Narrative theory in relation to Halloween (John Carpenter – 1978) &

The Crazies (Breck Eisner – 2010)Ryan Tarran

Tzvetan Todorov was a Bulgarian structural linguist and came up with the theory of the Classical Hollywood Narrative. The term ‘Classical Hollywood Narrative’ or CHN is a way of describing the structure of a narrative in a film or story and is conventional to many films narrative structures. It works by two opposing forces being in balance or equilibrium, then some event causes disruption of this balance or disequilibrium and triggers a chain of events and problems which need to be overcome to create a new equilibrium, which brings balance and order back to the world in which the narrative is set. The CHN is useful because from looking at just the start of the film and how the narrative plays out you can predict or tell whether or not the film is going to follow the CHN and then you can guess whether the film will have a happy ending or not or whether the main characters will survive. This allows film makers and media analysts to place the audience where they want them and to incorporate stereotypes and conventions that gratify the audience more easily. Halloween follows the CHN as there is a disequilibrium when Myers kills his sister and then is finally restored when they stop him towards the end. However, you could argue that this is not a new equilibrium because his body was not found and therefore balance could not be restored. The crazies does not follow the CHN because the first scene in the film is of the town destroyed which is a vision into the future of how it will become. This means that the film starts off with the disequilibrium and is therefore unconventional and does not fit in the category of the CHN.

CHN (Classical Hollywood Narrative)

Vladimir Propp was a Russian critic who examined 100’s of folk tales to see if the character types shared structure. He narrowed it down to 8 character roles and 31 narrative functions. Here are the 8 character types:

The Villain – The ‘baddie’ The Hero – The main protagonist & Victor The Donor – who provides an object of significant value to the Hero The Helper – aids the hero The Princess – Reward for the Hero and Object of the Villains Schemes Her Father – Rewards the Hero The Dispatcher – Sends the Hero on their quest The False Hero – The double agent who hinders the Hero rather than helping

Propp’s Characters

Understanding character roles and applying them to narrative in films is important because it lets us understand what roles the characters will forefill and what conventions and stereotypes they must then therefore conform to. This helps us to understand a bigger picture of the film and its narrative.

In the Crazies there are the following character types: The Villain – The government

The Hero – David

The False Hero – Military

The Donor – Deputy Russel

The Princess – Judy

In Halloween, the following character roles apply to: The Villain – Mike Myers

The Hero – Laurie

The Helper – Myer’s Doctor

Propp’s characters in Halloween & The Crazies

Claude Levi-Strauss looked at narrative structure and how it has binary opposites. Binary opposites are sets of contrasting opposite values in a narrative that represent different things. For example, good and bad. Binary opposition is important and useful for analysing and understanding media texts because it allows to dig deeper and find the arrangement of themes and contrasting values that different types of characters try to represent, this allows us to see what different characters stand for and what the narrative gives an ideology of what they represent in the plot.

Here are five examples of binary oppositions in Halloween: Good – Evil Aware – Unaware Innocence – Adultery Mortal – Immortal Powerless - Dominance

Binary Opposition

Bordwell & Thompson said ‘a chain of events in a cause-effect relationship, occuring in time and space’. This means that events happen within the time and space of the run time of the film but which do not occur on the screen that we see, but we know that they still occur in the film because of the ‘cause-effect’ relationship these then have and cause in the future. This is useful because with the right narrative and dialogue the audience can visualise entire sequences that are happening off screen but have not happened on the screen. This is extremely useful movie making method that allows for extra narrative and story to be crammed into the film and have certain events happen in the frame that could not have happened without a particular cause in a different time and space. This is useful for understanding media texts also because it allows us to understand a narrative in a more detailed manor and to analyse how the screenwriters have created the particular story for the film.

2 events in Crazies that cause another event to happen: Deputy Russel sacrifices himself allowing Judy and David to get out of the town and continue the

narrative trying to escape. Judy visits the nursery of her unborn child which then causes David to get his hand stabbed while

trying to save her from the Crazies that got into the room with her. 2 events in the film that we know happened but don’t see The plane crashed and contaminated the water flowing into the town, we know this because we see

the plane in the lake and therefore assume it must have crashed for it to have been underwater in a lake.

Judy gets her blood tested, we don’t see this but she mentions it during the dialogue and is taken to quarantine due to high fever, which was actually caused due to her being pregnant. We don’t see this but she says how they took blood samples from her and the other infected ‘Crazies’ townsfolk.

Bordwell & Thompson