alt Hacker NewsI don't know... I cannot disagree, but isn't this like moaning about how there is no innovation in:
- Designing vehicles because every one of them is a thing that carries people or things from A to B, with some propulsion mechanism and a way to steer it.
- Designing software because it's all about providing an interface to manipulate objects in a database, or values in memory.
- Designing drugs because it's all some kind of chemical you take that suppresses biological processes.
- ...
You can always come up with an abstract definition that puts a set of things into the same bucket. Isn't this just semantics? Movies are not remotely all the same story. If you say they are all about: humans reacting to conflicts which leads to some changes in the state of things. I mean, that's what a story is, that's what a 3-act structure is.
Sure there are engaging stories with different structures, but isn't it all just omitting one of the acts, or chaining multiple stories in an overlapping manner, starting or ending at a different point, or stretching one of the acts for longer?
And more often than not you need to bend-over-backwards to make such stories as engaging as the standard structure, it's really hard, because to an extent you are breaking the very core of what makes a story engaging, and the novelty can only carry you so far.
It can be distracting actually, shaking up the structure can detract from the craft of filling it with good content, it's a bit gimmicky. There's a certain purity and merit to making a prototypical story truly excellent and innovative, obfuscating and shuffling that basic structure is a cheap path to innovation.
Regardless, you can always shoehorn any story into one or more introduction-conflict-resolution blocks and complain about it.
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The worst thing about schematic stories is that they trained people to believe nothing else is even possible. Even as those other stories actually exist and are not even that niche.
Movies are nowdays very predictable. You know how it is likely to end from the start. You can even guess when exactly big fights happen.
You're totally right. I think the article is just inherently too reductionist, which is like of a foundation of analysis in general, is to reduce and then reason about some process/object. However, I think a lot of analysis is (for lack of a better term) critically reductionist, and they see that as a virtue of their analysis, they toss out nuance and details in favor of studying the "structure" of some process without considering that particular nuance or detail changes the structures meaning and possibly the structure itself.