Related comment - Mike Duncan who made a name for himself doing long form multi episode history podcasts recently produced a fiction project of the false history of a class revolution on mars ~200 years in the future that is told through the lens of long form multi episode history podcast from a narrator in the distant future.
It's pretty good considering it is his first not-non-fiction project and the narrative is a refreshing departure from typical sci-fi stories since it's written to sound like a true history with too many important figures to remember and historically disputed causes and effects of pivotal events.
The story doesn't not follow the conflict-rising-climax-resolution structure but it often refutes a listener's anticipation of satisfying narrative elements like true history many loose ends remain loose and plenty of important characters "disappear from the records" which leaves one wondering.
It's certainly unlike any fiction I had consumed prior and it's pretty good imo so I'm shining a light on it here.
nonameiguess · 49m ago
It'd be interesting to see if something like that could be adapted to the screen formats the author is complaining about here. House of the Dragon faced a similar problem. The source material is a lot like what you describe, a fictional history written as if it was real historical research, with multiple conflicting sources, disputed accounts, and no way to resolve the truth of what really happened. The HBO television adaptation kind of just threw that out the window and presented what is supposed to be seen as the "real" history through a normal God's eye third-person narrator. It also showed what happens in situations that the fictional history had no account of, resolving mysteries of what happened to people who disappeared without anyone involved witnessing how and writing it down.
mrob · 3h ago
One way to get more structural variety is by watching foreign movies. For example, I think Tokyo Story (1953) is better modeled as a four-act kishōtenketsu[0] structure than a three-act hero's journey. It's widely considered one of the best movies of all time, and one that I rate very highly, but it's very different from Western movies. That difference was essential to my appreciation of it, because it's also slow paced and lacking in action; the novelty was enough to hold my attention until I could engage with the story.
I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization.
In children’s movies the antagonist/monster is often meant as a metaphor for the child’s lack of autonomy in an ambivalent world that they do not fully understand.
And then you have My Neighbor Totoro, where all the monsters are friends, and the bad guy is just chronic illness, children who have let their imaginations run wild and fear the worst, a sibling getting lost, and at the end basically nothing happens which is the best news considering. There is no metaphor for human struggle, it’s just human struggle.
While some of his movies like Castle In the Sky, Mononoke and Nausicaä follow a modified Hollywood bad guy arc (in Castle half the bad guys practically become chosen family, in Spirited Away they become allies), a lot don’t. Up on Poppy Hill is essentially two teenagers in love discovering to their horror that they are first cousins, despair, and then discover that one of them was adopted.
But in all of them is the self-rescuing princess. The child either has to save themselves or at least demand the help that they are rightfully entitled to.
I got to introduce some kids to Ghibli right as Disney started distributing them. If you’ve seen Lasseter’s introduction to Spirited Away that’s where we were at that time - I’m telling you a secret that should not be a secret. And they in turn “forced” their friends to watch them in the same way my generation forced people to watch The Princess Bride; like it was a moral imperative to postpone other plans and rectify this egregious oversight in their education.
PaulHoule · 1h ago
It’s a standard trope in a mahou shoujo anime such as Sailor Moon or Futari wa Precure that the enemy tries to infiltrate the hero group and ultimately gets domesticated by Japanese society. I think of how the antagonist joins the party in Tales of Symphonia as a playable character.
jancsika · 21m ago
> I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization.
Loss of variety in terms of what's shown on traditional movie theater screens-- sure.
For everything else, technological advancement has lowered the price to create films of a base level of quality. And that has caused an explosion in artistic variety. I doubt the average American has enough leisure time to keep up with all the indie films produced in a year (nor even a sub-genre).
klik99 · 2h ago
I just learned about kishōtenketsu thanks to this great video on How To with John Wilson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-SwyF-Vvbs). I'm surprised that it's not as well known in the west, considering how many great directors use it.
Ozu is my favorite director, and learning about the 4-act structure helped me understand why - I always hated the third act of most movies, when character motivations go out the window in the interest of a big explosive ending. There is a lot of potential in kishōtenketsu structure to tell stories that are more realistic and introspective and don't require the kind of antagonistic conflict of 3-act structure.
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
Some years back I started wading into the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die". I'm still consuming — perhaps another 3 years and I'll be done? (Can die.)
Anyway, it's been a wild ride introducing to me early silent films, surreal films, art films, Italian neorealism, French new wave, etc. There very much are different narratives and structures outside "Hollywood films". Give them a watch.
RajT88 · 2h ago
Agree on foreign films having tropes/plot beats which were locally grown, instead of borrowed from Hollywood.
Time is another dimension you can use to get to different tropes. Lots of old movies don't go quite how you would expect them to, given modern filmmaking plot beats.
Examples:
Rang de Basanti (India) features political corruption which causes the death of a man in a group of tight-knit friends. In revenge, they hatch a plot to assassinate the defense minister. And then they do it, and the second act of the movie takes place and they all die. What a ride!
Duck Soup (1933) is about as far away from a modern comedy as you can get, and it is entirely about sticking your thumb in the eye of the wealthy and powerful. Surprisingly watchable, for such an old film.
sjm · 2h ago
Classic Thing, Japan. There are plenty of western movies that don't follow the three-act structure (off the top of my head, Apocalypse Now, Mulholland Drive (and probably most Lynch), Boyhood (and other Linklaters), basically any Robert Altman) and plenty of foreign films that do.
klik99 · 2h ago
Kubrick frequently uses a two act - Barry Lyndon where he rises from nothing to peak at the exact midpoint and then falls to nothing at the end, or Clockwork Orange where he does a bunch of horrible things in the first half and the consequences are mirrored around the midpoint of the movie.
mrob · 2h ago
>Mulholland Drive
From the article:
"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."
I liked the movie, and I approve of this kind of creativity, but a disguised 3-act structure is still a 3-act structure.
card_zero · 2h ago
OK, now let's find a way to see it as a four-act structure. Introduction: car crash. Development: woman with amnesia and blue key. Turning point: take your pick, remembering a name, the corpse maybe. Outcome: silencio.
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
Yeah, not sure it is a three-act structure. That's a stretch.
munificent · 2h ago
There is another film structure that is super common but is often overlooked. It is perhaps not coincidental that the protagonist is more often a woman. I found a blog post describing it once, but can't find it now.
In the typical three-act structure, the protagonist must make an internal change to themselves before they are able to resolve the conflict.
