 Seven theses about border genres / five modest proposals about docudrama Seven theses about border genres
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The term 'Aristotalitarianism' was coined by the English dramatist Timberlake Wertenbaker at a conference in Birmingham in 1997. The idea that 'randomness rocks' and that the web doesn't need story arcs comes from a Doonesbury cartoon I first saw in 2000. Wertenbaker meant academics and their theories, neither of which she cared for. I'm appropriating it and sending it back. I'm indicating TV and its dominant Aristotelian dramatic structures. 'TV is soaked in narrative' [Doug Pye]. Narrative has often been seen as a binary - either enabling (giving structure to the formless) or imposing (the tyranny of Storyworld v. the flux and complexity of Realworld). 'Narrative imbues time with historical meaning' (Bill Nichols). Without a story, audiences are adrift like Pip the cabin boy in Moby Dick - bobbing between eternities of time and space.* In web-cam observation, one part of the C20 documentary project is apparently (and ironically) realised - as Mike Doonesbury's daughter Alex knew all too well: the historic promise to document minutely and without recourse to structure. If moments structure narrative (and lived experience?) web-cam reminds us of the continuous allegorical nature of time [Alan Read]. Randomness makes documenting and structuring inimical procedures. What are the consequences for the socially-engaged, the ethically informed, if 'reality' (always partly a moral dimension) is structured as melodrama in the old media, (un)structured as an endless outtake in the new? * Intellectual audiences are keen on formalism like this: popular audiences are not. |
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