Because we're really smart?
Yeah, I don't know. It's late. I get a little odd in the wee hours. (As opposed to being so normal during the day.... :| )
So I just read through Clute's model and I have to say it does indeed seem to work for just about any story out there. In fact, I know I remember hearing George Lucas use a very similar description for his model of an epic plot. Something like "First, you introduce all of your characters and establish the scene. You bring in the major problems and the plot begins." i.e., Clute's Sighting and Thickening methods. This would be Star Wars: A New Hope. Lucas went on to something such as "In the middle of the story, you build up to the worst possible point you could imagine your characters being in." This is of course the Revel, the big event that screws everyone over. Empire Strikes Back. Han is frozen in carbonite. Luke is a cyborg now. Vader and the Emperor's plans are going swimmingly as far as the Rebels know. It sucks. "In the third act, you get them out of it." Couldn't have said it better myself, George. So yeah. This is the Aftermath. We know what happens in Return of the Jedi. The Jedi return. The Ewoks are happy and dancing occurs throughout the galaxy because the Death Star, Jr., is dead along with its commanders.
Every story needs a beginning, a middle and an end, so yeah. Clute's model works for those. One thing I can say I really liked about his article is the language used. Like Meg, the Revel section in particular made me happy. "...good becomes evil; parody becomes
jurisprudence; the jester is king; Hyde lives; autumn is the growing season." Simplistic enough, but powerful images and ideas we're all familiar with. It gets the point across while making perfect examples.
As far as horror and fantasy embodying how we see the world/want to see it, I agree for the most part. Sure, some horror is probably just written to weird people out or because the author likes to scare people. Not everything has to allude to some parallel in our world. But plenty of it does, in horror and fantasy. I do agree that fantasy is mostly taking things we wish we could see in the world, or changing things we already have seen and making them more pleasing, more exciting, more dangerous. Because it's fun to escape. I definitely have used fiction and movies to take a mental vacation my entire life. I still do very frequently. It keeps me sane or adds to my slight insanity. Either way, I'm hooked.
1 comment:
That a lot of non-horror fiction follows a three-act structure (plus aftermath) is obvious. Clute's point isn't that all fiction is horror; it's that horror does something unique with its three-act structure. The original Star Wars trilogy ends with happy Ewoks dancing jigs; not horror. Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" ends with every character horrifically dead, and the final sentence, "And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all"; now, that's horror.
As for Lucas' many oracular claims for his plotting abilities, the actual history of the screenplays for his original trilogy suggests a much less organized process, and one dependent on many collaborators. Lucas in interviews tidies this all up considerably, after the fact.
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