5.01.2007

Narrative Complexity and Condensation

WHEREIN THE DROLL BLOGGER CONTEMPLATES THE WAXING AND WANING OF NARRATIVE FORMS

My friend Randy gave me a ride home last night and we somehow got on the topic of Joost and, well, the future of television. He told me that Sony was starting to offer old Starsky & Hutch and Charlie's Angels episodes on the new "tubes", but -- and here's the kicker -- with each episode edited down to 3 to 5 minutes!

That's when I almost dropped my falafel sandwich. An hour down to five minutes? (I later found the NYTimes article which confirms this. Apparently they're called "minisodes".) Then I started to think about how this might be possible.

Television (in that era) was formulaic, to say the least. But then again, isn't that what narrative structure is all about? Beginning -> Middle -> End. A random sampling of taken from the Charlie's Angels episode guide affirms this adherence to the form:
Consenting Adults
Episode Number: 10
Season Num: 1
First Aired: Wednesday December 8, 1976


(Beginning) A prostitute supplied by a computer dating service keeps an antique dealer preoccupied while his store is burglarized of priceless art objects. One of the stolen items is a ceramic frog, stuffed with smuggled diamonds - belonging to a ruthless crime syndicate boss. Thinking he is lying about the thefts, the enraged kingpin kidnaps the antique dealer and Charlie's Angels enter the case. (Middle) Jill infiltrates the dating service posing as a hooker but finds that the prostitute involved in the burglary has led the crime boss to the diamonds. In a last ditch effort to gain evidence, Angels Sabrina and Jill disguise themselves as veterinarians and steal the syndicate chieftain's championship racehorse. The chieftain agrees to meet the Angels in the park and turn over the diamonds in exchange for his horse. (End) In the exciting climax, Angel Jill must make a getaway with the evidence on her skateboard - chased by a syndicate hit man.

So if it was so formulaic, why were we glued to the teevee back then?

Hypothesis 1:
Quoth Farah Fawcett (Majors): "When the show was number three, I figured it was our acting. When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra." (They had computer dating in 1976?)

Hypothesis 2:
We are suckers for resolution. We like things tied up neatly in a bundle. Closure.

The Field Paradigm: How to Write a Movie in Three Acts
Anyone who's tried to write a screenplay should have heard of Syd Field. Here is his algorithm for a basic moviefilm:

In this structure, a film must begin with about half an hour of 'setup' information before the protagonist experiences a 'turning point' that gives him or her a goal that must be achieved. Approximately half the movie's running time must then be taken up with the protagonist's struggle to achieve his or her goal: this is the 'Confrontation' period. Field also refers, sometimes, to the 'Midpoint', a more subtle turning point that should happen in the middle (approximately at page 60 of a written screenplay) of the Confrontation, which is often an apparently devastating reversal of the protagonist's fortune. The final quarter of the film depicts a climactic struggle by the protagonist to finally achieve (or not achieve) his or her goal and the aftermath of this struggle.
(from the Wikipedia entry on Syd Field)


My former boss at FEED Magazine, Steven Johnson, laid out a more comprehensive theory in his book (Everything Bad Is Good For You, and in the NYTimes Magazine) about how narratives on television are getting more novelistic, ie, more complex, and he shows their change over time by plotting their storylines visually. (Each row is a storyline.)

Starsky and Hutch


Hill Street Blues


The Sopranos


BTW, here's the "Seven Minute Sopranos", a brilliant work of editry and narrative condensation (which essentially validated the "minisode" idea to the Sony execs) and is a time-based visualization of the above graphic (70 hours down to 7 minutes):



Not exactly straightforward. It's more of a refresher rather than a digest, since it's pretty impossible to consume this without having some familiarity with the characters and setup. (Can somebody please do this for Six Feet Under? Great. Thanks.)

Which reminds me, in Wolf's Rain, the next anime series that Aya and I have moved onto, the entire 3rd DVD (called "Recollection") is essentially a re-hash of all of the action up until that point, with each episode a different re-edit from the perspective of a different character told in voiceover. It smacked of either a writer's strike or some sort of behind-the-scenes turmoil, though it is de rigeur in most anime and long serial television to do the occasional quick recap to bring the audience up to speed. But four entire episodes of recap (for shame!) felt like the time in seventh grade I cobbled together a five page book report, two pages of which consisted of direct quotes from the book. BAD.

The Right Length
I agree with Steven's argument, which he puts forth in his "Snacklash" piece in the "Snack Attack" Issue of Wired, that "freed from the time restrictions of traditional media, we're developing a more nuanced awareness of the right length for different kinds of cultural experiences." We've been doing this kind of narrative condensation ("snacking") for a long time now with print media (Cliff's Notes, Readers' Digest).

Is it a surprise that the most complex narratives are found in the least complex of media (the book)?

Narrative, in three dimensions
Yesterday Kottke pointed to this collection of images of Will Self's writing room, which is an explosion of post-it notes and maps:




It reminded me of William Faulkner's room in Rowan Oak:




The legend is that, in writing A Fable, the plot became so entangled and intricate that Faulkner had to resort to scribbling the chronology of the seven days over which the novel took place on the walls of his office in Rowan Oak, his antebellum house in Oxford, Mississippi.

(At this point the blogger had to return to his day job and close out this post.)

UP NEXT!

CRINGE as a publisher makes short shrift of the classics!

MARVEL as Tristram Shandy tries to visualize its own narrative structure!

1 comment:

Last Day Emails said...

I have post-its all over one of the walls in my office. They are arranged chronologically left to right, and also by entity per stratum. And it works really great! Way better the dry erase boards or huge pieces of paper. It's not the complex plot of a novel, however --it's the complex plot of real life (illegal schemes)!