Our Narrative Prison

Summary

How is it that we live in an era of apparently unprecedented choice and yet almost every film and TV series, as well as a good many plays and novels, have exactly the same plot? We meet the protagonist in their ordinary world, plodding along, not living their best life. And then an inciting incident changes everything, making it impossible for the protagonist to carry on as normal. They are pulled into a new quest. On the way, they meet someone who shows them a completely different way of being. They ask themselves: have I been living a lie? This is the mid-point, the point of no return. Life can never be the same. But there’s a double wobble since the protagonist’s quest is opposed by a powerful antagonist who frustrates the hero at every turn. At their lowest point, the protagonist realises their old mode of being is redundant, but the new one is too daunting. The story is resolved either in the protagonist’s favour or against them: they triumph or else fail tragically. The important thing is that their life philosophy has been turned upside down. When they return home, everything is the same, but everything is also completely transformed. The formula is particularly repetitive in cinema. As it happens, aspiring screenwriters in 21st-century Hollywood are following a rubric set out in the 4th century BCE. In his Poetics, Aristotle defines a well-constructed plot as having three main acts, and names other essential elements such as the ‘reversal of the Situation’, which is ‘a change by which the action veers round to its opposite’ – eg, the moment in The Sixth Sense (1999) when the therapist realises he is dead – and ‘recognition’, which he defines as a ‘change from ignorance to knowledge’ (Oedipus’ recognition is a big one). Aristotle’s schema was developed by later thinkers from Terence and Seneca to the 19th-century German novelist and playwright Gustav Freytag, who distilled stories into his pyramid diagram of exposition, rising action, climax and resolution. A...