The Stories we carry within us: Why there's no such thing as a 'new Story'

It may be stating the blindingly obvious, but I’ve recently been realizing that many Hollywood mainstream films have what I would call a ‘self-evident’ plot structure. What I mean is, when you’re watching a film and you know roughly how it’s going to develop, and even how it’s going to end. Which is rather odd, when you think about it. Why would we watch something when we know (roughly) how it’s going to turn out?

When we watch Batman, Spiderman, Rocky – or even the King’s Speech for that matter – we know that the story goes something like this: First Part: establish character or character’s special power > Second Part: character goes through some kind of crisis > Third Part: Denouement: character is pitted against his nemesis, boxing opponent or stutter, and wins.

If you think about it, it’s odd we should all want to see stories enacted for us, where we know roughly (if not exactly) what’s going to happen. Why would we do this? Again, it may be to state the blindingly obvious, but I think the answer lies in the fact that although we might know what’s going to happen, we don’t know how it will happen.  I think much of our viewing pleasure relies on us having some idea of what kind of story we’re watching and therefore how it might develop. We go into the cinema with a set of story ‘templates’ in our mind which we automatically – and without thinking about – refer to in watching a film. For the Lord of the Rings we might access that part of our story knowledge which covers ‘The Quest’. For the Kings Speech, the story that gets invoked is probably a ‘Battling against Adversity’.

The analogy that I think helps here is to think about how poetry works. There’s (more often than not) a rhythm underlying a poem that we understand as a metre, and the interest of the poem is created by the ways in which the poem either does and does not conform to that underlying beat.

So, while we’re watching or reading The Lord of the Rings we have various in-built assumptions: that good will triumph, that the heroes will prevail – either by being victorious and staying alive, or by giving their life in a cause that’s ultimately successful. I think our expectations give us a structure which helps us mediate our emotional responses. So, we ‘get through’ the times of crisis in the film – as it were – by retaining the knowledge that it will all work out in the end. Such a structure is important, because otherwise stories would be reduced to a series of random events. Without an idea of what should and should not happen, why should we be surprised if it all goes wrong?

I’d say that, in particular, Hollywood mainstream films and kids’ films wear their plot structure very close to the surface. Within the first few minutes, the audience instinctively knows the general thrust of the film, who the bad guy is, and what the main character’s ‘mission’ is. It’s clear when we watch ‘Happy Feet’ that this will be a story about a character being different from everyone else, and finding acceptance – even adulation – within his community. Within the first ten minutes of ‘Finding Nemo’, it’s clear this is a film about reuniting Nemo with his parents – and we instinctively know that this reunion will take the rest of the film to accomplish.  When you think about it, it’s amazing how strongly rooted these templates are inside us. If ‘Finding Nemo’ ended with Nemo dying, or Nemo’s Dad dying, we, as an audience would feel cheated – we’d feel that in some way, this didn’t work. By all means, have one of the characters appear to be dead; by all means, have one of the characters believe that the other character is dead (in fact, one or the other, or even both scenarios are generally essential in these types of stories); but don’t actually have the character die. 

At the very least, the film-makers would have to find some kind of meaning in Nemo’s death – in other words, it would have to be written as a Tragedy, and – once again – we’d actually be aware of this fact right from the beginning of the film. Even if you didn’t know Hamlet as the most famous play in the English language, you would know instinctively that this is a story with an unhappy ending, a story about various wrongs committed before the play began, and which will now be put right at the cost of the hero’s life.

This all goes back to the ‘contract’ set up between the story-teller and the audience which is in place from the moment the film /story /play begins.  When someone starts a story with ‘Once upon a time’ (or its equivalent), our expectation is that this is a story that will be worth listening to.  Our response if a story does not live up to our expectations is not to lose faith in stories or films, but to identify the flaw – quite rightly - within the film itself. We might not even know exactly why it doesn’t work – we might blame it on the actor, on the special effects, on certain parts of the story – but we just know instinctively that the film doesn’t work. 

Conversely, there’s a particular kind of satisfaction we get when we come out of a cinema having seen a really good film – one that renews our faith in film-making, or in humankind or even – by extension – ourselves. I’m not banging a drum for these particular films, but I was struck by the fact that the Kings Speech reportedly had audiences spontaneously applaud at the end. And I remember the same happening when the Full Monty was first released (at least, it happened at the showing I was at). The audience’s experience here is about the film hitting the spot and needing to express that recognition collectively – despite the fact that the actors, director and film-makers are probably many miles away at that precise moment, and can't hear us.

I believe that we all carry around with us a set of story templates which are deep rooted in our emotional lives. These aren’t individual to us, but collective (although we may carry individual ‘variations’ or predilections for certain kinds of stories). The ‘against all odds’ story, the couple get together after  misunderstandings story – and so on. When we are satisfied by a story it isn’t just that the story is gripping or compelling on its own terms; it’s also in the way this individual story gives voice to the deeper story we carry within us. 

To put it another way, the need for stories starts when we are very young, and never leaves us. When we are children we want to hear the same stories repeated over and over again - and perhaps our adult experience of stories is simply a variation on this.