This week we looked at remix culture, as well as the role of audience participation in the crafting of narrative.

As a writer, it is heartening and relieving to hear that there are no wholly original stories.  It takes the pressure off a little.  The elements, motifs and basic ‘creative language’ that are used to construct stories are well-established, having been around (and having constantly evolved) for thousands of years.

Originality is still a noble and achievable goal for creatives, through the fresh and original collation of familiar elements.  Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), for instance, takes familiar tropes of amnesia and noir-ish elements (including a hard-bitten protagonist) and presents these in a fresh new way by playing with chronology.  Similarly, Pulp Fiction (1994) assembles classic characters and scenarios of bygone American genre films and music in a modern setting with a nifty re-structured chronology to keep viewers hooked.

Daniel also raised the question in class of whether language is necessary for storytelling.  My answer is an emphatic yes.  The language doesn’t necessarily need to be spoken or written; the language may be symbols; providing that as a medium, they encode the author(s)’ meaning and can be decoded by the audience.

Sometimes that decoding is quite straightforward (as in the case of genre narratives, like Frankenstein (1930) and many more), while at other times the message or theme presented is far more abstract and requires greater (and far more subjective) interpretation on the part of the audience, which was the case for the short film we watched in class.