Formulas
rule many areas of popular culture expression, including video games movies,
television shows or music. This week, we learned about formulas, and I studied
the classic good/evil and rites of passage evident in Star Wars and Up. Each of
those films have convention, invention and indentifiers – all crucial to the
concept of formulas.
Conventions are almost-uniform approaches.
It can be music verses followed by the same refrain. Up and Star Wars’
“conventions” include character introduction, development, conflict and
resolution. The old man threatened with the nursing home flees in his flying home
to South America. He confronts a mad explorer intent on bringing back a rare
and lovable bird. Star Wars’ is a space-age swashbuckling pirate/rebel
adventure movie. It has a good kid and his sidekick pilot as futuristic good
guys.
There also are invention formulas. Up’s crusty-but-soon-kindly old man
looked like Spencer Tracy, but had Ed Asner’s old Lou Grant newspaperman
kindness. Luke Skywalker’s wanderlust leads the scrawny kid into manhood via
light-saber fights and confronting the Empire. In all movies bad guys are easy
to hate. Here, one’s a nut (Up’s
explorer), the other a psycho (Star Wars’
Darth Vader).
The key on convention, invention and
even classification is to know sci-fi from a western from a kids’ story from a
murder-mystery. The use of formulas, plot genres and themes make stories more
accessible. The middle class can enjoy them too, not just the richest 1 percent
who go to classical symphonies or operas. Romance, for instance, can be just as
intriguing if it is in a TV show, and not just Romeo and Juliet. So can music
on The Voice. It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare, Phantom of the Opera, or Rigoletto.
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