I’ve always considered narrative just the created story of something. This is mainly due to school telling me this and giving me ways to write creatively. However, when you look deeper it is so much more complicated. The first time I was confronted with this was the idea of a concept album (Black Veil Brides and Fall Out Boy having two of my favourite films to albums) which didn’t necessarily have the most conventional stories I was used to.
In music narrative is there but it is in a way that people might not necessarily recognise without visuals. It is the structural properties of music that create the narrative (Maus, 1991). This means the actual drum sounds or violin that create the story, the beating of drums might replicate your heartbeat or silence before a sharp, loud noise is to give a jump scare (Music Lecture Notes, 2017). Schenker suggests that it is through the artistic struggle that the narrative is created, being the creation of the tonality of the song (Maus, 1991). Music shares similarities with narratives as the have a “succession of events in a regular order” there is a formula to them both that is widely accepted even though they can be manipulated (Maus, 1991; Music Lecture Notes 2017).
I decided to further analyse a show I watched last year called Voice (spoilers inevitable). Voice is a crime thriller which uses an embedded, linear narrative form with the use of nonlinear conventions of flashbacks for contextualisation for the inciting incident. I’m only focusing on the overarching story-line as like other crime shows it has smaller story-lines over every or several episodes.
All these shorter narratives are interesting as they spotlight political issues in South Korea such as insurance fraud, organ trafficking, human drug testing and mentally ill criminals as the writer Ma Jin-won stated in a special episode in 2017.
Now for the spoiling so that the tropes used make sense. The two main characters suffer from a significant family member being murdered by a serial killer on the same night. The story continues throughout the show until resolved in the last episode, unknown whether continued in the next season. So, the first trope is the “Absence of Evidence” meaning the “absence of … a vital clue” ("Absence of Evidence - TV Tropes", 2018). This trope is used in Voice by the recording of the killer on the phone is missing when in court (Kim Ryun-hee, 2017). This leads to the next trope used “Connect the Deaths” where the characters must find the killer by the bodies left ("Connect the Deaths - TV Tropes", 2018). With the evidence missing they now need to find more evidence that will connect the two murders as well as the other murders throughout the show (Kim Ryun-hee, 2017). Another trope that links closely to the last is “Criminal Mind Games”. Voice performs this amazingly where even the cast and staff apart from the casting staff had no idea who was the killer until revealed (Kim Ryun-hee 2017).
The “Criminal Mind Game” is the trope where the detectives must follow a series of clues left by the unbalanced criminal to test them however, they are not meant to find them ("Criminal Mind Games - TV Tropes", 2018). This chase is to see the worthiness of the detectives and usually has a calling card, souvenir or wordplay ("Criminal Mind Games - TV Tropes", 2018). Voice uses this to their advantage to connect the other side-stories to the overarching story-line as throughout the other cases quotes in blood and bodies (Kim Ryun-hee, 2017). The final trope I’m going to include is one of the most over-used tropes called “Alone with the Psycho”. This trope consists of the detective discovering the criminal’s hideout usually unbeknownst to them whilst a second-party also discovers the hide-out ("Alone with the Psycho - TV Tropes", 2018).
However, now the detective’s mobile is not working and so they are stuck with the criminal with help only arriving just in time ("Alone with the Psycho - TV Tropes", 2018). Voice uses this trope with one difference, they use a male detective ("Alone with the Psycho - TV Tropes", 2018; Kim Ryun-hee, 2017). This show is made with a great deal of thought and was unforgiving with touching topics that were deemed untouchable. They not only told a well-developed story but spoke out about mental illness (a taboo topic in South Korea), criticises the ‘untouchable’ mentality of chaebol families and primarily the need for the police to investigate within the ‘golden hour’ which is the critical period of time in any police investigation (Kim Ryun-hee, 2017).
I still in my heart will understand narrative to be a set story due to school, but maybe I will deem the word story to be different.
Even though I know music can tell a narrative I still understand the story more in the context of film or meaning. Narrative requires an idea to be carried out and there are ways that have been developed that we understand. Just as there are elements of art or music which can be manipulated for a result, tropes work the same for film and television. We sometimes need these structures so we the audience see the understanding of the art.
Sources:
Absence of Evidence - TV Tropes. (2018). Retrieved from https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AbsenceOfEvidence
Alone with the Psycho - TV Tropes. (2018). Retrieved from https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AloneWithThePsycho
Connect the Deaths - TV Tropes. (2018). Retrieved from https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConnectTheDeaths
Criminal Mind Games - TV Tropes. (2018). Retrieved from https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CriminalMindGames
Francella. (2017). Yesung with knife [Image]. Retrieved from https://onehallyu.com/topic/474650-naver-ocns-voice-episode-9-video-comments/
Kim Ryun-hee (Producer), Kim Hong-sun; Kim Sang-hoon (Directors), (2017) Voice [Television Series], South Korea, Orion Cinema Network
Maus, F. (1991). Music As Narrative. Indiana Theory Review, 12, 1-34. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24045349
Soompi. (2017). Killer's Smile [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.soompi.com/article/962735wpp/final-review-ocn-voice
viewasian. (2017). Alone with Killer [Image]. Retrieved from https://viewasian.tv/drama/voice/
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