Narrative theory examines how stories and plots are constructed and presented to audiences. A narrative consists of the events or story, and the plot which structures how those events are presented. Media texts like movies and music videos tell stories that both reflect and teach cultural values. There are common narrative types that stories fall into, such as the tragic hero and love stories. Music videos can be categorized as performance, narrative, or abstract clips depending on whether they focus on singing, telling a visual story, or being a creative art piece respectively. Standard Hollywood narratives follow a pattern of equilibrium disruption, a quest, and resolution and re-equilibrium.

1. Narrative Theory

2. What is a narrative?
Narrative = story & plot
Story (what happens/the events)
Plot (how what happens is
presented to the audience)
Inferred
Events
(what we
don’t see)
Text
(what
we see)
Non-diegetic
material
Narrative Structures:
• Narrative
• Performance
• Abstract
Bordwell & Thompson (1997)

3. Tim O’Sullivan et al (1998)
• All media texts tell us some kind of story
• Through careful mediation, media texts offer a way of
telling stories about ourselves – the story of us as a
culture/a set of cultures
• What we experience when we ‘read’ a story is to
understand a particular set of constructions or conventions
& it’s important to be aware of how these constructions are
put together
• Media reflects culture but also teaches the audience about
themselves

4. Kate Domaille (2001)
Every story can be fitted into 1 of 8 narrative types – each of these types
has an original story upon which others are based:
• Achilles – fatal flaw leads to destruction of the previously flawless
person, e.g. Superman
• Candide – indomitable hero who cannot be put down, e.g. James Bond
• Cinderella – dream comes true, e.g. Pretty Woman
• Circe – the chase/the innocent & the victim, e.g. Saw
• Faust – selling your soul to the devil may bring riches but eventually
your soul belongs to him, e.g. Little Mermaid
• Orpheus – loss of something personal, the gift that is taken away,
tragedy of loss or the journey that follows the loss, e.g. The Sixth Sense
• Romeo & Juliet – love story, e.g. Titanic
• Tristan & Iseult – love triangle, e.g. Casablanca

5. Sven Carlsson (1999)
Music videos, in general, fall into 2 rough groups – performance clip or conceptual
clip
Performance Clip:
• Mostly filmed performance
• 1 or more settings performed in
The performance can be 3 types…
• Song
• Dance
• Instrumental
Narrative Clip:
• Like a short silent film with musical background
• Visual story that’s easy to follow
• Pure narrative clip contains no lip-sync
Art/Abstract Clip:
• No narrative or lip sync = pure art clip
• Just concept & mood

6. Pam Cook (1985)
Standard Hollywood narrative structure should have:
• Linearity of cause & effect within an overall trajectory of enigma
resolution
• A high degree of narrative closure
• A fictional world (diegesis) that contains verisimilitude, especially
governed by spatial & temporal coherence
Equilibrium
(balance) Protagonist
Antagonist
Take on narrative
role – they have
conflict of desires
Disruption of
equilibrium
(changes the story)
Quest
Resolution
Re-equilibrium

7. Pam Cook (continued…)
Cause & Effect
Linearity
Trajectory = a path/course (like a journey)
Enigma = something/someone that is mysterious or difficult to understand (another
term for distruption)
The story moves forward to solve the problem
Todorov (1997) – explores same idea as Pam Cook

8. Claude Levi Strauss (1958)
His ideas about narrative amount to the fact that he believed all stories
operated to certain clear binary opposites, e.g.
• Good vs. Evil
• Black vs. White
• Rich vs. Poor
The importance of these ideas us that essentially a complicated world is
reduced to a simple either/or structure – things are either good or bad,
right or wrong, there’s no inbetween

9. Michael Shore (1984)
Music video are:
• Recycled styles
• Surface without substance (all about the look – no depth/meaning)
• Information overload
• Ambivalence
• Decadence
• Immediate gratification
• Vanity & the moment
• Adolescent male fantasies
Weezer’s video for Buddy
• The death of context
Holly uses recycled styles
• Classical storytelling motifs
from the 70s sit-com, Happy
Days
Oasis use recycled styles in
their video for The
Importance Of Being Idle
as they use the style of
British Social Realism

10. Andrew Goodwin (1992)
Argues that in music videos…
• “narrative relations are highly complex”
• Meaning can be created from the individual audio-viewer’s personal music
taste to sophisticate intertextuality that uses multi-discursive phenomena
of western culture
• Many are dominated by advertising references, film pastiche (copying) &
reinforce the post-modern ‘re-use’
Therefore, we respond to the same videos in different ways depending on our
own views & values – we create individual meanings based on our own
understanding of our culture