In my screenwriting classes in college, the classic three-act structure, along with key plot elements—the inciting incident, the climax, the resolution—were drilled into us. Most of today’s screenwriters continue to stick to this tried-and-true cinematic formula. In this Aeon essay, Eliane Glaser pushes back against this repetitive structure and explains why Hollywood is an “oppressive storytelling machine.” If you think about it, even films with the most effective redemption arcs and emotionally satisfying resolutions only offer the illusion of change. “There may be an internal transformation,” Glaser writes, “but the structural conditions remain the same.”
Glaser then asks: “So, what happens when we truly break with convention?” What kinds of stories can we tell when filmmakers deviate from three acts—a structure that’s very Western, male, and colonial? Her insights make me wonder: What would our own lives look like if we went off-script to live our most authentic and meaningful lives?
We may be entirely familiar with the corporate clichés of Hollywood, but I don’t think the underpinnings of traditional story structure are necessarily obvious. One of my favourite films, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), conforms pretty closely to formulaic structure, even if it is complicated by dream sequences: the inciting incident of the car crash; Betty’s quest to help Rita rediscover her true identity. I believe that one reason we don’t object, don’t groan with boredom, is that the scaffolding is – crucially – hidden. Every film opens with a fresh premise. The inciting incident always feels surprising, to the protagonist and to us alike: it’s a wild card that comes out of nowhere. It is this discreet veiling, in fact, that enables the formula to continue to thrive alongside the evident narrative variety we encounter every time we enter an independent bookshop: from W G Sebald’s collection The Emigrants (1992) to Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine (1988) to Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital (2023). Hollywood’s storymakers may have grown more sophisticated about the method of delivery, but they are still providing the same drug: the shake-up that leads to enlightenment.
The COVID-19 lockdown was effectively an inciting incident on a global scale, offering us glimpses of how to live more meaningfully: building stronger ties with local communities; leaving urban areas for the countryside; discovering a greater sense of wellbeing through working at home (though, five years on, we appear to have returned to business as usual without learning those lessons – unlike the protagonists in films). Equally alluring is the idea of having a calling, an all-encompassing mission that sweeps away everyday mundanity, to say nothing of the appeal of absconding from a stultifying job or a stifling domestic life.
More picks on storytelling
The Texas Border Is the New Frontier of Film
“After years of having their stories told by outsiders, locals are fighting back with their own cameras and building much-needed infrastructure. But they need more support.”
How a Script Doctor Found His Own Voice
“For decades, Scott Frank earned up to three hundred thousand dollars a week rewriting other people’s screenplays. Finally, he decided to stop playing ventriloquist.”
The Protagonist Is Never in Control
“An upended fairy tale.”
What If We Cancel the Apocalypse?
“How the aesthetic, utopian yet pragmatic movement of Solarpunk reimagines a future without a climate catastrophe.”
Tale Spin
What is storytelling? Megan Marz explores stories, narratives, blog posts, and vibes in this Real Life essay. While I could recognize that blog posts were narrative constructions, and many of them had conventional arcs, they seemed to break with a tradition that to me defined what stories were. They appeared to leak literary expression back…
The Storykiller and His Sentence: Rebecca Solnit on Harvey Weinstein
Rebecca Solnit considers Harvey Weinstein’s 23-year prison sentence through the lens of storytelling, and who gets to do it now that at least two men who were “in charge of stories” — Weinstein and Woody Allen — have in the past week lost so much of their power, and women are now finding their voices.
