chimamanda adichie warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we...

Chimamanda Adichie

warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

Ultimately, The Wire is about individuals grappling with inherently corrupt institutions who, at best, may claim small victories.

None of these institutions can deeply recognize what is just and good in its own operation, despite the many individuals who try. This is the basis of the series' famous anger, and realism.

Melodrama does not demand a happy ending, though Dickens's readers did. It merely demands an awareness of what would be just.

The Wire's added dimension of the institutional level of melodrama, meshed with the stories of truly diverse social strata, is the most bravura achievement of The Wire.

It is the day-to-day workings of these institutions, at the nitty-gritty level of budgets, drug profits, political horse-trading, editorial practices -- not private loves, kindly uncles, or personal villains -- that determine fates.

Popular melodrama is a heart-rending mode we may think we are too good for but which pulls us back again and again to heavily plotted stories of the battle between good and evil.

It is better, modern melodrama -- one that even grants an occasional happy ending to a particular individual without betraying its principles of showing the way the "game is rigged" against the poor and black.

The Wire thus is, and isn't, Dickensian. More properly, it is serial television melodrama in which good and evil are raised beyond the personal to the institutional level. If Dickens represented the great serial melodrama of his time, The Wire represents the great serial melodrama of our own.

Two Crime Stories: Social Realism and Canonical

It is better, modern melodrama -- one that even grants an occasional happy ending to a particular individual without betraying its principles of showing the way the "game is rigged" against the poor and black.

Detective Film: Presupposes stable but concealed emotional nexus (A hates and kills B, but pretends he did not hate or kill B)

Fabula and Syuzhet

• Fa bool a• See o j(h)et

Fabula

Embodies the action as a chronological, cause and effect chain of events

Syuzyet

Consists of a particular pattern of events (actions, scenes, turning points, plot twists)

Style

The films systematic use of story devices: canonical, genre, linear, non-linear

Fabula

Crime: the investigation of a crime involves establishing certain connections among events

The fabula is a pattern that perceivers of narratives create through assumptions and inferences

The viewer builds the fabula on the basis of prototype schemata i.e. identifiable types of persons, actions, locales

Procedural Schemata: a search for appropriate motivations and relations of causality, time and space

A film’s fabula is not materially present on the screen or soundtrack

Syuzhet: Consists of a particular pattern of events (actions, scenes, turning points, plot twists)

Manipulation of causal intervention

Dramaturgy of film: the organized set of cues prompting us to infer and assemble story information

The Syuzhet and style interact in the course of cueing and channeling the spectator’s construction of the fabula

Denotation and connotation “become fellow travelers in the story”

Denotation: the literal or primary meaning of a word, in contrast to the feelings or ideas that the word suggests.

Connotation: The associated or secondary meaning of a word or expression in addition to its explicit or primary meaning: A possible connotation of “home” is “a place of warmth, comfort, and affection.”

Logical, temporal and spatial nature of syuzhet

Gaps are created by choosing to present certain pieces of fabula information and to hold back others

A detective story calls attention to its gaps, makes us fret over the lack of certain data

Omitted fabula information will become important later

Retardation (Delay of story information) cues spectator’s comprehension

Revelation of some (not all) information can arouse anticipation, curiosity, suspense, and surprise

In a crime story crucial murder evidence emerges piecemeal

The case can’t be solved too quickly

Resolution is suspended until conclusion

Detective Story: Serial

Crime

• Cause of Crime

• Commission of Crime

• Concealment of Crime

• Discovery of Crime

Investigation

• Beginning of investigation

• Phases of investigation

• Elucidation of crime

• Identification of criminal

• Consequences of identification

– The genre aims to create curiosity about past story events

– Suspense about upcoming story events

– Surprise with respect to unexpected disclosures about either story or syuzhet

– We learn what the detective learns when he or she learns it

The detective film justifies its gaps and retardations (delayed story development)

We are not allowed access to the detective’s inferences until he or she voices them-

(unless the detective is baffled or turns out wrong)

The activity of piecing together cause and effect in the crime fabula constitutes the central formal convention of the detective tale

Romance becomes another factor. The detective is attracted to the Femme Fatale even if he suspects them of deception, betrayal or even worse (Could be why listeners interpret Sarah as “in love” with Adnan.)