In this alternate plot structure, it is the community itself that must change. The protagonist is "right all along" and serves to the be the catalyst for that change. Almost as if society is the protagonist. It looks something like:
1. Inciting incident where problem appears.
2. Protagonist attempts to tackle problem using their "true self".
3. Family/village/community smacks them down and says they can't do that.
4. Protagonist tries to conform and solve the problem the way they are told to but fails.
5. Climax: Running out of options, the protagonist unleashes their true inner self and solves the problem.
6. The community witnesses this and realizes that they should accept the protagonist for who they are.
This is very common in Disney movies (Mulan and Frozen being stellar examples) and in family movies where the protagonist is a young person that "no one understands".
It is sometimes mixed with the typical three-act structure where the protagonist also makes an internal "change", but the change is most often simply accepting who they already were at the beginning of the film before trying to deny that throughout the second act.
viridian · 4m ago
Moana might actually be a better example than Mulan or Frozen, because there's not even any inner turmoil outside of the very beginning.
Moana herself is just about the only person who doesn't have a character arc, she just gets better at doing the things she was already set on doing. Both Maui and the entire village of Motunui including her family need to learn that Moana is actually right about everything.
She's effectively an avatar of the ocean's will, and the more she leans into it, the better it goes for her.
owebmaster · 1h ago
I think that is exactly the plot in Ne Zha 2, a chinese animation that is breaking records. The trailer is awesome.
bossyTeacher · 33m ago
princess mononoke fits the bill
kazinator · 2h ago
We have that choice now. If movies based on human-versus-{human,nature,aliens,supernatural,...} conflict is not your thing, you can go to YouTube (or similar) and watch, say, people collaborate in making something. It's still a kind of conflict with resolution: people or a person versus the tooling and materials, using their knowledge and skills to show solutions, and then it's all resolved when the thing is made. At every turn, you don't quite know what they are going to do next, or sometimes even what they are working on and how it will fit into the big picture. (E.g. it something that will be a part of the finished work, or is it a tooling jig?)
It's not easy to get away from the three parts of introduction, development and conclusion, in any work that exhibits sequence. Not even in something abstract like music. (I should say, it's certainly easy to forcibly get away from it, if you don't care about the result being boring.)
There is also comedy. If you manage to make people laugh throughout the work, the plot doesn't have to necessarily follow the formula.
klik99 · 2h ago
One thing I've noticed in music composition (where I have more training/experience, but I suspect the same is true for narratives) is the rules get codified / standardized a generation after a style of music is popular. Bach, for example, "breaks the rules" of counterpoint at least once in every piece in Well-Tempered Clavier, which was supposed to be an educational piece so if he actually felt like there were rules to follow he'd be more likely to be "by the book" for educational purposes.
But the rules of counterpoint were codified after his death (IIRC there were two people who worked together to do it), and act like an averaging across all baroque composers. Making the rules is kind of like putting it in a glass box, sealing it off and preserving it - IE removing all life from it. A contemporary example is how punk became standardized, just wear leather jacket with safety pins and mohawk and play barre chords. The spirit of punk moved to post-punk and elsewhere but also this bizzaro copy of all the superficial aspects of punk moved elsewhere.
While I love Joseph Campbell and the heros journey, I do feel like sticking too strongly to it does the same thing for narratives. I especially hate insistence that everything needs a three act structure, not because it's inherently bad, but because stories that don't need it are shoehorned into it and given an unneeded third act with more set pieces than genuine character motivation and development. It's like people see a good movie with a three act structure, and think it's due to that specific structure.
ijk · 2h ago
Hollywood has the particular problem that the executives would really like a formula to follow to make people like the films, the screenwriters would really like a formula to follow to write something that they can sell, and so on. There's a lot of commercial pressure for a factory to mass-produce plot and stamp it out into films. People liked a film? Make the exact same thing and see if they'll buy it again. Franchises help, because at least there's some incentive to shuffle around some different characters and plot elements.
Though the never-ending soap-opera of comics aren't really that great a fit for wrapping everything up in a three-act structure. (I'm still confused by why the Marvel films felt the need to kill off 90% of their villains in the same movie they debuted.) But the hero's journey is an attempt to answer to "how can we make a film as popular as Star Wars?" So we just follow that pattern, I guess.
Not that there weren't other patterns--the Disney animators independently arrived at their own storytelling rules, for example. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston ) has a discussion of what they found worked for them and what didn't. It's worth comparing what they say there with the actual films and reflect on how the rules bore out in practice, of course. But it's another attempt at codifying a formula for appealing stories.
There's lots of attempts to try to describe the universal appealing story pattern. Whether narrative actually works that way has become bifurcated into separate questions: "what kind of stories are effective for humans?" and "what kind of story can we produce reliably as a commercial success?" are subtly different but have become conflated.
_DeadFred_ · 7m ago
You're missing the constraints: what kinds of stories actually work for humans and can be told clearly, with mass appeal, in a 90-120 minute audio/visual format.
We already have spaces for broader or more experimental narratives, they're called novels. Music videos gave us popularized short form experimentation for a while. TV series give us longer form audio/visual storytelling. But there's a hard limit to how much complexity or diversity you can pack into a 90-120 minute block while still keeping it cohesive and broadly engaging. TV gets away with slower pacing and more meandering structures because viewers can dip in and out. People like/recommend a series even if one episode didn't keep their interest. If 30 minutes of a movie don't keep someone's interest they aren't going to recommend it, it sucks to spend 30 minutes in a theater detached from what you are watching. Movies have to convince audiences to stay locked in for the entire runtime, which naturally narrows the kind of stories that can work.
And part of the problem now is that movies were once novel. They evolved from stagey, non-gritty recorded plays basically to gritty, photorealistic stories. That leap kept things feeling fresh for a long time. But now that the tech curve has plateaued, now that dark/gritty has run it's course, it's like people want movies to somehow figure out how to be... not movies.
Punk was new/novel fresh. Then what was new/novel/fresh was identified and expanded upon. Then it become not new/novel/fresh. Other music genres were kept fresh by technical limitations slowly being removed by new tech/monetary limits limited who could do what/knowledge gatekeeping. Now that every tool is available to every person along with deeper knowledge of music theory, which theoretically should make it more interesting, music has gotten more boring. Because we don't want good. We want novel new experiences.
klik99 · 2h ago
Yes, that's a really good point. I had this nagging feeling of there was a commercialization aspect driving when I was writing that, since that's obviously what happened to punk, and you hit the nail on the head. I do think students are taught the 3-act structure / heros journey as if it was the ideal structure, but the true reason for it's ubiquity is an attempt to commoditize art.
bossyTeacher · 30m ago
> A contemporary example is how punk became standardized, just wear leather jacket with safety pins and mohawk and play barre chords. The spirit of punk moved to post-pun
also pop and indie pop, rock and indie rock.
jari_mustonen · 2h ago
The article mentions Jung's "collective unconscious," which is often misunderstood.
