Exam Practice Essay - Narrative

Todorov’s narrative theory dictates that every narrative must follow this structure: equilibrium is disrupted, the characters recognise the disruption and attempt to fix it, and in the end, there is a new equilibrium in place. Our video contains all of the stages of Todorov’s theory, albeit edited out of order for a nonlinear structure. The story begins with the equilibrium of a boy in a relationship with a girl, the disruption is the girl having an affair, the recognition is the boy catching them in the act, the attempt to repair is a conversation between the two to try and work through their issues, and the new equilibrium is the boy having moved on from his girlfriend and happy with the way things worked out. We used this structure because audiences are accustomed to it and comfortable with those kinds of stories.


Vladimir Propp developed a theory about characters in media texts that suggest there are seven broad character tropes in all of the stories he studied. There are: the villain who struggles against the hero; the donor who prepares the hero or gives the hero some kind of magical object; the helper, possibly with magical powers, who helps the hero in the quest; the princess, the person that the hero marries, often sought for during the narrative; the false hero who is perceived as good character in beginning but later emerges as evil; the dispatcher who makes the lack known and sends the hero off; and the hero, also known as the victim, the seeker, the paladin, or the winner, who reacts to the donor, weds the princess, and struggles against the villain. Our video adheres to three of these tropes. Our main protagonist is the hero, the girlfriend who cheats on him is the villain, and the other boy she has the affair with is the helper in a way, because he helped to set the protagonist on the path to true happiness and helped him to realise he’s better off without a partner who is going to cheat on him.


Andrew Goodwin has a theory that there are three categories about the relationship between what is conveyed in musical lyrics and what is on screen during music videos. Illustrative music videos are simply straightforward visual representations of what appears in the lyrics. Amplified music videos take the meaning of the lyrics and amplify them creatively to give them a surreal bent. Contradictory or disjunctured music videos are completely abstract, and the visuals bear no relation to the lyrics, music, song title or artist, and therefore contradict the other two categories. I believe our video is illustrative, as the “Shine” lyrics are about a confused man who is struggling with his love life, desperate to escape and only now just realising it, just like our lead character.


We used a closed structure as it is a convention of music videos and it is more satisfying for the audience to have closure. It is ambiguous in the sense that we don’t know where this boy is going with his life next, but we have the clear, definitive end to the story and closure as we know he has moved on from the breakup of his relationship.


Claude Levi-Strauss created a theory called binary opposition, which in music videos applies to the idea of juxtaposing two concepts which don’t agree with each other to create internal conflict for the character. The binary opposition in our video is love versus hate, as the boy loves the girl, but she hates him enough to cheat, and he is filled with hate upon catching them and when he leaves her. He then goes out to the coast where he learns to love himself and have a sense of self-worth.