Group 2C
Sarah Myers, Ryan Powell, Carley Bartlett, Antoniya Petkova, Jordan Muckley, Bashir Yusuf and Katherine Tysoe.
We started the discussion this week by discussing the main points we covered in the two lectures about narrative and we focused on Todorov and Propp’s models and the process of narrative telling. We explained how we applied those models in our individual tasks, what kinds of objects we analysed and what kind of conclusions we came up with. Films, books, adverts, crime scene shows, newspaper articles, music videos – these were all covered by some extent by people from different groups and though most of them seemed to conform to the narrative structures, suggested by Todorov and Propp, not all necessarily did (some adverts or music videos didn’t really seem to adhere to the models).
An obvious misunderstanding that occurred in relation to “equilibrium” was that we thought it had to be a positive happy existence, whereas Spencer explained that equilibrium doesn’t necessarily mean happiness, it’s rather normality and peace – how things are in their natural way. For instance, in Star Wars, for us that is not normality, but it is normality in their world, in their galaxy, and thus – there is equilibrium. Or in certain cases, even if the film, let’s say, doesn’t have a happy ending (like in one group’s suicide video from the 72-hour challenge), enhanced equilibrium could be perceived to be his suicide, whereby for him something might be better than the beginning.
Then we touched upon the idea of pleasure. For instance, horror movies strive not to conform to the narrative structures, they try to shock and disturb and leave us uncomfortable, they are purposefully for disruption and disequilibrium. But there is still pleasure that we get from seeing a movie like the Grudge or Cloverfield. If we’re looking “on the surface”, there seem to be plenty of stories that don’t actually contain enhanced equilibrium in themselves, but if we go deeper into the idea that’s behind the object and the pleasure we get from it, we might see it a different way. What Spencer was talking about was that the enhanced equilibrium doesn’t necessarily need to be in the story itself, but it might be outside of it, it might be the pleasure we get from the object we’re consuming.
But then again, what is the pleasure of seeing a movie like those two above or reading an article about a murder? According to Spencer, we don’t read the news simply because we want to be informed. Yes, that exists and it’s the main reason, but we also get pleasure from that. Information is pleasure. And the pleasure of consuming negative information is that feeling – “my life is so much better”; it’s that realisation that we don’t cherish our lives enough, when we have it so much better than those people in that movie or that article, etc. And there’s also the idea of “us” and “them” – reading about them makes us feel better about us. In journalism, stories play a big role. Like, for instance, what news started out as, were just facts. And this is what news perhaps is supposed to be. But we’re not going to want to read an article that says “Fire somewhere. 15 people killed. Here are their names”. Why? Because there is no story, there is no narrative. And, according to Spencer (and I’m going to quote you on this): “Stories help us go to sleep. If you write a story and put one person to sleep, you’ve been successful.”
Then we moved on to things that left us feeling uncomfortable. There are certain things that the audience expects and when we don’t get them, we feel uneasy. We don’t like the things that don’t conform to those models and patterns embedded into our brains. And yet again, we don’t want to expect the end, we want to be surprised and we get pleasure from that. We actually get pleasure from the discomfort itself. Spencer brought up BBC’s “Crimewatch” and the idea of the enhanced equilibrium, which is missing from the story itself (it leaves the murder unsolved). But the new equilibrium is that feeling we have, not only “yes, my life is so much better”, but the idea of crime and punishment, that thought (very crudely put) “if someone kills me tomorrow, many people will be out there looking for him”. These are the ideological structures we get pleasure from – the fact that there are still morals in the world, the idea of punishment of criminals, good vs. evil, law vs. order, etc.
We moved on to discuss the 72-hour challenge objects and whether or not we thought our (or anyone else’s) did not conform to the narrative structures. Throughout the discussion it was obvious that most of them did and even though some people could think of some that arguably didn’t, Spencer didn’t really seem to be convinced. In his opinion, all the media produced objects during activity week were conformed and conventional. He brought up the idea of things just being “alright” and us having no opinion over them, not being able to talk about them for a while or even remember them the next day. And that is, basically, what mainstream production is all about, things being alright, playing it safe. But we, as media students, are not in the “alright” business, we need to make more subversive things, shocking and controversial, because we want to be remembered, we want people to know who we are.
What Spencer left for us as an important thing to feed back to our group was looking deeper into the objects we looked at (or any object) and think about those narrative structures again. And even though it might seem that they don’t really conform, we need to ask ourselves “do they really not?” and try to analyse them further. And especially thinking about our 72-hour projects, we might think we were extremely original and our characters didn’t correspond to Propp’s character functions or that our story didn’t follow Todorov’s model, but they all did.Labels: tasks |