What he meant by it is that some unconscious features are collective, meaning they are genetically programmed in all people. Jung believed this also includes certain thought patterns, which can be inferred from stories. For example, he would have argued that a paragon of wisdom is typically an older man with a white beard (Gandalf and Dumbledore come to mind) because we have a genetically programmed inclination to see older men with white beards as paragons of wisdom.
Jung liked to use these kinds of methods to analyze the human psyche and its structures. Interesting guy. If anyone is interested, I recommend his collection of essays, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, as a first read.
pinkmuffinere · 2h ago
The Hero’s Journey is useful as a writing tool, but imo it is also a lens through which we analyze stories (once we learn about it). My feeling is that _any_ story can be cajoled into matching the hero’s journey with enough imagination. For this reason, I’m not as concerned about the limited palate — i think it says more about our perspective than about the story itself. It’s like complaining that we’re missing out on math because we learn numbers in base 10. Consider this example:
“I was hungry (call to action), so I went to Filipe’s to get a sandwich (transformation, now bearing sandwich) (Return is implied, I’m no longer at Filipe’s)“
Is that really constrained by the hero’s journey? Or is it just that communication discusses dilemmas and resolutions, and these can be fit into our stereotypical hero’s journey?
jimbokun · 28m ago
> “I was hungry (call to action), so I went to Filipe’s to get a sandwich (transformation, now bearing sandwich) (Return is implied, I’m no longer at Filipe’s)“
That’s the version of the Hero’s Journey used in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.
PaulHoule · 3h ago
It is easy to lay out criticism, hard to tell what a real answer could be. A writer friend of mine said it in a Hegelian way, that plots are thesis - antithesis - synthesis. You have some conflict and it is resolved.
You might make experiences that are about spending some time in a loved imaginary world with loved characters (The Star Wars Holiday Special or Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser [1]) but inevitably people who aren't superfans are going to feel it doesn't appeal to them. You can make a profitable game (Azur Lane) which is all about fanservice, collecting, and little narratives -- and people are going to say it is degenerate and compare it unfavorably to normal single player games like, say, Hi-Fi Rush or even mobile games which have a clear story like Love Nikki. All the complaints that people have around big media franchises will still stand.
While I do have a lot of love for TVTropes, I think what they're talking about here is a little broader than most of the tropes we see there (although they do have an excellent article on the Hero's Journey itself [1]). IMO, tropes in the sense that we see them listed there are building blocks for a narrative structure, of which the Hero's Journey is one example. As mentioned upthread, kishōtenketsu is an alternative (and for that matter, TVTropes has an article on it as well, see [2]).
I don't know... I cannot disagree, but isn't this like moaning about how there is no innovation in:
- Designing vehicles because every one of them is a thing that carries people or things from A to B, with some propulsion mechanism and a way to steer it.
- Designing software because it's all about providing an interface to manipulate objects in a database, or values in memory.
- Designing drugs because it's all some kind of chemical you take that suppresses biological processes.
- ...
You can always come up with an abstract definition that puts a set of things into the same bucket. Isn't this just semantics? Movies are not remotely all the same story. If you say they are all about: humans reacting to conflicts which leads to some changes in the state of things. I mean, that's what a story is, that's what a 3-act structure is.
Sure there are engaging stories with different structures, but isn't it all just omitting one of the acts, or chaining multiple stories in an overlapping manner, starting or ending at a different point, or stretching one of the acts for longer?
And more often than not you need to bend-over-backwards to make such stories as engaging as the standard structure, it's really hard, because to an extent you are breaking the very core of what makes a story engaging, and the novelty can only carry you so far.
It can be distracting actually, shaking up the structure can detract from the craft of filling it with good content, it's a bit gimmicky. There's a certain purity and merit to making a prototypical story truly excellent and innovative, obfuscating and shuffling that basic structure is a cheap path to innovation.
Regardless, you can always shoehorn any story into one or more introduction-conflict-resolution blocks and complain about it.
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daft_pink · 3h ago
It’s not only that the films have the same basic narrative structure, but the way films these days need to check a series of boxes. You can’t have just an action movie anymore, it also must contain a romantic subplot, charismatic antagonist, light humor, diverse cast, visual effects, international marketability (topic not narrow to one countries audience) etc.
Before we had the same basic recycled narratives, but a film didn’t need to check every single box and some films were more directed at romance or certain audiences and only checked a few of these boxes.
Modern tent poles need to check every single box and it just feels so formulaic and boring.
parpfish · 3h ago
I hate the fact that every film feels a need for a romantic subplot.
albumen · 2h ago
Check out John wick, Mad max fury road or The Banshees of Inisherin.
ijk · 2h ago
Is that still as much of a thing? Maybe I'm over-indexed on comparisons with 1930-1960, but it seems to me that romantic subplots have been in decline--there are quite a lot of recent films that entirely lack such a thing--especially compared to back in the day. The academy's award structure of lead actor/lead actress seems like it was a better fit for days where you had to shoehorn that into everything. To the point that they stuck romance subplots into Marx Brothers movies regardless of if it made any sense. (Which is conclusive proof why Duck Soup is their best film, since the Groucho/Margaret Dumont romance subplot is better integrated into the film.)
I'd be interested in seeing someone do a breakdown of the frequency of romantic subplots in films; I have some guesses as to the possible pattern but this seems like a moment for hard data.
hiatus · 2h ago
You might enjoy The Pervert's Guide to Cinema.
BeFlatXIII · 2h ago
Ruined The Hobbit
jes5199 · 1h ago
I think it’s hard to say that any one thing ruined the Hobbit. like, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
Yes, it is formulaic and boring.
I generally have had to go back to movies pre-Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark to find film less formulaic.
AStonesThrow · 2h ago
Children's animated films also require a fart joke or two.