Melodrama

Subverts everything to broad emotional impact

Pity, irony, and other dissociated emotions

Maximizes the viewer’s urge to know what will happen next—and, especially, how any given character will react to what has happened

The emotional expressiveness of the film issues partly from the narration’s tendency to be omni--communicative

To wring every emotional drop out of the fabula situations the narration employs omniscience

Various characters discover what viewers already know

Crosscutting different plotlines

• Following several characters from one locale to another expands range of knowledge

• Melodrama can still manipulate knowledge in as complicated a fashion as detective stories

• Syuzhet will inform us of initiation of a chain of action and then skip over some time or move to another line of action

• Detective Film: Presupposes stable but concealed emotional nexus (A hates and kills B, but pretends he did not hate or kill B)

• The melodrama assumes violent and overt changes of emotional attitudes

• The Wire—Social Realism/Melodrama (Not bad or corny melodrama)

Detective Film: Presupposes stable but concealed emotional nexus (A hates and kills B, but pretends he did not hate or kill B)

The melodrama assumes violent and overt changes of emotional attitudes

The Wire—Social Realism/Melodrama

Popular melodrama is a heart-rending mode we may think we are too good for but which pulls us back again and again to heavily plotted stories of the battle between good and evil.

Fabula:

Character centered causality and the definition of the action as the attempt to achieve a goal are both central features of the canonic format

THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD STORY

Plot

• Undisturbed stage• The Disturbance• The Struggle• And the elimination of the disturbance

Two plot lines

• One involving heterosexual romance

• The other involving another sphere: work, war, a mission or quest

Scenes

• Continuation of time, space and action (cause and effect)

• A scene may be temporally closed, but it is causally open

• Each scene displays distinct phases • Exposition• Middle—move towards their goals• Action must be left suspended

• Mystery film. Resolved enigma. • Develops towards full and adequate

knowledge

• The ending is the crowning of the structure

• The logical conclusion of the string of events

• The final effect of the initial cause, the revelation of the truth

• There is a need for a logical wrap-up.

• When we do not get this logical wrap-up we may feel frustration or sadness

The classical ending is not all that structurally decisive

It’s more or less an arbitrary readjustment of that world knocked awry in the previous story

During the time of the book, out of 100 randomly sampled Hollywood films, over sixty ended with a display of the united romantic couple. The cliché happy ending with a clinch

The Classical Hollywood Story

The retardation (delay) of the middle portions make the tied up ending even more satisfying

“Closure effect”

The strain of resolved and unresolved issues seems strong

The most coherent possible epilogue remains the standard to be aimed at

The narration knows more than all the characters, conceals relatively little (What will happen next?)

If time is skipped over a montage sequence or a bit of character dialogue informs us; if a cause is missing, we will typically be informed that something isn’t there

In the beginning of a Hollywood Motion Picture we don’t know anything

During the course of the story, information is accumulated, until at the end we know everything

Citizen Kane (not classical storytelling)

It reveals the mystery

It doesn’t reveal all of Kane’s motivations

The priority of causality within an integral fabula world commits classical narration to unambiguous presentation

On the whole classical narration treats film technique as a vehicle for the syuzhet’s transmission of fabula information

In classical narration, style typically encourages the spectator to construct a coherent, consistent time and

space for the fabula action.

Utmost denotative clarity from moment to moment.

Each scene’s temporal relation to its predecessor will be signaled early and unequivocally (by intertitles, conventional cues, a line of dialogue)

The Hollywood Classical Style passes relatively unnoticed

The Hollywood fabula is a product of a series of particular schemata, hypotheses, and influences

The spectator comes to a classical film very well prepared

Shape of Syuzhet and fabula is likely to conform to the canonic story of an individual’s goal oriented, causally determined activity

The viewer has internalized, exposition, development of causal line,

Realistic motivation

Finding important links between cause and effect

Generic ConventionsGeneric Motivation

• On the basis of such schemata the viewer projects hypotheses • Hypotheses tend to be probable• Rendered as either/or alternatives• Aimed at suspense • Future-oriented “suspense” hypotheses • Many long range hypotheses must await confirmation • Delaying devices being unpredictable to a great degree can

introduce objects of immediate attention as well as delay satisfaction of overall expectation

• The structure of a Hollywood scene which almost invariably ends with an unresolved issue assures that an event centered hypothesis carries interest over to the next sequence

The Open Ending

• Leaves the viewers with an ambiguous or missing plot resolution

• Fails to fulfill the viewer’s emotional expectations by not offering a climax or other emotional relief

--Not Such a Happy Ending: The Ideology of the Open Ending –Eran Preis

Ideology

• Relatively coherent system of values, beliefs or ideas shared by some social group and often taken for granted as natural or inherently true

• --Bordwell Thompson

• Art reveals the true nature of ideology not by purely criticizing or mocking it, but by experiencing it

The classical narrative forms are not always capable of expressing complexity

Questioning ideologies—breaks conventions of form and content

Requirements of Successful Use of an Open Ending

• A writer with ideological awareness and the ability to penetrate to the true nature of the experience

• A historical situation that allows him/her access to such insights

• A viewer willing to replace closure with conflict and accept ideology as a process rather than taken-for-granted truth