New Storytelling Paradigms – Crots And Fractals (Part 2)

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Story Paradigms:

Crots

A crot is defined as a piece of story. I’m not sure you can get away with seemingly unrelated pieces of story, but imagine if you could throw small vignettes on the screen that will then form the whole. Like a jigsaw puzzle tossed willy-nilly on a board and you must put it together without any sense of how that picture will look.

Yeah, that would be an amazing accomplishment if you could pull it off.

Anthologies like Twilight Zone Movie or Black Mirror or even Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex I think fit this definition. Certainly Paris,  je t’aime does.

Fractals

Fractals are ever-repeating patterns, but different than a beehive’s mainly symmetrical shape. Called a Mandelbrot set, it describes those patterns as sized variations on a complex shape. Lungs, lightning, tree branches, snowflakes are all fractals.  A fractal can be used to mathematically describe such disparate forms as the stock market growth or a fungus.

And to further complicate this, tree bark while described above as being a cell-like tessellation, can also be a fractal because the patterns appear as branching.

A fractal possesses self-similarity meaning the shapes looks the same as they branch but they are not Euclidean because the shapes they describe are irregular. In other words they are not circles, triangles, squares, etc. but they are similar to each other in form.

Long form sweeping narrative films like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and adding The Hobbit trilogy are like this. Sorta. Fractals are difficult to understand using narrative structures from film/ TV.

I mentioned gaming theory as using some of these forms of structure. Let’s examine this statement a bit.

Fractals Can Be Fun (sorta)

In my opinion, there’s a problem trying to use fractals for film or TV.

Games work fine with fractals because they serve the player. Paths and endings are typically player-driven more than set-in-stone-story driven. Many outcomes and paths are possible given a player’s choice and that’s by design. However, that’s a huge difference from film or TV in which the writer determines the outcome – for the most part.  Some create endings that can be interpreted differently. In “Inception” the ending is open. Is the DiCaprio character back with his kids or not? I’ve seen pages of argument for both ideas.

I myself am never happy with amorphous endings, but I recognize that the writer is trying to give the viewer choices, similar to a game. How many arguments have been spun around American Psycho? I see it one way, a friend sees it differently. Both interpretations are valid.

The episode of Black Mirror called Bandersnatch experimented with this type of open-ended narrative. The viewer got to choose certain aspects of the game-like storyline.

A potential example of fractal-based storytelling in the big picture is our old friend Everything Everywhere All at Once. Even though the dimensions the characters inhabit are wildly different, they all featured the same characters in various roles. A type of fractal approach replicating complex patterns of characters in connected situations.

An old movie actually based on a classic board game, Clue, shows this structure if you squint your eyes and don’t hold any preconceptions.

Generational films like The Godfather series can even be thematically stretched to be fractally-based as the cycle of dysfunction and violence starts in Italy and continues to modern-day America. Big fractals perhaps but fractals nonetheless.

Writers Leslie Bohem’s and Endre Bohem’s, Twenty Dollars is somewhat fractal. The story revolves around a single twenty-dollar bill that impacts various people. All branches of intent.

Fractal Variations

A Japanese form of story-telling called kish?tenketsu uses fractal-like repetition to tell a “story.”

According to Charles Hinshaw on Medium.com:

Ki (introduction — establishes the characters and location).
Sh? (development — advances the plot towards ten without making significant changes).
Ten (twist — usually in the form of a literary non-sequitur).
And ketsu (conclusion — denouement; connecting the twist back to the plot).”

This is a repeating form of storytelling. I think of it as scenes when each scene has its own similar internal structure that connects and leads to a larger whole. The repetition of intent creates a fractal variation.

Gaming uses this a lot. In fact, it probably forms the basis of most games.

Besides using it to write scenes I can’t quickly come up with a film/ TV example beyond what was discussed in the section on fractals.

Structural Motif

Filmmaker Josh Eisenstadt (Spreading Darkness, Dark Reel) coined this structure’s name. Being a pre-eminent David Lynch (and Twin Peaks) expert he’d know. He describes a situation where something like The Ring from Twin Peaks becomes a motif key to a scene. It repeats in various iterations over a time period like in the TV series that he knows so much about so you’re basing scenes on a motif. He also describes a similar set of motifs in Mulholland Drive where a blue key and a cash box are used in two situations at opposite ends of the script.

