In this blogpost, I will cover:
-Levi-Strauss' Binary Opposition
- Proppian character archetypes
- Roland Barthes's 5 codes
- Todorov's 5 part narrative structure
- Carol Vernallis
- Tim O'Sullivan
- Andrew Goodwin
- Campbell
Kate Domaille's 8 Narrative Types
Every story ever told can be fitted into one of eight narrative types. Each of these narrative types has a source, an original story upon which the others are based. These stories are as follows:
2. Candide: The indomitable hero who cannot be put down, e.g. James Bond
3. Cinderella: The dream comes true, e.g. Pretty Woman
4. Circe: The Chase, the spider and the fly, the innocent and the victim e.g. Terminator
5. Faust: Selling your soul to the devil may bring riches but eventually your soul belongs to him, e.g Wall Street, Devil's Advocate
6. Orpheus: The loss of something personal, the gift that is taken away, the tragedy of loss or the journey which follows the loss e.g. The Sixth Sense.
7. Romeo and Juliet: The love story, e.g. Titanic.
8. Tristan and Iseult: The love triangle. Man loves woman. Unfortunately, one or both of them are already spoken for, or a third party intervenes
IN OUR MUSIC VIDEO: We started by exploring Achilles: The fatal flaw We wanted to use the simulacrum (Baudrillard) of Olivia’s existing brand as a teen pop star to show the decay of her character under pressure. We decided to move away from that concept. We can apply Orpheus: the tragedy of loss. Olivia looses her popularity and social status which sends her on her heros' journey (Campbell's monomyth)
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| Our video - Olivia looses her social status |
Levi-Strauss' Binary Opposition
Claude Lèvi-Strauss (1958): his ideas about the narrative amount to the fact that he believed all stories operated to certain clear Binary Opposites e.g. good vs. evil, black vs. white, rich vs. poor etc.
The importance of these ideas is that essentially a complicated world is reduced to a simple either/or structure. Things are either right or wrong, good or bad. There is no in between.
This structure has ideological implications, if, for example, you want to show that the hero was not wholly correct in what they did, and the villains weren’t always bad. From James Cagney’s 1930s characters to Clint Eastwood’s amoral spaghetti western character, the anti-hero has been a common feature of cinema. Consider too homo-/heterosexual: what about bisexual? Queer theorist Judith Butler (performativity of gender) also argues the binary opposite of gender is problematic
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| Our video - clear binary opposition and usage of the anti-hero |
NARRATIVE: Propp's 7 Character Types
Vladimir Propp was a soviet scholar and folklorist who analysed the basic plot components of fairy tales to identify their basic narrative elements. He did this by breaking the fairy tales into different sections.
Through these sections, Propp was able to define the tales into a series of sequences.
At first he had divided them into 31 different sections. However, he soon realised that those 31 sections could be resolved into 7 broad character functions.
These are the seven basic character types also known as archetypes:
From the study of fairytales:
1. The Villain (antagonist) - struggles against the hero.
2. The Donor - prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object.
3. The Helper - helps the hero in the quest.
4. The Hero - reacts to the donor, saves the day, weds the princess.
5. The False Hero - takes credit for the hero's actions or tries to marry the princess.
6. The Princess or Prize - the hero deserves her throughout the story but is unable to marry her because of an unfair evil, usually because of the villain. The hero's journey is often ended when he marries the princess, thereby beating the villain. Propp noted that functionally, the princess and father cannot be clearly distinguished.
7. The Dispatcher - character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off.
NARRATIVE: Roland Barthes' 5 Codes
The Action code - the audience is excited by the need to resolve a problem.
The Semantic code - the audience is directed towards an additional meaning through connotation.
The Symbolic code - the audience assumes that a character dressed in black is evil and forms expectations of his/her behaviour on this basis.
The Cultural code - the audience derives meaning in a text from shared cultural knowledge about the way the world works
IN OUR MUSIC VIDEO: You can apply the enigma code as we don't find out who slushed Olivia until later in the video. Symbolic code for costume. Light pink means innocent and pristine and black means evil.
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| Our video - symbolic code of black clothing meaning evil |
NARRATIVE: Todorov's 5-Part Narrative Structure
Everything is balanced evenly - there is no problem - everything is calm.
2. A disruption of the equilibrium by some action.
Something happens to upset the balance - chaos - things have gone wrong.
3. A recognition that there has been a disruption.
What has upset the balance is recognised. The characters see what has changed.
4. An attempt to repair the disruption.
People make an effort to bring the balance back - to restore equilibrium - the characters will have to work to make things different.
5. A reinstatement of the equilibrium.
The balance is back - equilibrium is restored - all the problems are sorted out.
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| Our video - disruption- we find out Olivia is the anti-hero |
CAROL VERNALLIS (2004)
‘Experiencing Music Video differs from previous work on music video because it takes the music of music video most seriously.
'I argue that music videos derive from the songs they set. The music comes first – the song is produced before the video is conceived – and the director normally designs images with the song as a guide.’ ‘Music videos often suggest a story, we obtain no more visual information than we might derive from a single narrative painting.’
‘In music video, what is concealed and what is revealed serve to encourage multiple viewings by engaging the viewer in a process of reconstructing, interpolating or extrapolating a story behind the scenes that are actually visible. When the narrative mode is present even fleetingly, it creates an aura of mystery, a sense that things need to be puzzled out’.
Videos use ellipsis in such an extreme fashion that causality is often absent.
‘Music video presents a range all the way from extremely abstract videos emphasizing colour and movement to those that convey a story. But most videos tend to be nonnarrative. An Aristotlean definition – characters with defined personality traits, goals, and a sense of agency encounter obstacles and are changed by them – describes only a small fraction of videos, perhaps one in fifty. Still fewer meet the criteria that David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson require in their Film Art: An Introduction: that all of the events we see or hear, plus those we infer or assume to have occurred, can be arranged according to their presumed causal relations, chronological order, duration, frequency, and spatial locations. Even if we think we have a sense of a music video’s story, we may not feel that we can reconstruct the tale in the manner that Bordwell and Thompson’s criteria demand.’
TIM O’SULLIVAN (1998) NARR UNIVERSAL
argues that all media texts tell us some kind of story. Media texts offer a way of telling stories about ourselves – not usually our own personal stories, but the story of us as a culture or set of cultures.
ANDREW GOODWIN RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LYRICS, VISUALS, MUSIC: asked what is the relationship between lyrics, visuals and music:
(1) illustrative – images provide a literal representation
(2) amplifying – repetition of key meanings and effects to manipulate the audience
(3) contradicting – images contrast with the music
(4) disjuncture – when the meaning of the song is completely ignored.
A video may combine some of these. He argues that the most common function of a video, looking at Madonna's example, is to frame the “star-in-text”; creating a role that boosts their star appeal and branding.
CAMPBELL (1949) MONOMYTH/HERO’S JOURNEY:
He argued that narratives across time and cultures were all basically variations on the same theme: a hero’s journey; this sameness he labelled monomyth. He identified 17 stages of the hero’s journey.
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