Roger Ebert Jim Emerson has a brilliant post up here about what conventions signal to us that a story (particularly, a movie) is beginning or ending.* Particularly, he’s interested in asking what ending conventions small children would inherently understand, prompted by this blog post.

I’m loving Dr. Bordwell’s post, which begins with this anecdote:

I was watching “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” some years ago with a friend’s three-year-old daughter. Molly hadn’t seen the movie before, and she watched it in a fascinated silence. At the end, Snow White and the prince leave the dwarfs and ride off into the distance.

At this point Molly cried, “More!”

This surprised me. How could she know, on her first pass, that the story was ending?

My dissertation was on the psychology of narrative. That’s an awfully broad topic, ranging from how people tell stories of their own lives to how they understand genre conventions used in filmmaking, playwriting, and other narrative arts. As I was just starting to play with these ideas, one of my biggest “aha” moments came at a showing of “The Mummy.” (Some of my smartest ideas are inspired by some of my stupidest experiences.) The audience was extremely diverse in age, ethnicity, and apparent social class. Halfway through the movie the projectionist switched a reel. And at the exact same moment, everyone in the audience registered that the story had stopped making sense. There wasn’t an obvious visual cue; one scene cut to another as might happen ordinarily. It was the story that stopped working, and everyone knew it. You almost never see an entire roomful of people “get it” at the same moment. Certainly “If X then Y” logic never works that way. But story logic … story logic is different.

*Commenter Unmana points out that this is Jim Emerson, not Roger Ebert. Apologies and thanks!

This Tuesday, October 26, I’ll be one of the judges at a storytelling slam at Johnny D’s in Davis Square. The slam starts at 8:00 pm (signup begins at 7:30) and tickets are $8 — free for Somerville residents with a story to tell! More info here.

The slam is on the theme of “Horrified!” — nicely specific yet open-ended, that — and is hosted by Massmouth. From the press release:

Many things may make us horrified, from medical to the media, social and political, culinary, natural and macabre. On October 26th, ten intrepid contestants will strut, before judges and audience, their best 5-minute tale on the “horrified!” theme for laughs, gasps and prizes. First prize: a $50 Johnny D’s gift certificate. For contestant tips & coaching, visit: http://massmouth.ning.com/. In between, audience members may participate in story games, Halloween riddles & who-knows-what-all-other surprises. Make reservations @ Johnny D’s for a great dinner & the best seats!

What’s your best five-minute story of a time when you were horrified? Come tell us!

On the Emily Rooney show today, I talked about stories: the story of “Mad Men,” the storytelling initiative at Central Square Theater, the stories drunken garden club ladies told a research psychologist back in 1976. (I’ll get a link up to the show as soon as possible.)

All these things — the kinds of stories we like to read, hear, or watch; the power of storytelling to build community and identity; the kinds of stories we tell about ourselves — are under the general umbrella of “narrative psychology.” For those of you who are interested, here are some recent articles of note on psychology and stories:

This study attempts to categorize people by their media preferences. The critiques in the comments are spot on: this is a very psychology-focused study, and disregards the whole field of media and communication research. Still, I do find it interesting — in my own dissertation, I tried to link up personality traits and reading preferences.

This New York Times article looks at recent research in how people tell the stories of their lives. We are willing to admit our faults, but need to believe we are continually improving.

Attempts to give an evolutionary explanation for storytelling are often embarrassingly bad stories themselves, but I liked this quite a bit.

This isn’t a study of narrative psychology per se, but of experimental philosophy. However, it’s about the use of stories to get at people’s moral intuitions (focusing more on the paradoxical nature of those intuitions than on the methodological problems of “trolleyology”).

Happy reading!

And, did anyone get to see the series finale of “King of the Hill”? Just as pilots are difficult to do well, because of the narrative demands of exposition, finales can be tricky, too. Life doesn’t tie up in neat knots, so how do the writers balance art and naturalism, providing a sense of an “ending” without making the hospital corners too neat? And the nature of KOTH, I think, made writing a finale particularly difficult.

If a show is a series of one-off episodes, you don’t need a series finale. When — or perhaps if — “The Simpsons” ever goes off the air, they can do an ordinary episode, or get a bunch of guest celebs in to make it special. But there’s no ongoing story that needs to be wrapped up.

When there is an ongoing narrative … well, you can do that well or badly. I liked the ending of “The Shield,” although I know some people felt Vic didn’t get punished quite enough. “Deadwood” got cut down prematurely, having been promised four seasons and only given three, so that show’s finale was an exercise in trying to achieve a kind of emotional closure when the narrative arc had been interrupted. (I think they did a good job, but that’s because, for me, the most significant throughline of the show was the long, brutal, complicated love story of Al and Trixie. What he does for her in the final episode showed so clearly the extent to which love could redeem him — and the extent to which it couldn’t.)

“The Sopranos” … mmm, yeah. Not such a great job on that one. And do not even get me started on “Battle-frackin’-star Galactica,” the ending of which not only failed to satisfy any narrative logic, but was deeply offensive on every possible level: it was scientifically illiterate, ableist, pretty well erased the role of black people in human history –

Oh. Sorry. “King of the Hill.” I told you not to let me get started on “Battlestar Galactica”!

Anyway, KOTH was always a weird grey area between shows that are one-offs and serialized shows. There were ongoing plot arcs (Hank’s relationship with Cotton, the Dale/Nancy/John Redcorn triangle), but the characters never fundamentally developed. So what do you do with a show where people can die, but not age, or even change clothes?

