I saw that new Godzilla movie and I want to use it as an excuse to ramble about something I think about a lot, which is "narrative insularity".
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EG in "Black Panther" you see very little of Wakanda that's not the royal palace and laboratory or the official...succession ritual combat rock. All the Wakandan characters are royalty or high-ranking soldiers/spies. (IIRC there's a very brief scene or two on a market street.)
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Spider-Man movies are usually not "insular narratives" since the character is supposed to be such an everyman. But it seems to me a lot of other MCU movies take place mostly in various '"facilities" or space or whatever and de-emphasize any "normal person" supporting characters.
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In superhero media especially, one striking example of "narrative insularity" is how much of it these days completely ignores that staple of the genre, "how do I keep my secret identity/live a normal life while being a hero". How many Avengers even have a secret identity anymore?
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(Except Spider-Man, like I said people seem to generally recognize this approach wouldn't fit Spider-Man.)
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Even on television, I suspect the trendy emphasis on large casts of interconnected recurring characters can actually make the narratives more "insular", as compared to like, a cop show where you meet different "normal people" every week.
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I don't watch as much television as y'all but I need an example, uh, "The Magicians". I think nearly every character is a magician and they spend all their time in that world. IIRC at one point they kidnap a famous US Senator and any repercussions this might have are not shown.
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To use Canonical TV Shows as an example, "The Wire" is not an "insular narrative", "Breaking Bad" is an "insular narrative" (there's famously little emphasis on the actual users of Walt's meth). It's not good or bad; in both cases there I think the choice fit the intended story.
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But I suspect narratives are generally getting more "insular" and I even think viewers these days are "trained" to expect an "insular narrative". Every new character should be related to an existing character, every villain should have a personal grudge against the hero, and etc.
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There was a great article that I can't find about how the BBC Sherlock show exemplifies this. I might be stealing the terminology from there actually, I don't remember. On "Sherlock", Moriarty is personally obsessed with Sherlock and almost all the cases tie back to that.
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(It was in one of those magazines where the name of the magazine is a year. 1894? If you know the article I mean, let me know.)
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Oh, a good example of a genre movie making choices to make the narrative less "insular" is the first "Kingsman" movie. At the climax there are cutaways to show how the protagonist's friends and also random normal people we've never met before are impacted by the global craziness.
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Ah it was this article by
@NicholasLBarber that I was thinking of. "Universe-shrinking" is the phrase he uses. Great stuff. I don't remember if I'd had similar thoughts before or not, but it definitely at least crystalized them.https://www.1843magazine.com/culture/the-daily/the-small-world-of-modern-thrillers …Show this thread -
Apparently the insularity of "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" might actually be hurting it at the box office. (Again, subjectively, I thought it was an odd choice that made such a seemingly large-scale movie feel very small.) https://deadline.com/2019/06/godzilla-king-of-the-monsters-rocketman-ma-opening-weekend-box-office-1202624876/ …pic.twitter.com/4peV1LYUmE
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