COMMON USES OF NARRATIVE: FILM

Perhaps it is because stories are so commonplace and everyday, so deeply engrained within our lives and culture and of our ways of learning and telling about our lives, that we fail to recognise how very important they are - and what persuasive power they offer to media producers.

Mass media institutions recognised the power of narrative early in their history. For example, going to the cinema didn't take off until film producers began to construct films that used the form and structure of narrative. And when they did, audiences began to pack into the cinemas and have never stopped doing so. Narratives captured and enthralled audiences like never before and... made money. Never slow to recognise a goldmine when they see one, the media soon transferred the idea of narrative from cinema to all kinds of media texts: the news, advertising, songs... today narratives pervade media texts of all kinds. But narratives offered the media much more than a means of making profit, they hold immense ideological power, too.

• Narrative offers media producers just what they need: a compelling, trusted, comforting and persuasive device that engages an audience in ways that little else can achieve so easily.
   
• It seems we never tire of reading, hearing and telling stories - and the level of trust we place in a storyteller is easily achieved and can be quite extraordinary.
   
• Stories we grow up with - narratives - help form our views of the ways things 'ought' to be. They 'tell' us about personal relationships, romance, love and family life, about dangers, about heroes and villains, about success and failure and so on. It's as if they tell us about the way things should be in the best of all possible worlds - and against which we measure our own existence.
   
• If our experience disappoints us in some way, as it so often must, it is often because it is not living up to our view of how existence ought to be - as 'told' to us in a particular narrative.
   
• The 'romance narrative' will help you understand this. The romance narrative is a way of thinking we learn from ancient stories that show us how men and women fall in love. But in such narratives, the man, the woman and the romance are always perfect - a kind of 'hero meets princess' type story where the hero wins his 'reward' of the princess.
   
• If only life were like stories - but somehow we often find ourselves deeply believing that it ought to be so.