Watching Films Is A Major Contribution To Your Misery

Story structure is giving you unreasonable expectations in real life.

Now, before we start on this, I should mention that these are hardly my own revelations. the information here is well known to people in the business of creating stories. I have a few friends studying film who will be no doubt happy to correct me on any mistakes I make.

To start, here's a few things everyone knows about stories: We all tell stories, and we all like hearing them. Stories usually have 3 parts; an individual goes about their business, some interference to this occurs, then interference is overcome and a lesson is learned. Almost every single film, book, play, television show and exaggerated boast in history follows this pattern. Even if in a book, the Hero dies at the end, they will still be overcoming internal struggles and problems and coming to terms with their pasts or whatever. Stories that don't follow this pattern feel incomplete or wrong to us.

This is why when a child tells you about their day it seems impossible to listen to, they aren't hitting any of the beats that we know stories have to conform to in order to catch our attention. And if a narrative doesn't fit this profile, we dislike the story without realising why.

It's even worse with films. 

We've been making films now for round about a century, and they've got it down to a science. Like when someone pushes out a cheap song which goes: Intro, verse, bridge, verse, chorus, verse chorus, solo, chorus. When someone makes a movie, they know that the protagonist must hear the call to action or the beginning of their journey or arc between 5 and 20 minutes into the film. This is fairly obvious, so let's see something more specific.

At almost exactly 60 minutes into any film, the characters must reach a climax of some sort. Either an action scene, a revelation or twist, or a romantic moment, or an emotional turning point. In Raiders of the Lost Arc, 1:00:00 is the exact second when Indie uncovers the room containing the arc. In A New Hope, the Millennium Falcon lands inside the Death Star at 1:00:00. In The Matrix, a lot of slow exposition from Morpheus is interrupted apropos of nothing for a chase with some robot squids, which they evade and then just go back to what they were doing. If that moment wasn't there, though. People would say the movie "dragged". This happened in The Avengers. at the 1 hour mark, Black Widow is talking to Loki. Then, at 1:06:00, the trouble starts with the attack on the helicarrier. That scene was 6 minutes late, and almost every single criticism of the Avengers involves the "slow" middle section. Try it. Go and watch a film on Netflix, and skip to one hour in. It will usually be an action scene, and it's almost always footage that gets used in the trailer.

We have been conditioned to want this formula for years without knowing it. And we look for it in real life as well. You may notice in films that roughly 30 minutes before the end, some tragedy or turning point is reached where all seems lost, often achieved via the death or incapacitation of a mentor, (Obi Wan Kenobi is a prime example.) This is the darkest moment in the film, usually, and is necessary to give the climax it's full clout. But we all now associate terrible misfortune with an impending triumph. How many people have you heard who hit the bottom, and say that they know something is coming their way to help them. 

Maybe it's a winning lottery ticket. Or a job offer, or remission, or some higher power. We are all convinced that eventually, it's all going to turn out okay. Because every story we've ever heard, has played out like that. Even "true" stories. Biopics and documentaries are often full of embellishments, exaggerations, omissions and rearrangements of events in order to conform to this narrative pattern, and even anecdotes we tell to other people are framed this way. 

So when, in our own lives, the story doesn't have a swelling, heroic upswing after going down and out, it comes completely to our surprise. We physically can't comprehend that we're not going to win the big game, or pass the final exam, or that standing up to the bully won't make him go away, or that your estranged partner won't come running through the airport to stop you at the last minute. 

I went through a breakup earlier in the year, and I had to constantly remind myself that the story was over. And every time I did, it felt like being denied a happy ending all over again. And it's this that makes us miserable. Especially cynical, misanthropic, angry, former idealists like myself. Because these ideas are so ingrained in our psyches, that breaking away from them is a physical effort. Is there anyone reading this, who can't name a person who is still waiting for that fairy tale moment? Who is certain that there must be some way to fix things? Some combination of words that will make everything go back to the way it was?

Think of the men and women who's partners are abusive, but believe that if they just hang in for a little while longer, they can change them, or help them. That it will all be okay. (This is specifically Beauty and the Beast's fault, but the larger case still holds.)

How much easier would it be for those people if they hadn't been told for their whole lives that everyone gets a happy ending? That this is the one time ever that things aren't going to all work out for the best?

This is not wholly the fault of movies. Mainly because 3-act storytelling is older than the written word itself. The very oldest pictographs we can find contain stories which were already old when they were made, and they follow this same pattern. Even our ancient religious texts. Is there any greater evidence that they were man made that the fact that they conform perfectly to our fantasies? You are a normal human (Possibly a farmer or a blacksmith) who discovers he has been charged by the almighty with the sacred quest of spreading the holy word. You are persecuted and face adversity, eventually being killed. Then, when all seems lost, you emerge into the kingdom of heaven with the father, to live happily ever after. Perfect three-act story.

Maybe this is why death is so hard for us. Because to the people still living any fictional "afterlife" is completely intangible, so the story for the survivors is truncated. We only get up to the horrific and devastating setback, and never get to experience the glorious finale.

This type of emotional conditioning prevents us from moving on and accepting the past. It causes discomfort, bad decision making and immense sadness and regret and feelings of loss and denial. Which, ironically, usually lead us to trying to take our mind of things by watching movies.

This has been an Empirical Opinions journal, allow me to play you out: