Over at the Locus blog, Graham Sleight is talking about his BSFA interview of Nick Lowe, the excellent Interzone film reviewer. Graham got Nick to talk about Hollywood and why their movies end up as they do. He has some interesting points to make as a result, but I’d like to go off at a tangent. This bit caught my eye:

Secondly, he argued, Hollywood has become wedded to a model of how narrative works that’s increasingly narrow and prescriptive. He called this the “protagonist” model, whereby a story has to centre on a single person whom the audience has to find sympathetic and who has to grow or learn something about themselves in the process of the film. And (to finish paraphrasing Nick’s point) we have to find them in some sense heroic by the end of things.

I recognize that narrative structure all too well. People occasionally blame it on Joseph Campbell, but he didn’t really invent it, he just codified it. And it isn’t just Hollywood that is wedded to that structure. You find it in a lot of fiction too, especially fantasy.

The reason you see so much of it is that it is very popular. It is the classic escapist formula: “give me a character that I can identify with, and have them make a huge success of their lives”. In essence it is the basis of all romance literature. Many readers lap this sort of thing up, and commercial entities such as Hollywood make sure that they provide it.

This also tends to be the sort of narrative that newbie reviewers castigate as a “Mary Sue” plot, because they assume that the author has created this character as a reflection of herself, rather than as someone for the reader to identify with.

I don’t think that there is anything we can do about this. There will probably always be more readers who want escapist literature than who want literature that will challenge them. All we can do is continue to promote more challenging works and hope that some people will give them a try.