You do it subtle, that’s what you do. It’s very possible to watch the finale of KOTH and not even realize it was the finale. The moments of grace that end it are small ones. Hank and Bobby grilling together, of course. But also Dale massaging Nancy’s headaches away. And, most touchingly, Kahn Souphanousinphone telling his daughter to “Take the night off [from homework], you three grades ahead already.” If there was an underlying theme to the show, it is about what it means to live up to a parent’s expectations — or what it means to have to modify those expectations for the child you actually have. Both Kahn and Hank wanted a son, and neither of them got one. (There’s a dissertation to be written on gender roles in that show, there is.) In the final episode, you get the sense that maybe both men have decided that their children are, in fact, good enough.

And that was very sweet.

I think “Seinfeld” should have gone out a bit more like KOTH did. It had a similar structure: events happen and their aftereffects continue from episode to episode, but no one ever really changes. Obviously, “Seinfeld” couldn’t go for the tart sentimentality of KOTH, it wasn’t that kind of show. But it was a mistake for them to do a big blow-out wrap-up, when nothing had ever happened that needed to be wrapped up in the first place.

Eight years ago today, Mr. Improbable and I had been living together for a month. I was working four days a week at Harvard as the communications manager for a software-implementation project. I was also finishing my dissertation on the psychology of narrative — why we read what we do, and how we tell the story of our own lives. In the spring of 2002, I would become a “Dr.” and a “Mrs.” within a few months of each other.

Eight years ago today, I still knew that I’d better keep writing something besides academic jargon and instructions to end users on how to access the new system, or my skills would atrophy. Eight years ago, it wasn’t as easy to get a blog started as it is today, so I kept a journal instead.

Eight years ago today, I wrote this:

I have been in a dangerous state of non-motivation lately, not wanting to deal with the dissertation or anything related to it—i.e., this diary. I’ve been alternating between reproaching myself for my faithlessness, swearing to get this on the web soon so that I’ll have no excuse not to do my entry every day, and telling myself that it doesn’t matter, with all I’ve done lately I can afford to slack off for a week, I’ll begin again next Monday.

Then this morning the world changed.

There are psychologists who study “flashbulb memories”—those memories that burn into the consciousness of an entire culture, that give rise to the question “where were you when”—when Kennedy was shot, when the Challenger went down, when the OJ verdict was announced. And what they’ve found is that, though the memories feel profound and authoritative, they are in fact as fragile and changeable as any other memory. Ask a person the day after The Event what happened, and you get one story; ask them six months later, and it has changed. Those who were alone say they were with friends. Those who were numb remember searing pain.

I don’t remember, even now, how I heard. I was at work, catching up on e-mails and checking the web for news as I do in the morning, and Marc called, and somehow I heard it from him or from a colleague’s shocked announcement over the cube wall or perhaps I saw it online, but then there was shouting back and forth as we all told each other what we knew, and everyone was on the phone to someone else and yelling their news across the cubes and yelling back to the rest of us in the office.

Another hour or two of this, and pacing while the news websites slowly, slowly loaded, and I went home. Not because I felt in danger—despite a few hysteric pronouncements, I certainly didn’t think Harvard would be a target, and anyway if it were I’d not be much safer at home, six blocks away—but to be with Marc, and to see the news. And to see those towers down and think, “No.”

No.

The World Trade Centers are gone. I don’t know why it’s that thought, and that combination of words, more than any other, that brings me to the edge of tears. The human toll is greater, and more meaningful—I’ve have given up the Empire State Building too, and the Golden Gate Bridge, and let them fill in the Grand Canyon with styrofoam peanuts while they were at it, to save those lives. But there is something so egregious about the destruction of the skyline. It’s like those countries where rejected men scar women with acid, destroying their beauty, turning their glory to shame. Human beings die, but we build things, create great gorgeous improbable things, to live after us. Destroying those is a blow to the spirit as well as the heart.

Marc and I sit on the couch, holding hands, watching the news for hours. Occasionally one of us gets up to check e-mail. Sometime in the afternoon Marc decides we should take a walk, and we do, and I feel a little sanity ebb back in: there’s still sun and cats on porches and my new Rockport shoes feel good—until we see the plane overhead and Marc says, “Look, a plane,” because there aren’t supposed to be any, and I realize how many things there are to think about now that there didn’t used to be.

There’s a school near our house and you can hear the children playing. I don’t really know at what age a child can be old enough to realize what happened today, to realize that it’s not a movie, not a “far away” thing. But I do know that whatever they realize, they don’t know that this is not the way it’s supposed to be. They don’t know the unwritten rule that America is never, ever, supposed to be attacked. In a strange way it’s like the election fiasco last fall, the sense of wrongness, of this-can’t-happen-here, the sense that the rules have changed. But for these kids, it can happen here. And even if it never happens again, it will change their assumptions about the world, it will make them a different generation, it will separate them from older brothers and sisters and, maybe, lovers, the way being pre- or post-Watergate separates Marc and me.

Dare I relate this to my research? Oh, yes. Until today America was one kind of story, a triumphal story about wealth and unquestioned belief in our own goodness. For many, we were a romance, in the classic literary sense of the term as used by Northrop Frye: the quest of an extraordinary people going from one glorious adventure to the next. For others, we were a comedy: the struggle of workaday folk to make a living and a life, enjoy simple pleasures and avoid the absurd traps of fate and their own foolishness.

We may come back to believing in one of these stories again. I wonder how, because I think the only myth that can get us through a crisis this huge is the “romance” story, and the tawdriness of politics and dissolution of a shared set of reference points—religious, epistemological, aesthetic—have done permanent damage to our ability to see ourselves as a romantic hero of a nation. Even those who cling to this myth today ascribe it only to the “Greatest Generation,” which of course so inexplicably raised the present lot of self-absorbed, self-loathing Boomers. America may well only work as a comedy now, and something just happened that is not supposed to happen in a comedy, where things can bend but cannot break.

What story will be left to tell?

Eight years later, I’m asking that question even more intently, even more despairingly.