My parents don't enjoy seeing films in theaters. So when they took us out as children, it was under exceptional circumstances. We went to see E.T. when it premiered. I remarked about Drew Barrymore's young character shouting "penis-breath" and my mother explained that if they didn't throw in a few profanities, the film would have been rated "G" and dismissed as a children's film. A "PG"-rated film was likely to gain more screenings in more theaters and capture a broader audience.
RankingMember · 3h ago
I think it comes down to the current financial realities of film-making, as the article touches on. There are certainly outliers that are revered by those who seek alternatives (David Lynch's work for example), but these are a small minority. I think general financial stability in some future (hopefully soon!) iteration of society would allow more experimentation- artists who are not starving artists are much more willing to take risks and stay true to their vision, profit/marketability be damned.
bob1029 · 1h ago
> The story is resolved either in the protagonist’s favour or against them: they triumph or else fail tragically.
I've always been a huge fan of the bad guy winning decisively. It is relatively rare.
We have subplots from the action hero films where some pretty bad things happen, but I feel like movies like Se7en and Arlington Road take it to a completely different level.
jimbokun · 22m ago
Because if you are looking for those kinds of stories it’s easier to find them in the news.
jimbokun · 40m ago
> Like Le Guin, he believes that we must ‘fundamentally think about how we rebuild structures’, because those we are living under ‘are literally killing us … whether that be patriarchy or racism or the climate catastrophe.’
This is why the right is surging around much of the world.
A critique of lazy story telling somehow ends up declaring lazy story telling a genocidal act that is “literally killing us.”
Or maybe it’s just a bunch of movies pandering to an audience that wants to see more of the same and if you want to see something more innovative seek it out or make it yourself.
_m_p · 3h ago
Every film cited in this article is meant to cater to the existing tastes of the audience and people like having their existing tastes reaffirmed.
Yep, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is one of the "1001 Movies".
I confess, I was not patient with the film. I scrubbed a bit to move the film along at a faster pace — almost skipped right over the wild ride that is the end of the film.
marviel · 2h ago
"Wired For Story" is a great book that discusses an alternative set of "Story Atoms" which can be combined to create unique, compelling stories.
the_gipsy · 2h ago
You can deconstruct those supposedly complete sets of plot types further, into just two atoms: rise and fall. The protagonist rises, then falls, but rises again (not necessarily to the same levels, but you get the idea). Or just falls and falls, but ultimately rises.
Meaningless, but so are those "7 types of story archs" taxonomies.
SeenNotHeard · 1h ago
Sure. Another comes from Jim Thompson, who said there was only one kind of story: "Things are not as they seem."
bee_rider · 3h ago
I thought this was a pretty interesting parallel, and reflection on the idea.
> Ironically, the monomyth is now being stretched out of shape by commercial forces, too. Franchises, sequels and box-set formats are extending stories in multiple directions to eke out ever more revenue, bringing to mind Musk’s intergalactic ambitions, which imply there’s a franchise option for human life: late capitalism, it would seem, respects neither narrative nor planetary boundaries. ‘It’s outrageous, really,’ Yorke says of endless sequels. ‘If you think of it in basic terms, a story is a question and answer, dramatised. And when the question is answered, there is nowhere else to go.’ Not surprisingly, Hollywood is working hard to combine narrative boundlessness with satisfying, self-contained stories: the Marvel ‘Multiverse’ is a kind of vast conglomerate of autonomous (super)heroes’ journeys.
The piece seems a bit critical of the monomyth, but it does flag the current, massive alternative as quite stupid as well. Instead of a hero’s journey for a hero, we have a franchise journey, degrading the typical arc to put it in service of the whole.
plank · 2h ago
A variation of the theory that there are only 7 different stories told in (fiction) books.
alfor · 11m ago
What I find tiring is propaganda and "the message" (if you watch the critical drinker)
The structure of the myth is not a problem if you respect the personages playing it. I just watched Firefly, a sci-fi serie done on a small budget decades ago, it's so much better than the slop we have these days with 100X the budget.
Why? Because the personages are different (really diverse) pursue their own goals and try to do good (mostly) in their own weird and incompatible ways.
To see that and enjoy it realy show what we lost recently, we are demoralized by our own culture.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 2h ago
The Matrix is like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. Notice the strangeness of the dream.
adzm · 1h ago
Save the Cat is also one of those things like kerning where once you know about it you start seeing it everywhere. I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned here yet. Many, many movies follow it almost exactly.
Here is an overview:
Opening Image – A visual that represents the struggle & tone of the story. A snapshot of the main character’s problem, before the adventure begins.
Set-up – Expand on the “before” snapshot. Present the main character’s world as it is, and what is missing in their life.
Theme Stated (happens during the Set-up) – What your story is about; the message, the truth. Usually, it is spoken to the main character or in their presence, but they don’t understand the truth…not until they have some personal experience and context to support it.
Catalyst – The moment where life as it is changes. It is the telegram, the act of catching your loved-one cheating, allowing a monster onboard the ship, meeting the true love of your life, etc. The “before” world is no more, change is underway.
Debate – But change is scary and for a moment, or a brief number of moments, the main character doubts the journey they must take. Can I face this challenge? Do I have what it takes? Should I go at all? It is the last chance for the hero to chicken out.
Break Into Two (Choosing Act Two) – The main character makes a choice and the journey begins. We leave the “Thesis” world and enter the upside-down, opposite world of Act Two.
B Story – This is when there’s a discussion about the Theme – the nugget of truth. Usually, this discussion is between the main character and the love interest. So, the B Story is usually called the “love story”.
The Promise of the Premise – This is the fun part of the story. This is when Craig Thompson’s relationship with Raina blooms, when Indiana Jones tries to beat the Nazis to the Lost Ark, when the detective finds the most clues and dodges the most bullets. This is when the main character explores the new world and the audience is entertained by the premise they have been promised.
Midpoint – Dependent upon the story, this moment is when everything is “great” or everything is “awful”. The main character either gets everything they think they want (“great”) or doesn’t get what they think they want at all (“awful”). But not everything we think we want is what we actually need in the end.
Bad Guys Close In – Doubt, jealousy, fear, foes both physical and emotional regroup to defeat the main character’s goal, and the main character’s “great”/“awful” situation disintegrates.
All is Lost – The opposite moment from the Midpoint: “awful”/“great”. The moment that the main character realizes they’ve lost everything they gained, or everything they now have has no meaning. The initial goal now looks even more impossible than before. And here, something or someone dies. It can be physical or emotional, but the death of something old makes way for something new to be born.
