Our Narrative Prison
May 23, 2025 at 04:30PMIn 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.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/05/23/narrative-prison-hollywood-formula/
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