The other day I was listening to a very good episode of On The Media but it reminded me of a troubling linguistic trend. I’m about to rant a little. Indulge me.
The word “content” bothers me when used to refer to art or journalism or other creative expression. I don’t hate it, but it gives me that same sort of feeling of transient disgust that you get walking down the street and getting a whiff of sewer gas. I suppose it makes sense — in a time when books and movies and games are all enjoyed through a few consolidated, multi-purpose screens, and as the boundaries between media blur, and as those bits of media all share shelf space in the same virtual stores — it makes sense to come up with a catch-all word. Fine. I would prefer simply “media,” but I can hold my nose and use “content.”
What really rankles me is the verb that gets matched with “content.” Because once you have “content,” once you reach that level of generalization, there is only one thing you can do with it: consume it. It used to be that you would read a book, or watch a movie, or flip through a magazine, or listen to music. Now all those things fall under the category of “content consumption.” Yes, that’s phrase everybody, at least in the media and tech worlds, seems to have settled on. I’m not going to link to examples. Google it if you must.
Others have noted that the word “consumption” as applied to “content” is awkward and imprecise. But it’s worse than that. The problem with “consumption” is that it takes actions like reading and watching and playing — actions that though sedentary are mentally active — and reduces them to entirely passive, painting us as the consumers sucking at the teat of iTunes rather than collaborators in meaning, integrators of experience. Customers rather than an audience.
Maybe this was inevitable as our information economy matures: “Content” is America’s future stock-in-trade, and the formerly cloistered and subtle language of ideas had no chance once capitalism moved in.
I’m not saying that art and commerce weren’t related before. A Van Gogh picture was worth a lot of money long before “content consumption” reared its head — but that was a valuation of the object itself, not of one’s engagement with it. (Yes, you buy a museum ticket to see a Van Gogh, but museums aren’t selling transcendental aesthetic experiences at $20 a pop.)
“Content consumption” joins ad services’ habit of “selling eyeballs” in tallying our time and mental activity and processing it into a crude fuel to turn the wheels of commerce.
I’ve been reading Uncreative Writing by writer and UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith, who thinks that writing is ripe for a revolution. He thinks of language not solely as semantic content but also as raw material — material that can be transformed by computers, or written from scratch by computers, sometimes even meant to be read only by other computers. In effect, writers get abstracted (promoted?) a level, from generating language to managing its creation and manipulation.
It has me wondering what this would mean for stories. Goldsmith’s narrative examples involve the appropriation of existing narrative material. What would it look like to not make up a story but to manage a machine generating a story?
The only example I’ve found is A Ship Adrift. Perfectly, the credits say that “a ship adrift is a thing “by” james bridle.” Bridle explains on his blog that he began by creating a system to read information from a weather station:
A Ship Adrift takes the data from that weather station and applies it to an imaginary airship piloted by a lost, mad AI autopilot. The ship is drifting because the pilot is mad or the pilot is mad because the ship is drifting; it doesn’t really matter.
If the wind whips eastwards across the roof of the Southbank centre at 5mph, then the Ship Adrift floats five miles to the East. […]
As the Ship drifts, it looks around itself. It doesn’t know where it is, but it is listening. It’s listening out for tweets and foursquare check-ins and posts on dating sites and geotagged Wikipedia articles and it is remembering them and it is trying to make something out of them. It is trying to understand.
The ship is lost, and I don’t know where it’s going. I don’t know what it’s going to learn, but I want to work with it to tell some stories. I want to build a system for cooperating with software and chance.
A Ship Adrift
The result is, to my eye, gibberish. But it’s gibberish on a timeline, written by hundreds of people and amalgamated through a partnership of man and machine. And if you look at the text in the context of the wandering little dot representing the ship, it’s even a little poignant. Perhaps the beginning of something.
This Wired article on the return of the show Arrested Development on Netflix is worth reading in its entirety, but I want to pull out these interesting tidbits about narrative form:
Arrested Development is exploring the more playful, outré structural possibilities offered by the new platform on Netflix. Each episode will cover events from a different character’s point of view, like a comedic Rashomon. There will be moments and Easter eggs that will make sense only in retrospect. There will be a suggested viewing sequence, but it will be possible—even rewarding—to watch out of sequence. Cross describes the new structure as being “like if you could mash up a Venn diagram with a nautilus shell. And then put that inside a Möbius strip.”
[…]
The new Arrested Development is not just a seven-hour movie. It’s something new—a collection of episodes released altogether that can be remixed and recombined and that gain something from each juxtaposition. Right now that’s a framework only Netflix can offer. Asked what the show would have been like had Showtime won its bid, Hurwitz says, “I know that storytelling-wise, saner ideas might have prevailed.”
House of Cards was an earlier Netflix effort to put its own money into a show and release the entire season at once, and it justifiably got a lot of press, but it was basically a seven-hour movie. From a storytelling standpoint this might be the bigger deal.
Since my previous post, in which I responded to Richard Brody’s idea that codified story development processes were turning movies into formulaic gruel, I’ve been mulling over different ways to describe story structure. I think it’s helpful to divide these descriptions into three types.
Universals
In his book The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall refers to a “universal grammar” of storytelling.
As the linguist Noam Chomsky showed, all human languages share some basic structural similarities — a universal grammar. So too, I argue, with story. No matter how far we travel back into literary history, and no matter how deep we plunge into the jungles and badlands of world folklore, we always find the same astonishing things: their stories are just like ours. There is a universal grammar in world fiction, a deep pattern of heroes confronting trouble and struggling to overcome. (p. 55)
This grammar is versatile. Gottschall compares it to the human face: the same deep structural pattern the world over, but enabling great variety. It is composed of the structural feature of conflict — the pattern of “complication, crisis, and resolution” — as well as a handful of universal themes about sex and love, death, the desire for power, etc.
The argument recalls Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth,” in which the hero finds a conflict that requires separation from his home, initiation into an unknown world, and a return with special knowledge or powers. He gets much more specific than Gottschall, but the claim to universality is the same, and Gottschall, consciously or not, even draws on the title of Campbell’s most famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces when he describes the universal grammar using the metaphor of the human face.
Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey”
Often when you hear about Campbell today, it’s in the context of advice from a screenwriting “guru” about how to structure your script. But in those instances, the monomyth has been turned into something more like one of the two categories below.
Norms
I’m borrowing the term “norm” from the film scholar David Bordwell. Norms aren’t instructions; they are standardized sets of options.
In Hollywood film style, for instance, there are several ways to make spatial arrangement stress an important point: instead of a cut-in to a close-up, we can get a track-in, or a shift in lighting, or a character’s movement into the foreground. A norm is usefully considered as what semiologists call a paradigm—a bounded set of alternatives which at some level serve equivalent functions. (Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 151)
That example is a norm of style, but there are also norms of story construction, and this strikes me as a concept that can be applied to any medium.
Here are some story, plot, and narration norms Bordwell identifies for classical cinema:
stories present psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem
plots end with a decisive victory or defeat
causality is the prime unifying principle, and space and time are arranged to emphasize cause and effect
narration tends to be omniscient, highly communicative, and only moderately self-conscious (i.e., the film is free to move around in the fictional world and tell us more than any single character knows, and a film rarely makes a show of the fact that it is a film)
These norms are not universal. Different norms take hold in different parts of the world and in different times. Bordwell identifies other storytelling traditions that are more episodic and elliptical, in which the goal is vague and the end inconclusive.
Rules
I reserved the word “rules” for this third type because, unlike the two categories above, these are meant to be prescriptive rather than descriptive. They are most often used by writing instructors, whereas the other two seem to be the province of academics.
Rules are instructions for fulfilling norms. They tend to range from specific to crazily specific. I’m reading a book on screenwriting called Save the Cat by Blake Snyder, in which he says
…the trick is to create heroes who:
Offer the most conflict in that situation
Have the longest way to go emotionally and…
Are the most demographically pleasing!
Those first two rules are ways to fulfill the classical norms of a psychologically defined character with a clear goal. (The third rule is unabashed commercialism.)
He goes on from there to identify which pages certain plot points should happen on: the catalyst on page 12, act break on page 25, b-story starting at 30…
It’s easy to sniff at this stuff from an academic perch, but I’m writing a screenplay right now and it’s been useful.
I’m tempted to always put the word “rules” in quotation marks because I don’t think there are inviolable storytelling rules, but I’ll resist because I think that’s generally understood among writers, as evidenced by the popular saying that you should ‘know the rules so you can know when to break them.’
The Goldilocks approach
I’m feeling somewhat Goldilocks about my list: “rules” feel restrictive and prescriptive. Universals are also problematic: too broad for practical use, and yet there will always be outlying examples that will cause trouble for academics: Gottschall is forced to write off Finnegans Wake and Gertrude Stein’s experiments in writing stories in which “nothing much happens” as failures.
Norms, though, feel just right. I see them being more useful more often to scholars, but I also think practitioners of story (writers, filmmakers, game designers, etc.) would get something out of knowing where the “rules” come from — that they are tried and true ways of fulfilling certain cultural norms, and perhaps sometimes universals, and not the invention of self-appointed experts.
Norms’ usefulness to storytellers might increase in the future as the boundaries between media dissolve: knowing to put the inciting incident on page 12 of a screenplay doesn’t do much good when you’re trying to craft a transmedia experience, but staying focused on presenting a story space with clear cause and effect and highly communicative narration would be essential.
Well this is handy: the same week I start a blog about storytelling, Richard Brody of The New Yorker complains about a focus on “storytelling” (he puts it in quotation marks) ruining movies.
Brody refers to “a crisis that is endemic to the modern cinema, that is, in fact, one of the strange, unintended consequences of cinematic modernity: the very notion of “storytelling” and the obsession with characters and whether they’re admirable or likable.”