Dark Night of the Soul – The main character hits bottom, and wallows in hopelessness. The Why hast thou forsaken me, Lord? moment. Mourning the loss of what has “died” – the dream, the goal, the mentor characters, the love of your life, etc. But, you must fall completely before you can pick yourself back up and try again.
Break Into Three (Choosing Act Three) – Thanks to a fresh idea, new inspiration, or last-minute Thematic advice from the B Story (usually the love interest), the main character chooses to try again.
Finale – This time around, the main character incorporates the Theme – the nugget of truth that now makes sense to them – into their fight for the goal because they have experience from the A Story and context from the B Story. Act Three is about Synthesis!
Final Image – opposite of Opening Image, proving, visually, that a change has occurred within the character.
THE END!
mg · 2h ago
The article complains that most movies follow the same plot:
We meet the protagonist in their ordinary world, then an inciting incident changes everything, they are pulled into a new quest, meet someone who shows them a different way of being, they struggle with a powerful antagonist, and in the end the protagonist either triumphs or fails tragically.
HN to the rescue! What are some movies that do NOT follow this plot?
munificent · 2h ago
I find this plot structure tired and boring so I'm always on the lookout for movies that don't follow it. They are hard to find! (Also, I probably don't have an excellent memory to recall them later when I do find them.)
Horror movies in general seem to have more freedom to play with plot structure than other genres. Every film, regardless of plot, needs to have something that makes the audience want to watch to the end of the film. With horror, it's often putting the question in the audience's mind "what is happening?" That can be compelling enough to propel the viewer to the end so the film often doesn't need to have a protagonist go through some emotional journey.
It's been a while since I've seen them, but I don't think The Ring or The Grudge follow this plot form. It's probably telling that both of those are adaptations of non-Western films. I don't think Alien follows this structure either: Ridley is basically right all along and just has to survive.
I think Goon is an underrated comedy, and it doesn't really fit the three-act structure well. It certainly has conflict and climax, but Doug doesn't really go through any internal crisis. Instead, he's more often the catalyst for internal change in other characters.
rprenger · 1h ago
One thing about horror movies is that even though they usually pretty much follow a three act structure they at least usually have to have a prologue to set the mood before the "regular life" part. But recent ones I've noticed that don't follow the structure closely are
"Skinamarink" and "I Saw the TV Glow"
ijk · 1h ago
Where do we draw the line?
Does an anthology approach like Playtime (1967, dir. Jacques Tati) count? It's got kind of an arc to it, but doesn't really have anything like a recognizable struggle with an antagonist. Unless you view brutalism as the antagonist, I guess.
8½ (1963, dir. Federico Fellini) could, likewise, be shoehorned into a discussion of the arc of the film--which it, itself deconstructs in the third scene or so. It's primarily a film about making the film. There's _kind of_ a journey the protagonist goes on, but does it really count as being this same plot?
ijk · 1h ago
Adaptation (2002, dir. by Spike Jonze) features Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicholas Cage) and his brother Donald (played by Nicholas Cage's twin brother) trying to struggle with this exact question of how to adapt a book that doesn't seem to conform to any usable pattern. I'm really not sure where it falls in this classification.
ijk · 1h ago
Rashomon (1950, dir. Akira Kurosawa) is more of a multi-faceted mystery; we go through a progression of new information but no one really goes on a recognizable hero's journey--unless it's the listeners at the gate who are hearing the story.
narag · 2h ago
In biology one thing is made similar to other ("assimilated") in order to absorb it. In the same way, some ideas are packed in some format known to be easy to digest.
The trick in this topic is how dissimilar to some vague canon should a story be to qualify for an answer to your question.
Would you say Alien is a good example?
hinkley · 2h ago
> meet someone who shows them a different way of being
Enter the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
amiga386 · 2h ago
Twelve Angry Men
Primer
Holy Motors
Le Voyage dans la Lune
Irréversible
sdwr · 22m ago
Primer follows the classic story structure pretty well, even though the literal timeline is jumbled up.
The main characters start in a familiar place, are thrust into a new world, and learn about themselves as they are tested by circumstance and each other. The stakes rise to a crescendo where everything is on the line, then resolve to a "new normal" informed by their different personalities.
lwo32k · 2h ago
Before Sunrise / Before Sunset
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 2h ago
Not a movie but most motorsports do not follow the monomyth. The cars or trucks or tractors compete, but none of them are designated protagonist. The progression is usually from slower and cheaper vehicles to more expensive and faster ones, to build excitement for the audience.
The adventure of the individual vehicle is that it prepares for the races, it practices, it tunes, then it competes, and then it either wins or loses. And then, budget permitting, it prepares for the next race.
mrob · 2h ago
This can be generalized to stories about any kind of real-life racing. For example, there's a whole genre of videos about the history of speedrunning video games (competing to complete the game in the fastest time), popularized by the works of Youtuber SummoningSalt:
These are presented in an entertaining way that's full of twists and drama, but because they're non-fiction they can't be forced into any pre-existing structure.
noworriesnate · 1h ago
This reminds me of Dwarf Fortress, a game famous for its auto-generated stories. Boatmurdered is one such story—it’s brutal, fascinating, it’s in this uncanny valley halfway between random and an actual story. And it definitely isn’t formulaic (except for the fact that everyone always dies in the end; the game’s motto is Losing is Fun).
What happened to flip phones and physical keyboards?
Can you go into a mall anywhere in the world and go buy a starbucks before you go to H&M? Doesnt even matter if you go to H&M or zara because its all the same clothing.
Getting back to film and tv context. The skill of the author is what lets the change or difference come through. Goerge RR Martin had a different take and did well. How did he do it? Game of thrones is empathy. Empathy lets you escape the narrative prison. Show the trauma of the villian to make them a victim.
The Fairphone still looks like a generic smartphone but they sell it via empathy of ethical, sustainable, and repairable parts.
egypturnash · 1h ago
The politics and actions of Tesla's CEO/mascot have absolutely nothing to do with hating the Cybertruck. Nor does the fact that if you see it in person you quickly realize that it is designed so that it blinds other people on the road by reflecting an intense strip of sunlight off of the top of its hood, and that it is also designed so that if it hits a pedestrian, bicycle, or smaller car, it will throw them under its wheels rather than over the hood - that big prow is fine in something like the cartoon military vehicle from Aliens that inspired it, but it's pretty anti-human in the context of driving around a road with other people on it. It's solely because it looks different.
immibis · 1h ago
Maybe the cybertruck is just bad though. Kei trucks don't look like American trucks and they're beloved, not hated, by the people you're saying hate the cybertruck because they just fear change.
