. But after doing some reevaluation (“I did get rejected by Jennifer when I asked her out”) and some evaluation (“I think I’m getting hypothermic.”) he comes around to the idea that he’d really better start a new plan. Voila! He starts – Production – screaming!
Now, this would work as a short story. But I bet once you wrote it out, somebody could come along and say, "Hey … I see Future (he wants to get out), Past (Jennifer rejected him), Progress (“I’m getting cold”) and Present (time passes).
So, it really matters to put these things into a larger context, or they lack the perspectives necessary for a Grand Argument Story, and for helping you understand the tools of a Grand Argument. If you put this into a GAS, you’d have to consider so many other things (how did he get into the well?), and this bit would get put into its place.

PS. It’s not bad that this little thing can get reframed as Situation, even when it was considered as Mind. It’s not a complete story, and it’s not trying to be one.
PPS. I did not plan ahead to make this something I could reframe as a Situation. I just improvised a paragraph while walking through the Theme Chart. I think that’s cool that it so easy shifted from one to the other!
PPPS. M. Night Shyamalan has our favorite stuck-in-limbo character (Malcolm in The 6th Sense) but he’s a be-er, and not in a Situation. This fooled a lot of people for a long time.

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#22

I didn’t contradict Jim, or at least didn’t mean to. If your MC throughline is “guy stuck in a well”, that’s Situation. If stuck in a well is just storytelling as in my example or @Khodus, (if the source of the problem is “being eaten alive” it doesn’t matter if you’re stuck in a well being eaten by rats or stuck in a tree being eaten by bears) then your throughline is no longer about being stuck in a well even if the storytelling includes that.

My second post, the one you mention is basically like the example you gave, admittedly might not have worked. But it was an attempt to switch the problem from stuck in a well to self esteem.

#23

Hey @decastell I think the reason there is confusion in this thread is because there are two very different questions being discussed. I think you might be thinking they are the same question, when they aren’t.

Jim was answering the question: If the source of an MC’s personal issues is being stuck in a well, is the MC Domain always Situation? Obviously, the answer is yes.

Then that got twisted into: If an MC is stuck in a well, is the MC Domain automatically Situation? And everyone is saying, it depends.

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#24

I’m inclined to agree: a guy stuck in a well is in situation, period, full stop. As Jim said, the inequity – the thing that unbalanced was previously the norm – was getting stuck in the well, and therefore it’s situation. Period. Full stop.

So the heuristic this sets up in applying Dramatica’s domains to throughlines would be that the nature of that throughline’s inequity – the thing that changed the status quo – defines the domain. A guy who gets stuck on a spaceship is in situation. A guy who was already stuck on a spaceship but has now lost his mind and can no longer tell fact from fantasy is in Manipulation.

Absolutely correct, but here I’m assuming the other throughlines will be added to the story. I just didn’t want to get lost in the weeds of “you have to look at all four throughlines” because the point of the question is to discern whether some scenarios must be in a particular domain.

Definitely. It tells me that if I have an MC throughline about a guy stuck in a well, then I can’t have an OS throughline about people being stuck in a town beneath a giant dome. Both throughlines are clearly in Situation and thus would break the Dramatica model of story – that the story itself would likely run into problems because both throughlines are, at that broadest level, about being stuck in a place. (Note, I’m not talking about a story with an OS about people feeling stuck in a town because they view it as a dead end.)

Okay, but that’s categorically different from Jim’s response.

I’ll go through your examples here:

Not the same thing. I’m talking about a story in which a guy gets stuck in a well, not a story in which during chapter one he gets stuck in the well, in chapter two he gets out, and then the rest of the book involves his reputation.

So far as I can tell, from Jim’s response (and I’m sorry to keep using poor Jim’s name in vain here), that would still have the MC in Situation. The inequity is that he’s stuck in the well. Take him out of the well, and his life goes on as it did before.

Again, that may be true, but it’s contrary to the previous assertion. Also, I think it would be highly problematic in terms of the notion of a grand argument story requiring four domains, because it makes it almost impossible to identify a story that has four throughlines (OS, MC, RS, IC) but does not give them unique domains – you’d be able to just say, “well, because a town full of people living under a dome is situation, I’m treating the MC being stuck in a well as manipulation.” It means the notion of uniquely applied domains is irrelevant – one can just fudge it in the interpretation after the fact.

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.

We could, of course, argue it until the cows come home, but the fact that it “fooled a lot of people for a long time” is a pretty good indicator that the model is not especially good at producing an objective determination about a film – that it ends up being a matter of gradual consensus. At some point any analytical tool has to be able to produce the same result even if different (sufficiently trained) people apply it.

#25

Nope. The question was:

Jim’s reply was:

This interchangeable use of terms like “source” turns something that I suspect is meant to be very specific into something untenably vague. It sends you down the rabbit hole of either why did the guy get stuck in the well, or why is being stuck in a well a problem, and you can recursively keep asking both those questions endlessly.

The suspicion I’m coming to is that the Dramatica throughline domains may not be a precise delineator within a story. One can generally fudge them together by deciding one scene is more important than another, but that ends up becoming a subjective determination about which scenes “feel” more important than others.

This doesn’t in any way inhibit Dramatica’s value for creating new stories, or for helping the writer see gaps in their work, because the writer is always able to make the choice about which scenes or moments within any given throughline are most important and thus delineate the domains. But for reverse-engineering a storyform from a finished film (in which only the story telling can be observed), I’m not seeing evidence that the model can produce an objective and replicable result.

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#26

Totally agree: if the bulk of the movie is about someone in danger of being eaten alive by a giant rat, then the OS is in Activity. If the bulk of the movie is about someone stuck in a well, and the rat is just one of the many dangers, then it’s about a Situation. My sense is that it comes down to where the movie spends the bulk of its time: if “the dreadful rat” is one scene in a movie about a guy stuck in a well, then it’s Situation. If “stuck down a well while trying to escape the rat” is just the second act of the movie about a guy being pursued by a man-eater, then it’s in Activity.

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#27

I seem to have done you a disservice here. My apologies.

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#28

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.

#29

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.

#30

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.

#31

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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#32

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…

The Domains of The Sixth Sense
#33

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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#34

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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#35

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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Curious George: A Very Monkey Christmas
#36

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!

#37

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?

#38

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.

#39

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.

#40

@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.