The Coming Era of Visual Storytelling: Building to Last

I've been kicking around the idea of applying meme-tracking to the study of the proliferation of certain stylistic and narrative elements in movies, TV shows, and online video. Also, I'd like to track the popularity of individual texts.

The first step would be to log which movies, shows, videos had certain elements (non-linear plotting, infidelity, a female protagonist, dense information within scenes, intricately woven subplots) or were of a certain genre. The second step would be to track the popularity of a text or an element within texts over the course of many years. Step 3 would involve making some falsifiable hypotheses that would be supported or debunked by the data.

Let's go ahead and skip to step 3. Some films have stuck around. Others haven't. Now that we've started to make more and more films and TV shows available on DVD (and soon online), I think its worth asking why it is this way. Perhaps critics cause films and TV shows to stick around by drawing the public's attention to them, or perhaps some inherent quality of the texts caused them to stick around and the critics merely recognize these characteristics. Of course, the elements themselves might not matter as much as the frequency with which they change. We might be able to see more clearly the degree of variety and familiarity that is demanded by the public.

I don't think we can really say at this point whether either of these are true because until relatively recently, films and then TV shows were seen as a transient medium. Their economic and cultural value were temporary. They had expiration dates. Just within the past few years, with the expanding inexpensive and accessible libraries of motion picture texts on DVD (soon to be online), we're getting our first glimpse of what texts are still valued by the general public well after their release. To some degree, this happened with books, but even there, some amount of capital was required to take the book into a 2nd, 3rd, 4th printing.

And here we get to the "so what" of it: people (especially vendors and owners of texts) never really cared about what separated a classic text from a temporarily successful text because it didn't matter, economically speaking. If a film, TV show, or book were popular within the first year of its release, then it would get syndicated, or re-released, or go to a second printing. All texts (except maybe oral legends) cost money to keep going, and the best way to get that money was to make it popular right away. Any text's initial popularity is a reflection of its immediate relevancy as well the strength of the promotional campaign behind it, NOT qualities which might make it of value to people living in a different culture (either on another continent or in another era). Stories weren't built to last because it wasn't in the producer/distributor/ owner's best interest.

We trundled along, mixing advertising (time-sensitive messages that are intended to distract) with storytelling, for the better part of a century. Given the available technology and the high cost of storage and distribution, this made economic sense. But now things change. With the dramatic fall in storage and distribution cost, it is significantly cheaper to keep an old title selling than to produce a new one. For the first time in the history of commercial storytelling, the economic emphasis should be on creating a lasting product.

In terms of examining culture, its always been important to ask what makes classic stories so enduring and universal. Culture (particularly storytelling) has been yoked to commerce for so long that the only studies of storytelling that were read widely and mattered to those outside the academy were ones that pertained to stories that produced profit. Now, the study of the classic story can get that outside momentum behind it.

So, what makes a classic story? Joseph Campbell's pretty much got this covered, but to speak about it in more practical and exact terms, I'd love to examine the films and TV shows that have been produced so far.

A few testable hypotheses:

1. So-called "body genres" (porn, horror, and melodrama) are somewhat similar in narrative structure (simple, unvarying), and popularity arc (steep drop off after a brief period of time).
2. Films and TV shows that are unified and complex (in terms of the threads of the narrative) are likely to have a less steep drop off in their popularity arc than films and TV shows with simpler narratives. In terms of commerce, these stories have a longer "shelf life" than others assuming the appeal of all other things - the timeliness/timelessness of the themes and content, the acting style, and other elements that may go in and out of fashion - is equal.
   
3. Certain critics, over the years, have been more adept at picking movies that did poorly initially but sold well later and continue to sell well decades since its initial release than others. There's a problem of causality here - did the critic's praise result in higher ticket sales, or was the inherent superiority of the story responsible, and the critic's and public's reaction merely an inevitable result of those qualities?
   

My hope is that we can get past the rather defensive stance that all genres, subject matters, and styles are equal. When theorists use this term (or imply that it is the case by rescuing oft-overlook and maligned genres like the aforementioned body genres), its a value judgment - a soap is no worse or less important than a highly rated, critically acclaimed prime time show like Seinfeld; a forgotten B film from the 50's is no less important than a Hitchcock film. OK, fine. Though they can be considered equal, different types of films, shows, and videos are not the same in terms of their style and content (rather obviously, since that is what is typically used to tell them apart) as well as (less obviously) their "patterns of popularity": how quickly they fade from the public's consciousness, how often they return to it.

Then there are those movies, TV shows, and especially songs that weren't all that popular to begin with, then sank under the radar for years, maybe decades, only to resurface later. When you dig one of these long forgotten texts up, you feel this proprietary need to defend it. It feels rare. But maybe we can set this personal passion aside and look at things with some distance. Of course, the existing history of visual storytelling is tainted for the reasons I mentioned (lasting popularity relied on initial popularity in a way it doesn't have to anymore), but if we correct for things like differences in advertising budget and pay special attention to the texts and characteristics that weren't so popular initially but stuck around and grew in stature over the years, then we might begin to understand the qualities that make a visual story a classic.