It's pretty good considering it is his first not-non-fiction project and the narrative is a refreshing departure from typical sci-fi stories since it's written to sound like a true history with too many important figures to remember and historically disputed causes and effects of pivotal events.
The story doesn't not follow the conflict-rising-climax-resolution structure but it often refutes a listener's anticipation of satisfying narrative elements like true history many loose ends remain loose and plenty of important characters "disappear from the records" which leaves one wondering.
It's certainly unlike any fiction I had consumed prior and it's pretty good imo so I'm shining a light on it here.
I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu
And then you have My Neighbor Totoro, where all the monsters are friends, and the bad guy is just chronic illness, children who have let their imaginations run wild and fear the worst, a sibling getting lost, and at the end basically nothing happens which is the best news considering. There is no metaphor for human struggle, it’s just human struggle.
While some of his movies like Castle In the Sky, Mononoke and Nausicaä follow a modified Hollywood bad guy arc (in Castle half the bad guys practically become chosen family, in Spirited Away they become allies), a lot don’t. Up on Poppy Hill is essentially two teenagers in love discovering to their horror that they are first cousins, despair, and then discover that one of them was adopted.
But in all of them is the self-rescuing princess. The child either has to save themselves or at least demand the help that they are rightfully entitled to.
I got to introduce some kids to Ghibli right as Disney started distributing them. If you’ve seen Lasseter’s introduction to Spirited Away that’s where we were at that time - I’m telling you a secret that should not be a secret. And they in turn “forced” their friends to watch them in the same way my generation forced people to watch The Princess Bride; like it was a moral imperative to postpone other plans and rectify this egregious oversight in their education.
Loss of variety in terms of what's shown on traditional movie theater screens-- sure.
For everything else, technological advancement has lowered the price to create films of a base level of quality. And that has caused an explosion in artistic variety. I doubt the average American has enough leisure time to keep up with all the indie films produced in a year (nor even a sub-genre).
Ozu is my favorite director, and learning about the 4-act structure helped me understand why - I always hated the third act of most movies, when character motivations go out the window in the interest of a big explosive ending. There is a lot of potential in kishōtenketsu structure to tell stories that are more realistic and introspective and don't require the kind of antagonistic conflict of 3-act structure.
Anyway, it's been a wild ride introducing to me early silent films, surreal films, art films, Italian neorealism, French new wave, etc. There very much are different narratives and structures outside "Hollywood films". Give them a watch.
Time is another dimension you can use to get to different tropes. Lots of old movies don't go quite how you would expect them to, given modern filmmaking plot beats.
Examples:
Rang de Basanti (India) features political corruption which causes the death of a man in a group of tight-knit friends. In revenge, they hatch a plot to assassinate the defense minister. And then they do it, and the second act of the movie takes place and they all die. What a ride!
Duck Soup (1933) is about as far away from a modern comedy as you can get, and it is entirely about sticking your thumb in the eye of the wealthy and powerful. Surprisingly watchable, for such an old film.
From the article:
"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."
I liked the movie, and I approve of this kind of creativity, but a disguised 3-act structure is still a 3-act structure.
In the typical three-act structure, the protagonist must make an internal change to themselves before they are able to resolve the conflict.
In this alternate plot structure, it is the community itself that must change. The protagonist is "right all along" and serves to the be the catalyst for that change. Almost as if society is the protagonist. It looks something like:
1. Inciting incident where problem appears.
2. Protagonist attempts to tackle problem using their "true self".
3. Family/village/community smacks them down and says they can't do that.
4. Protagonist tries to conform and solve the problem the way they are told to but fails.
5. Climax: Running out of options, the protagonist unleashes their true inner self and solves the problem.
6. The community witnesses this and realizes that they should accept the protagonist for who they are.
This is very common in Disney movies (Mulan and Frozen being stellar examples) and in family movies where the protagonist is a young person that "no one understands".
It is sometimes mixed with the typical three-act structure where the protagonist also makes an internal "change", but the change is most often simply accepting who they already were at the beginning of the film before trying to deny that throughout the second act.
Moana herself is just about the only person who doesn't have a character arc, she just gets better at doing the things she was already set on doing. Both Maui and the entire village of Motunui including her family need to learn that Moana is actually right about everything.
She's effectively an avatar of the ocean's will, and the more she leans into it, the better it goes for her.
It's not easy to get away from the three parts of introduction, development and conclusion, in any work that exhibits sequence. Not even in something abstract like music. (I should say, it's certainly easy to forcibly get away from it, if you don't care about the result being boring.)
There is also comedy. If you manage to make people laugh throughout the work, the plot doesn't have to necessarily follow the formula.
But the rules of counterpoint were codified after his death (IIRC there were two people who worked together to do it), and act like an averaging across all baroque composers. Making the rules is kind of like putting it in a glass box, sealing it off and preserving it - IE removing all life from it. A contemporary example is how punk became standardized, just wear leather jacket with safety pins and mohawk and play barre chords. The spirit of punk moved to post-punk and elsewhere but also this bizzaro copy of all the superficial aspects of punk moved elsewhere.
While I love Joseph Campbell and the heros journey, I do feel like sticking too strongly to it does the same thing for narratives. I especially hate insistence that everything needs a three act structure, not because it's inherently bad, but because stories that don't need it are shoehorned into it and given an unneeded third act with more set pieces than genuine character motivation and development. It's like people see a good movie with a three act structure, and think it's due to that specific structure.
Though the never-ending soap-opera of comics aren't really that great a fit for wrapping everything up in a three-act structure. (I'm still confused by why the Marvel films felt the need to kill off 90% of their villains in the same movie they debuted.) But the hero's journey is an attempt to answer to "how can we make a film as popular as Star Wars?" So we just follow that pattern, I guess.
Not that there weren't other patterns--the Disney animators independently arrived at their own storytelling rules, for example. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston ) has a discussion of what they found worked for them and what didn't. It's worth comparing what they say there with the actual films and reflect on how the rules bore out in practice, of course. But it's another attempt at codifying a formula for appealing stories.
There's lots of attempts to try to describe the universal appealing story pattern. Whether narrative actually works that way has become bifurcated into separate questions: "what kind of stories are effective for humans?" and "what kind of story can we produce reliably as a commercial success?" are subtly different but have become conflated.
