Narrative Technique
Saturday, August 30th, 2008 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rolanniYesterday was as bad a day of perfesser-herding as I've had at the day-job, surpassing my previous benchmark, last fall. That one took place against the back drop of a Full Departmental Move-In, and Supervising the Unpacking,too, to give you some measure of Sheer Hellishness that was yesterday.
Arriving home by way of the CVS, where the pharmacy was out of my drugs (sigh), and the post office, where my Abney Park CDs were waiting for me (yes!), I found that I Had No Brain left to deal wtih any of the SRM Office Stuff, and certainly not for writing. I therefore stretched out on the couch and listened to From Dreams or Angels, until Steve announced that SRM was closed for the day, and the two of us viewed the latest in from Netflix.
I had a good time with "Eddie Izzard: Dress to Kill" (yes, I'm coming to it late; this is why I have a Netflix account; to view all the cool films I've missed), but it got me to thinking, about being a "lesbian drag queen" less than about the architecture of narrative.
In "Dress to Kill," the ...story our narrator tells is interesting because, though it seems to wander, it is in fact built in a tight spiral. Several touch-points are planted early -- Ciao!, the president of Burundi, how planting flags widen empires, cousins marrying is bad, Nazis -- and the narration touches upon them with precision as it seemingly freewheels through a survey of European history, a synopsis of "The Great Escape", the difficulty of making monkeys do as they're told in desperate situations, the invention of the Heimlich Manuever, the building of Stonehenge, the naming of Engelbert Humperdink, and an encapsulation of "Speed" in French.
What I wonder is, if you went back and saw the show again the next night, would the monologue contained within the spiral have changed? That is, is the Whole Thing memorized and told out in exact order, show after show, or if only those key points of structure are immutable. I'm thinking that the narration does change from show to show -- at one point Eddie Izzard delivers a joke, the audience laughs, and he says, "That's such a crap joke. Some nights, I don't even say it."
I'm also interested in the idea of how much variation in the overall narrative you could have, given the same -- eight? dozen? -- touchstones that form the spiral.
Arriving home by way of the CVS, where the pharmacy was out of my drugs (sigh), and the post office, where my Abney Park CDs were waiting for me (yes!), I found that I Had No Brain left to deal wtih any of the SRM Office Stuff, and certainly not for writing. I therefore stretched out on the couch and listened to From Dreams or Angels, until Steve announced that SRM was closed for the day, and the two of us viewed the latest in from Netflix.
I had a good time with "Eddie Izzard: Dress to Kill" (yes, I'm coming to it late; this is why I have a Netflix account; to view all the cool films I've missed), but it got me to thinking, about being a "lesbian drag queen" less than about the architecture of narrative.
In "Dress to Kill," the ...story our narrator tells is interesting because, though it seems to wander, it is in fact built in a tight spiral. Several touch-points are planted early -- Ciao!, the president of Burundi, how planting flags widen empires, cousins marrying is bad, Nazis -- and the narration touches upon them with precision as it seemingly freewheels through a survey of European history, a synopsis of "The Great Escape", the difficulty of making monkeys do as they're told in desperate situations, the invention of the Heimlich Manuever, the building of Stonehenge, the naming of Engelbert Humperdink, and an encapsulation of "Speed" in French.
What I wonder is, if you went back and saw the show again the next night, would the monologue contained within the spiral have changed? That is, is the Whole Thing memorized and told out in exact order, show after show, or if only those key points of structure are immutable. I'm thinking that the narration does change from show to show -- at one point Eddie Izzard delivers a joke, the audience laughs, and he says, "That's such a crap joke. Some nights, I don't even say it."
I'm also interested in the idea of how much variation in the overall narrative you could have, given the same -- eight? dozen? -- touchstones that form the spiral.
