Paul Schrader. Omul care a scris scenariul pentru Taxi Driver la capătul câtorva ani în care abia a ieșit din casă. Recluziune autoimpusă în schimbul unui scenariu kantian prin miez ideatic, celinian prin stil și fellinian ca alură. Rămâne un reper aproape intangibil după mai bine de 30 de ani.
Textul pe care vi-l propun astăzi e mai vechi (2009), a fost publicat în The Guardian, însă e de o actualitate brizantă. Cu alte cuvinte, se încadrează în paradigma "cu cât mai vechi, cu atât mai actual". Nimic nou, huh?
Writers have always known there are a limited number of storylines. Christopher Booker's Seven Basic Plots popularised the number seven, but others have argued for three, 20 and 36 basic plots - Rudyard Kipling said 69. That's not new. We do tell variations of the same stories over and over. That's not what I mean by the "exhaustion of narrative". What is new is the omnipresence and ubiquity of plot created by media proliferation. We are inundated by narrative. We are swimming in storylines.
(...)
Originality has always been in short supply. Does the proliferation of media mean that it is harder to be original today than it was 50 years ago? Well, yes. Today's viewers live in a biosphere of narrative. Twenty-four-seven, multimedia, all the time. When a storyteller competes for a viewer's attention, he not only competes with simultaneously occurring narratives, he competes with the variations of his own narrative. That's real competition. The bar of originality has been raised. The media marketplace puts a premium on anything "new" or "fresh" and, at the same time, inundates its viewers with continual and competing narratives.
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