We already have spaces for broader or more experimental narratives, they're called novels. Music videos gave us popularized short form experimentation for a while. TV series give us longer form audio/visual storytelling. But there's a hard limit to how much complexity or diversity you can pack into a 90-120 minute block while still keeping it cohesive and broadly engaging. TV gets away with slower pacing and more meandering structures because viewers can dip in and out. People like/recommend a series even if one episode didn't keep their interest. If 30 minutes of a movie don't keep someone's interest they aren't going to recommend it, it sucks to spend 30 minutes in a theater detached from what you are watching. Movies have to convince audiences to stay locked in for the entire runtime, which naturally narrows the kind of stories that can work.
And part of the problem now is that movies were once novel. They evolved from stagey, non-gritty recorded plays basically to gritty, photorealistic stories. That leap kept things feeling fresh for a long time. But now that the tech curve has plateaued, now that dark/gritty has run it's course, it's like people want movies to somehow figure out how to be... not movies.
Punk was new/novel fresh. Then what was new/novel/fresh was identified and expanded upon. Then it become not new/novel/fresh. Other music genres were kept fresh by technical limitations slowly being removed by new tech/monetary limits limited who could do what/knowledge gatekeeping. Now that every tool is available to every person along with deeper knowledge of music theory, which theoretically should make it more interesting, music has gotten more boring. Because we don't want good. We want novel new experiences.
also pop and indie pop, rock and indie rock.
What he meant by it is that some unconscious features are collective, meaning they are genetically programmed in all people. Jung believed this also includes certain thought patterns, which can be inferred from stories. For example, he would have argued that a paragon of wisdom is typically an older man with a white beard (Gandalf and Dumbledore come to mind) because we have a genetically programmed inclination to see older men with white beards as paragons of wisdom.
Jung liked to use these kinds of methods to analyze the human psyche and its structures. Interesting guy. If anyone is interested, I recommend his collection of essays, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, as a first read.
“I was hungry (call to action), so I went to Filipe’s to get a sandwich (transformation, now bearing sandwich) (Return is implied, I’m no longer at Filipe’s)“
Is that really constrained by the hero’s journey? Or is it just that communication discusses dilemmas and resolutions, and these can be fit into our stereotypical hero’s journey?
That’s the version of the Hero’s Journey used in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.
You might make experiences that are about spending some time in a loved imaginary world with loved characters (The Star Wars Holiday Special or Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser [1]) but inevitably people who aren't superfans are going to feel it doesn't appeal to them. You can make a profitable game (Azur Lane) which is all about fanservice, collecting, and little narratives -- and people are going to say it is degenerate and compare it unfavorably to normal single player games like, say, Hi-Fi Rush or even mobile games which have a clear story like Love Nikki. All the complaints that people have around big media franchises will still stand.
[1] https://screenrant.com/star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-hotel-...
A long analysis of Stargate SG-1 as starting point: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/StargateSG1
1: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHerosJourney 2: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kishotenketsu
- Designing vehicles because every one of them is a thing that carries people or things from A to B, with some propulsion mechanism and a way to steer it.
- Designing software because it's all about providing an interface to manipulate objects in a database, or values in memory.
- Designing drugs because it's all some kind of chemical you take that suppresses biological processes.
- ...
You can always come up with an abstract definition that puts a set of things into the same bucket. Isn't this just semantics? Movies are not remotely all the same story. If you say they are all about: humans reacting to conflicts which leads to some changes in the state of things. I mean, that's what a story is, that's what a 3-act structure is.
Sure there are engaging stories with different structures, but isn't it all just omitting one of the acts, or chaining multiple stories in an overlapping manner, starting or ending at a different point, or stretching one of the acts for longer?
And more often than not you need to bend-over-backwards to make such stories as engaging as the standard structure, it's really hard, because to an extent you are breaking the very core of what makes a story engaging, and the novelty can only carry you so far.
It can be distracting actually, shaking up the structure can detract from the craft of filling it with good content, it's a bit gimmicky. There's a certain purity and merit to making a prototypical story truly excellent and innovative, obfuscating and shuffling that basic structure is a cheap path to innovation.
Regardless, you can always shoehorn any story into one or more introduction-conflict-resolution blocks and complain about it.
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Before we had the same basic recycled narratives, but a film didn’t need to check every single box and some films were more directed at romance or certain audiences and only checked a few of these boxes.
Modern tent poles need to check every single box and it just feels so formulaic and boring.
I'd be interested in seeing someone do a breakdown of the frequency of romantic subplots in films; I have some guesses as to the possible pattern but this seems like a moment for hard data.
I generally have had to go back to movies pre-Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark to find film less formulaic.
My parents don't enjoy seeing films in theaters. So when they took us out as children, it was under exceptional circumstances. We went to see E.T. when it premiered. I remarked about Drew Barrymore's young character shouting "penis-breath" and my mother explained that if they didn't throw in a few profanities, the film would have been rated "G" and dismissed as a children's film. A "PG"-rated film was likely to gain more screenings in more theaters and capture a broader audience.
I've always been a huge fan of the bad guy winning decisively. It is relatively rare.
We have subplots from the action hero films where some pretty bad things happen, but I feel like movies like Se7en and Arlington Road take it to a completely different level.
This is why the right is surging around much of the world.
A critique of lazy story telling somehow ends up declaring lazy story telling a genocidal act that is “literally killing us.”
Or maybe it’s just a bunch of movies pandering to an audience that wants to see more of the same and if you want to see something more innovative seek it out or make it yourself.
One can watch other films. For example: https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/chantal-akerman-10-essential-fi...
I confess, I was not patient with the film. I scrubbed a bit to move the film along at a faster pace — almost skipped right over the wild ride that is the end of the film.
Meaningless, but so are those "7 types of story archs" taxonomies.
> Ironically, the monomyth is now being stretched out of shape by commercial forces, too. Franchises, sequels and box-set formats are extending stories in multiple directions to eke out ever more revenue, bringing to mind Musk’s intergalactic ambitions, which imply there’s a franchise option for human life: late capitalism, it would seem, respects neither narrative nor planetary boundaries. ‘It’s outrageous, really,’ Yorke says of endless sequels. ‘If you think of it in basic terms, a story is a question and answer, dramatised. And when the question is answered, there is nowhere else to go.’ Not surprisingly, Hollywood is working hard to combine narrative boundlessness with satisfying, self-contained stories: the Marvel ‘Multiverse’ is a kind of vast conglomerate of autonomous (super)heroes’ journeys.