Josh more uses a spiral/radial structure for his Spreading Darkness movie starring Eric Roberts, but he also points out that the evil motif structurally affects different characters in different ways from one central core act.

Hyperlink Cinema

Multilinear stories are those using one theme, but telling different tales for different characters.

You can see this used in film and games easily enough.

Syriana, Babel, and Crash are all examples of this storytelling structure. In one case, Babel, a rifle is the unifying motif and although the connection is clear, the individual situations that the rifle affects are wildly different.

Again, Leslie Bohem’s and Endre Bohem’s, Twenty Dollars surfaces, and Altman has his Short Cuts.

Now for games, a MMPG is a solid example: different players either working together or apart to accomplish a common goal.

Rainbow

Edge of Tomorrow, Groundhog Day, Source Code and Deja Vu all have a structure that repeats events with slightly different outcomes.  We could call it a  rainbow narrative in which parallel bands of color radiate out with each band being shaped similarly but each with a different shade.

Same shape, different storylines.

Rashomon/ Spoked Wheel

Rashomon-shaped stories have the same tale told from different angles or characters. Some of those angles or characters may be reliable or not. The master, Akira Kurosawa, famously did this in 1950 in his film Rashomon.

However, Citizen Kane used the scheme back in 1940 in a slightly different manner.

Many mysteries are written using the rashomon narrative technique as the detective hears the same story from differing perspectives. Vantage Point about the attempted assassination of a president does this.

The movie Gone Girl does it using different perspectives for the same tale.

Circular Structure

A story that ends where it started. An ouroboros. Bookending.

Oddly enough, the western The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly does this – sorta – with a noose being shot out from around Clint Eastwood’s neck in the beginning, and he in turn doing the same thing at the end.

Mad Max: Fury Road also (sorta) does this with the big road chase ultimately coming back to where it started as the ending details that they’re making a paradise they once sought back in the place of their captivity.

The underrated and unusual for him  Martin Scorcese’s After Hours drops Griffin Dunne back where he started after an insane night lost in weirdness downtown somewhere.

Of course, as Josh Eisenstadt pointed out to me during our conversation, Lynch’s Lost Highway is definitely a circularly structured film that could also be a Mobius strip that twists back onto itself.

Conclusions

I’m all in on narrative theory. Anything that makes me a better, more informed writer is a big yes. But at some point, do discussions like this make the phrase ‘the tail wagging the dog’ come to mind?

The what of something is never going to be as important as the why. And by that I mainly mean the characters themselves. I can cobble together a bunch of whats but unless they inform the whys of it they fail.

Games are a bunch of whats. Film should be whys. Games for the most part don’t move me. Film almost always does because the writer has something to say about why characters do what they do. Action films, horror films by their very nature sometimes look more like games – this happens then this happens and The End. Fun, entertaining but not particularly compelling.

And there is a solid place for all of that.

But being tired of traditional narrative isn’t enough reason to usurp it. Be a better writer if you’re bored with a three-act structure. Don’t look for techniques and tricks to elevate your writing. Conquer the three-act, pyramid structure first and then twist it to fit your evil plans.

We are all looking to make a mark, to be noticed, to add another notch in our belt but is rejecting a structure (a true structure not a scheme) that has been around for thousands of years, proves itself year after year in box office, critical success, and notable achievements wise?

Picasso was an accomplished painter before he began deconstructing portraits. Dali also had years of traditional training before he started melting clocks. David Lynch, John Waters, Daniels – all these people paid their dues first.  Were you aware that Lynch wrote a very traditional The Elephant Man before Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks?

In any case, there are so many other things to worry about when writing a book or script – or even an article – that the shape of the narrative becomes a relatively minor consideration.

But – exploring is great and our reach should always exceed our grasp, as the saying goes.

 - Everything Everywhere All At Once could be called a Meandering, Spiraling, Radial, Explosive Fractal, Cellular Crot Wavelet Spoked Wheel story.

Now how’s that for a delightfully confounding concept?