#a thesis-driven story isn't really capable of that for me

[novelconcepts]

HELLO HELLO. just read your recent comments on PoaLoF and i loved your comment juxtaposing films with a “thesis” and films with a “purpose.” that’s so intriguing to me, never an explicit distinction i made in my head. i think i have an outline of what i assume that means, however, i wanted to ask if you could expand upon that a little?? as in what qualities spur you to classify a movie as one or the other + any other thoughts that come to mind on the topic.

and to continue the trend of showering you with compliments, i am continually impressed by.... just you in general lmao. honestly, i haven’t been able to read any of your pieces since the first few chapter of the FWB fic because of time constraints BUT i still return to your account as one of my afternoon guilty pleasures just because i absolutely mcfreaking love your analyses. it’s so nice to find a place where there’s a convening of overall love for a piece of media AND cinematic analysis, if that makes sense. it’s warm AND substantive. i’m like 90% sure you’ve influenced the way i interact with visual media now. thanks for being comfortable enough to share these parts of yourself. and also for gracing us with such awesome/beautiful answers. i hope all is well with you. YEEHAW AND GOODNIGHT.

The whole second paragraph of your message is just so nice, thank you so much. Bit too flustered to say much more to that, except I’m really glad my rambling makes people want to look at visual media differently. I’m definitely not an expert, but I do have a ton of fun poking through all the symbolism and various elements of storytelling.

As for your question--the difference between a story with a purpose and a story with a thesis--I guess the way I visualize it is...every story begins with an idea. And the storyteller is responsible for building out from that center in some way. A story with a purpose takes whatever that central notion is and builds over it, advancing from that initial idea into something bigger, something that breathes. Characters, relationship dynamics, conflict all feed that idea in a way that feels honest and interesting. Take Bly, for example. If the idea behind Bly is “loving is worth the pain of losing”, then every structure within the show should feed back into that, but not in a way that feels paper-thin. Jamie’s growth arc--Hannah’s tragedy--Flora’s loss of memory--Dani’s agency--all of it can be traced back to what love is, what makes love worth it, and why grief is just another facet of carrying that love forward. Peter’s possessive qualities, Rebecca’s choice to still be better than her murder, Henry losing himself in drink and work to keep from thinking on what he’s lost--it all feeds back to that core idea that love is hard, and painful, and we have to decide if it’s worth it anyway. But it does it from a human perspective, not a preachy one. Every piece of the story gives you a reason to care about the initial idea through the characters and choices, with every piece standing up on its own, and the story wouldn’t be the same without each one. You wind up falling deeply in love with the narrative as a whole because everything feels authentic and purposeful, like the primary idea is the beating heart around which an entire body is built. 

A story with a thesis starts the same way--with a central idea--but everything else is built around that idea in a sort of free-float. With a “thesis-forward” story, it’s like the body is just bones with clothes tossed over it--nothing about it necessarily needs to exist, except the base structure. The storyteller absolutely wants you to know what they believe--in the case of that movie, that the system in America regarding the elderly and vulnerable is deeply, dangerously broken--but the rest is just padding. I don’t care about the lead character in the least; there’s nothing human about her, she’s just a tool to tell us how morally-reprehensible the situation is. Swap her out with a different jacket, it wouldn’t matter; I don’t know anything about her at all except the surface. Her girlfriend is a collection of cool walk-pretty hair-no real purpose except to try to convince us the lead isn’t a complete monster; just a neat hat on the skeleton, utterly irrelevant to the actual point. The antagonist is, likewise, a silly beard and a few sharp one-liners. Swap any of them out, it wouldn’t make a difference to the overall thesis. A movie with a purpose tends to hit hard because the idea has an entire living body built around it. You can find any number of reasons to attach yourself to the story, be it character or relationship or philosophy. A movie with a thesis is trying to convince you of something, and doesn’t really care about anything but the bones--everything else is just clothing, pretty and replaceable, and ultimately impossible to connect with. 

The tl;dr version, I guess, is “is it character-driven or is it idea-driven?” A story that is character driven is always going to say much more, for me, for what I want out of a narrative, than an idea loosely fleshed out ever will. Not to say that a thesis-forward movie is bad or unenjoyable, it’s just much, much harder for me to connect with or want to come back to again.