Let’s start with the basics. I’ve talked previously about how the role of the protagonist can warp things: with the way that we construct stories, it’s very easy for people to sympathize with and focus on the actions of a protagonist and realign their understanding of right and wrong – at least within the context of a story – to the protagonist.
Read MoreUtopia is a funny thing, and I don’t know about anyone else, but whenever I hear the word “utopia” I immediately feel my hackles rise: not because I don’t want the world to get better, but because it always seems to me that it’s used to mean its inverse
Read MoreStar Wars was always going to be one of the cultural artifacts we touch upon in the “nostalgia trap” series. It’s an active cultural institution, and one that it looked like you could set your watch by fairly recently – the future of Star Wars on film is, of course, up in the air after Solo, which was a perfectly fine movie released just a month after an Avengers movie, and thus did poorly. But Lucasfilm has only ever done Nostalgia pieces. Getting angry at Star Wars for nostalgia is like getting angry at Star Trek for being utopian.
Read MoreThere is a trait shared by all of the stories that I mentioned, and it contributes to their success – they all achieve memorability by including what I call a “minimally contradictory element” (or, “MCE”.) A minimally contradictory element is something that diverges from what is expected but which seems obvious after you see it.
Read MoreI think that narratives are important to understand for the same reason that I write about postmodernism so much: as chaotic and unpredictable as the world-at-large can be, we have to remember that the human brain is the most advanced pattern-recognition organ on the planet. We look at the world and we find stories and then we share those stories. If you look at how we talk about memory, then that’s a story to, and in a very real sense, it means that each and every one of us is made out of narrative in a very real way.
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