Narrative Theory Applied To An Example Video

Tim O'Sullivan (1998) argues that all forms of media tells us some kind of story - more specifically a story about us as a culture/a set of cultures. This is present in Haim's video for The Wire, as a story is told of the three band members breaking up with their boyfriends and how the boys cope post-breakup. Love and breakups are a very common concept used in music videos because it relates to us as a culture and audiences may have experienced something similar. However, Haim go against this theory to an extent due to the reversal of stereotypical gender roles in the video. It is the girls who break up with the boys, and the boys become overly emotional and heartbroken, compared to the girls who do not seem to care. This contrasts the stereotypical view of gender that we have in our culture, so teaches the audience a different point of view.

Pam Cook (1985) states that the standard Hollywood narrative structure should have:
• Linearity of cause and effect within an overall trajectory of enigma resolution.
• A high degree of narrative closure.
• A fictional world that contains verisimilitude especially governed by spatial and temporal coherence
This video follows Cook's theory because the story essentially moves forward to solve the problem. Equilibrium is established at the start when each couple are still together, but then the protagonists (the band) and the antagonists (their boyfriends) have a conflict in desires when the girls break up with the boys despite the boys still being clearly in love with them, leading to a disruption of the equilibrium, in which the story changes. The 'quest' is how the boys react after the break up and how they attempt to cope with it. However, there isn't a clear resolution/re-equilibrium at the end of the video because it ends quite abruptly with no clear answer as to whether or not the couples get back together or not, so the video applies to Cook's theory up until the ending. In addition, the music video applies to Todorov's theory in this same way.

Another way that this music video applies to narrative theory is Kate Domaille's theory of narrative types (2001). Domaille argues that every story can be fitted into 1 of 8 narrative types. Each of these narrative types has a source, an original story upon which the others are based. This video fits into the Romeo & Juliet narrative type, as it is a love story. Despite the plot being more of a dysfunctional love story, as it is about the breakups rather than the actual relationships, the emotions shown by the characters and the values that are reflected in the narrative are very typical of a love story narrative type.

Sven Carlsson (1999) identified rough groups that music videos fall into (in general). This music video falls into 'narrative clip' and 'performance clip' because a story is present but there are lip-sync and live performance scenes as well.