The problem, he says, is not so much with classical cinema’s relying on narrative, but that story should be “a basis, not a goal […] merely a starting point for a significant work, not a result.” This is worse than simply a missed opportunity: the focus on story not only precludes invention in other aspects of cinema, but saps the energy of story itself. The rules around storytelling have become so stringently normalized that the movies become “a delivery system for a uniform set of emotional juicings, and the result, whether for C.G.I. or for live-action films, is a sort of cyborg cinema, a prefabricated simulacrum of experience and emotion that feels like the nexus of pornography and propaganda.”
That’s my best try at summarizing an argument that I find unconvincing. (I have skipped some speculation about how this state of affairs came to be and what the popularity of such content means for society.) So we have two related problems: an allegedly restrictive list of storytelling “rules” resulting in the cinematic equivalent of fast food; and the focus on those rules precluding invention in other aspects of cinema. And neither of them are real problems.
The rules he cites as examples (which the author of the list, Emma Coats, calls “story basics” rather than rules) are not at all restrictive. Things like making sure the stakes for the main character are high, and giving us a reason to side with him or her. If these rules are ruinously restrictive, then we are writing off all of classical cinema.
There may be an argument to be made that these broad rules are being followed in narrow, unimaginative ways, that a good portion of films being released are formulaic. But I don’t see how this is a problem specific to “modern cinema” unless by modern Brody means since the 1910s. Really inventive films have always been rare.
As to the idea that formulaic films evoke a mere simulacrum of emotion in the audience, the equivalent of audio-visual fast food, Brody expands on that point later in the piece to say that the emotion he primarily refers to is the false relief of the collective feeling of isolation we moderns carry around with us. It’s an interesting and somewhat baffling hypothesis I would like to see supported.
The main problem here is that Brody confuses a focus on story and character with a myopic focus on script. He hints at this when he complains “[W]hen the script has been built with such solidity and has become an object of obsession for a year or more, it becomes not the springboard for filmmaking but its objective, and constrains the filmmaker to be its illustrator.” No argument here. If a director does nothing but cover the script, the movie will probably limp along. But script and story are not the same thing.
Brody thinks that a strong filmmaker approaches a script with an attitude of “creative destruction.” But a director’s inventiveness must be organized around something — a principle or skeleton that ensures a cohesive whole. The theorist Roman Jakobson called this thing “the dominant.” In classical cinema, the dominant is the narrative. (There are filmmaking traditions outside Hollywood — and mostly outside the West entirely — for which the story is not the dominant. But I don’t think Brody’s aim is to get us to write off all of Western cinema.)
Think of a formally daring filmmaker like Welles. His unusual camera positions don’t just look cool — they make a character big or small at certain points in the plot. His lighting evokes moods that echo characterization. His decisions serve the story. A focus on story does not preclude inventiveness; it enables its success by providing both a grounding and an opportunity for embellishment. The key is not to deviate from the script but to go above and beyond it.
Cinema’s most immediate predecessors share something else. As the nineteenth-century obsession with movement intensified, devices which could animate more than just a few images became increasingly popular. All of them the Zootrope, the Phonoscope, the Tachyscope, the Kinetoscope were based on loops, sequences of images featuring complete actions which can be played repeatedly. […] Even Edison’s Kinetoscope (1892-1896), the first modern cinematic machine to employ film, continued to arrange images in a loop. 50 feet of film translated to an approximately 20 second long presentation a genre whose potential development was cut short when cinema adopted a much longer narrative form.
But of course, the art form of loops wasn’t cut short. It just went dormant until someone invented the Graphics Interchange Format.
The internet is usually either seen as a way to distribute books, movies, and other contemporary cultural forms in a more efficient way, or else as a playground for emergent forms — hypertext literature and the like. Interesting to think that it could be reviving old forms as well.
I used to be so impressed by the ability to tap a word while reading on my phone for a definition. It seemed both a brilliant and a natural design decision: collapse the act of referring to the dictionary and get the reader back into the text as quickly as possible. But just yesterday, reading on paper, I came across a word I didn’t know and I relished it. I didn’t get up and get the dictionary. I thought about what that word might mean, enjoyed the sentence changing as I swapped out different meanings, and then continued on, happy in my ignorance. I got more out of it than if I had known the word.
I know of computer programs that disable one’s internet connection for a certain period of time. I’ve read about someone who locks their router and cell phone in a safe during the weekends. I wonder — so many design decisions facilitating absorption and creation are about making the process faster, more efficient. Maybe the future will be about intelligently slowing things down, purposefully and subtly making things a little more difficult. Gently forcing people to play and reach.
I’m starting this blog to think out loud about storytelling: techniques and theory, in print and in pixels, as well as the tools and ecosystems that enable it. Day to day, I expect that to mean posts about the future of the book, theories of narrative, transmedia experiences, and all manner of things related to prose fiction and film.
I may (fair warning) also detour into data visualization, user experience design, and the digital humanities, which I think are all tied up with what is going to be most exciting about storytelling in the coming few years.
If you’re a film buff or a bookworm with an analytical bent and an eye to the future, you’re in the right place.
William Comfort Anderson 