In my previous post, I discussed the way in which the slow and gradual process of character revelation and character development common to serialized narrative should, in theory, be ideally suited for exploring questions of social history -- questions of personal and cultural change. Before we examine these techniques in Mad Men, it would be useful to have a baseline understanding of how storytelling techniques in serialized narrative create investment in character. As we saw in the last post, both the length of the narrative and the pauses between episodes play a role, yet specific writing techniques must come into play as well.
Michael Newman examines some of these techniques in his essay "From Beats to Arcs: Towards a Poetics of Television Narrative." Newman begins his discussion on character arcs by noting that viewers are not only invested in the outcome of the plot, but in the "characters whose lives these plots define." (Newman, 23) Writers Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin echo this statement in their guidebook Successful Television Writing. "Ask just about anyone in the TV business, and they'll tell you the same thing," they explain. "No one watches their favorite shows for the stories....People tune into NYPD Blue to see how Sipowicz solves a crime and how he deals with it. They don't really care what the crime is, or who did it. They care about how it affects Sipowicz." (Goldberg and Rabkin, 23) Goldberg and Rabkin summarize The West Wing pilot to further their point, concluding that story structure is the platform that leads to "scenes of great emotional impact". Character is revealed through reaction to "challenges, risks, perils, adversities." (Goldberg and Rabkin, 24)
Yet this aspect of character technique is true of non-serialized narrative as well. With serialized narrative, we experience a characters reaction to a wide array of adversity over time, and can compare and contrast their emotional response over time. If a character arc is developed, character reactions and responses to adversity lead (or mostly lead) in a direction. As Newman summarizes, "Continuing stories make characters more likely to undergo significant life events" in which "the characters themselves are more likely to change, or at least to grow." (Newman, 23) In latter seasons of The West Wing, for example, Josh leaves his job as deputy White House chief of staff, convinces an unknown Congressman to run for President, and runs the campaign through a gauntlet of obstacles in the primary and general election campaigns. Adversity over time leads to multiple character revelations (including revelations of backstory relevant to character motivation) and to some level of character growth.
These descriptions of technique however seem like the beginning of an understanding rather than the end. I'm interesting in exploring how the techniques work at a more granular level within scenes and episodes to define character and establish arcs over time. I suspect there are deeper relationships between form and content that may influence the kinds of character revelations and growth arcs that "work" best in this kind of television, and that in turn may affect the kinds of stories that are told.
Writers don't write any story that happens to come along, and don't feel that there are infinite ways to tell each story. They speak, sometimes mystically, of finding the way to choose "the right" stories for their series and their characters and struggling to find "the right" way to tell those stories. I'm interested in those choices and that sense of having storytelling limitations. Perhaps a more granular level of exploration of technique will give us clues as to which stories (or in Mad Men's case which aspects of social history) are best told through these techniques.
Although there a number of challenges inherent in learning about writing techniques through for-profit manuals geared to novices, they at least provide the advantage of explaining some kind of analytical process and giving names to techniques. A number of years ago, my husband attended a weekend screenwriting seminar by David Freeman, who among other things, itemized character "rooting" techniques -- things that writers add to the script to make the audience more likely to root for the character. (My husband has experimented with using the techniques in his own work in politics.) Freeman has posted samples of techniques on his web site here, http://www.beyondstructure.com/article_sampletechniques.php. He's offering a relatively inexpensive online class in May on advanced dialogue technique, which I am thinking of signing up for to get access to additional descriptions of technique.
ReplyDeleteAgain, I'm looking for relationships between form and content, and for descriptions of things that writers say they do "by instinct" and that viewers may experience without being fully aware.