Narrative: essay.

Apply theories of narrative to one of your coursework productions.

The coursework production I am going to apply my narrative theory to is my music video I made in the second year as it was a narrative music video where the story-line played a main part in the music video.

The narrative for my music video told a story of a young, dysfunctional couple where the girl is being unfaithful to her man, and the storyline revolves around the modern, "not-so-pretty" reality of young people (clubs, drugs, alcohol, violence etc). There are 8 main narrative types outlined by Kate Domaille. The narrative type of my music video is the Tristen and Isault type where the man loves the woman but there is a third party involved: just like in my music video: the man wants to be with his girlfriend but she is unfaithful and cheats on him with another man.

To make it clear who the characters are in my music video I used binary opposites, that Levi-Strauss details in his theory. I used specific camera work to suggest to the audience who they should be identifying with. The binary opposites were good vs evil: the man being "good", unfaithful girl being "evil" (the camerawork focuses on the man, as he is the good in the music video and that is what I wanted my audience to identify with) love vs. hate and male vs female as it portrayed the two worlds of males and females and how they differ and interact in different ways. The binary opposites play quite an important role in my music video as there are very different personalities within my narrative, which distinguish the story-line.

There are key elements in Pam Cook's theory that I can apply to my music video's narrative: enigma resolution,  narrative closure, fictional world. My music video starts with the ending scene, where the man wakes up and has flashbacks. I made it to appear as if the couple is stuck in a loop of events, hence the end being the beginning an vice versa. The music video also has a narrative closure, despite the fact it is a loop as the characters meet at the end and they end up being back together, however, the story ends by the girl leaving, which suggests the story is a loop because she just goes back to the way she was. However, the camerawork and the edit suggests that there is narrative closure as it does end in some sort of way. I also included the fictional world aspect in my narrative as it is set in a realistic world but it is over-exaggerated, which makes it unreal to be understood. For example, there is a scene set in a nightclub (which is a pretty mundane location) however, when the man gets into a fight and gets kicked out, police does not turn up and there is not much fuss about the fight, which would be a different story in real life- therefore this is unrealistic, which creates the aspect of the fictional world.

There are 5 narrative codes distiguished by Barthes. I found that my music video uses 2 out of them: the enigma code and the semantic code. The enigma code is used because it is not clear in my narrative what is the cause and what is the effect of events as it is a loop of events. The semantic code - these are elements that suggest a particular, additional meaning to the text using connotations. In my music video, particularly in mis-en-scene and editing, I made sure that there are some semantic meanings in the storyline. For example, a part of mis-en-scene is costume. There were two costume changes for the girl: casual costume and a red dress with a red mask that symbolised her being evil (Devil-evil-red) and the man always wearing a white shirt to symbolise innocence. In the editing, we edited walls in the toilets where he was taking drugs to red, which symbolised evil and drug induced behaviour (anger, violence), which then occurred later on in the fight with the other man in the club.

However, the narrative of my music video does not have clear structure as it is hard to establish cause and effect and it does not have a clear begging, middle and end as it is a loop and the end is placed in the beginning, which contradicts Branigan's theory. In this way, the music video is a post-modern text because it does not define a clear, typical structure of the narrative and it's far more complicated than that.