OK. I was wrong…but I have an excuse. Previously I had stated that Notting Hill was all relationship story with no objective story in sight. After the analysis class last night, it’s clear to me that while I was seeing the right things, I was not looking at them from the right perspective. Consequently, I now have a new found respect for the film.

I was pleasantly shocked at all that I learned in analyzing this film. So much so, that I really want to devote a whole day to coalescing all my notes from last night into some really helpful material. But for now, I’d like to focus on the big piece that I missed.

The reason my initial analysis was wrong was because in the overall story of Notting Hill, relationships were the subject matter. Much like Hugh Grant’s other widely popular film, Four Weddings and a Funeral, the objective story in this film takes a look at how other people survive or fail in their own interpersonal relationships.

I’m so out of practice with using Dramatica to analyze stories that the instant I recognized a relationship, I automatically assumed it had to be part of the Subjective Story. In my opinion, this is an example where the new terminology confuses matters of story structure.

The Subjective Story is now commonly referred to as the Relationship Throughline. The problem with that name is that it carries with it its own preconceptions. In our culture, relationships usually refer to romantic connections. But there are a million other kinds of relationships that could fall under that throughline - father/son, boss/employee, etc. Subjective Story is just a more accurate way of labeling this throughline. Perhaps if I had still been thinking Subjective Story, I might not have confused the relationship in that thread with the relationship examined in the objective story.

That being said, I still got it wrong. That’s a big problem with Dramatica - once you think you’ve got it all figured out, you can often outsmart yourself in using it. See my previous post for frequent examples of this!

But there was an objective story with a protagonist and an antagonist and all the other players that go into making the objective thread of a story. I was afraid at first that we were merely bending the story to fit the theory - that we were making up an objective story when there really wasn’t one. That’s when I learned a good trick: if you can tell what happened in the story without using the character’s names well then, you’re looking at an objective story.

Separate the subject matter from the structure

In Notting Hill, you have the star who falls for the bookstore owner and does what she can to see the two of them get together - against the paparazzi, and the handlers and the ex-boyfriend, and with the help of the bookstore owner’s best friends and his flatmate. These are their roles in the story and help to objectify their personage in the story as a whole. You tend to think less of their personal issues when looking at their roles.

Contrast this with The New World, where you have the Indian princess, and the Captain, and the Governor…but the Governor doesn’t really hang out all that long, and the Captain takes off on some wild chase. The princess then goes to England to meet the Queen and so on and so on, but it really doesn’t add up to anything.

Again, the difficulty in seeing the objective story for Notting Hill, particularly for predominantly linear problem solvers such as myself, comes from the fact that its focus is on relationships themselves. To further complicate matters, like Four Weddings, the objective story lies in the Psychology or Manipulations Domain - a particularly treacherous spot for linear-thinkers. Here the story focuses on the conflicts inherent in how people change or who they pretend to be, or how they come up with ideas or how they plan on implementing them. It’s a far cry from warring armies or nations locked in civil war (where my affinity for stories usually lies).

This, however, is typical ground for romantic stories. If you’re writing one, or looking to analyze one, don’t make the same mistake I did and automatically assume that there is no objective story. Look closer at what everyone is involved in and separate the subject matter from the structure.

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Somewhat related to this article

• First Look at Notting Hill→

• Notting Hill: Using Genre to Identify Throughlines→

• Notting Hill: Analysis→

• User Group Analysis for Next Week→

• giving meaning to the meaningless→