The piece seems a bit critical of the monomyth, but it does flag the current, massive alternative as quite stupid as well. Instead of a hero’s journey for a hero, we have a franchise journey, degrading the typical arc to put it in service of the whole.
Why? Because the personages are different (really diverse) pursue their own goals and try to do good (mostly) in their own weird and incompatible ways.
To see that and enjoy it realy show what we lost recently, we are demoralized by our own culture.
Here is an overview:
Opening Image – A visual that represents the struggle & tone of the story. A snapshot of the main character’s problem, before the adventure begins.
Set-up – Expand on the “before” snapshot. Present the main character’s world as it is, and what is missing in their life.
Theme Stated (happens during the Set-up) – What your story is about; the message, the truth. Usually, it is spoken to the main character or in their presence, but they don’t understand the truth…not until they have some personal experience and context to support it.
Catalyst – The moment where life as it is changes. It is the telegram, the act of catching your loved-one cheating, allowing a monster onboard the ship, meeting the true love of your life, etc. The “before” world is no more, change is underway.
Debate – But change is scary and for a moment, or a brief number of moments, the main character doubts the journey they must take. Can I face this challenge? Do I have what it takes? Should I go at all? It is the last chance for the hero to chicken out.
Break Into Two (Choosing Act Two) – The main character makes a choice and the journey begins. We leave the “Thesis” world and enter the upside-down, opposite world of Act Two.
B Story – This is when there’s a discussion about the Theme – the nugget of truth. Usually, this discussion is between the main character and the love interest. So, the B Story is usually called the “love story”.
The Promise of the Premise – This is the fun part of the story. This is when Craig Thompson’s relationship with Raina blooms, when Indiana Jones tries to beat the Nazis to the Lost Ark, when the detective finds the most clues and dodges the most bullets. This is when the main character explores the new world and the audience is entertained by the premise they have been promised.
Midpoint – Dependent upon the story, this moment is when everything is “great” or everything is “awful”. The main character either gets everything they think they want (“great”) or doesn’t get what they think they want at all (“awful”). But not everything we think we want is what we actually need in the end.
Bad Guys Close In – Doubt, jealousy, fear, foes both physical and emotional regroup to defeat the main character’s goal, and the main character’s “great”/“awful” situation disintegrates.
All is Lost – The opposite moment from the Midpoint: “awful”/“great”. The moment that the main character realizes they’ve lost everything they gained, or everything they now have has no meaning. The initial goal now looks even more impossible than before. And here, something or someone dies. It can be physical or emotional, but the death of something old makes way for something new to be born.
Dark Night of the Soul – The main character hits bottom, and wallows in hopelessness. The Why hast thou forsaken me, Lord? moment. Mourning the loss of what has “died” – the dream, the goal, the mentor characters, the love of your life, etc. But, you must fall completely before you can pick yourself back up and try again.
Break Into Three (Choosing Act Three) – Thanks to a fresh idea, new inspiration, or last-minute Thematic advice from the B Story (usually the love interest), the main character chooses to try again.
Finale – This time around, the main character incorporates the Theme – the nugget of truth that now makes sense to them – into their fight for the goal because they have experience from the A Story and context from the B Story. Act Three is about Synthesis!
Final Image – opposite of Opening Image, proving, visually, that a change has occurred within the character.
THE END!
We meet the protagonist in their ordinary world, then an inciting incident changes everything, they are pulled into a new quest, meet someone who shows them a different way of being, they struggle with a powerful antagonist, and in the end the protagonist either triumphs or fails tragically.
HN to the rescue! What are some movies that do NOT follow this plot?
Horror movies in general seem to have more freedom to play with plot structure than other genres. Every film, regardless of plot, needs to have something that makes the audience want to watch to the end of the film. With horror, it's often putting the question in the audience's mind "what is happening?" That can be compelling enough to propel the viewer to the end so the film often doesn't need to have a protagonist go through some emotional journey.
It's been a while since I've seen them, but I don't think The Ring or The Grudge follow this plot form. It's probably telling that both of those are adaptations of non-Western films. I don't think Alien follows this structure either: Ridley is basically right all along and just has to survive.
I think Goon is an underrated comedy, and it doesn't really fit the three-act structure well. It certainly has conflict and climax, but Doug doesn't really go through any internal crisis. Instead, he's more often the catalyst for internal change in other characters.
"Skinamarink" and "I Saw the TV Glow"
Does an anthology approach like Playtime (1967, dir. Jacques Tati) count? It's got kind of an arc to it, but doesn't really have anything like a recognizable struggle with an antagonist. Unless you view brutalism as the antagonist, I guess.
8½ (1963, dir. Federico Fellini) could, likewise, be shoehorned into a discussion of the arc of the film--which it, itself deconstructs in the third scene or so. It's primarily a film about making the film. There's _kind of_ a journey the protagonist goes on, but does it really count as being this same plot?
The trick in this topic is how dissimilar to some vague canon should a story be to qualify for an answer to your question.
Would you say Alien is a good example?
Enter the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Primer
Holy Motors
Le Voyage dans la Lune
Irréversible
The main characters start in a familiar place, are thrust into a new world, and learn about themselves as they are tested by circumstance and each other. The stakes rise to a crescendo where everything is on the line, then resolve to a "new normal" informed by their different personalities.
The adventure of the individual vehicle is that it prepares for the races, it practices, it tunes, then it competes, and then it either wins or loses. And then, budget permitting, it prepares for the next race.
https://www.youtube.com/@SummoningSalt/videos
These are presented in an entertaining way that's full of twists and drama, but because they're non-fiction they can't be forced into any pre-existing structure.
https://www.jalopnik.com/every-car-looks-like-this-thanks-to...
Everyone hates the cybertruck because its different than the generic white ecobox.
https://www.phonearena.com/news/Why-do-all-smartphones-look-...
What happened to flip phones and physical keyboards?
Can you go into a mall anywhere in the world and go buy a starbucks before you go to H&M? Doesnt even matter if you go to H&M or zara because its all the same clothing.
Getting back to film and tv context. The skill of the author is what lets the change or difference come through. Goerge RR Martin had a different take and did well. How did he do it? Game of thrones is empathy. Empathy lets you escape the narrative prison. Show the trauma of the villian to make them a victim.
The Fairphone still looks like a generic smartphone but they sell it via empathy of ethical, sustainable, and repairable parts.