something I think about a lot is how long fictional narratives take, diegetically. my mind always goes to big blockbuster action films because they feel so big, but really, if you step back, their stories are so small.
how many days actually pass in Star Wars (1977)? maybe two or three? somewhere, Luke's story, beginning with his departure from Tatooine and ending with the destruction of the Death Star, might be recorded as something that happened "between September 16th and 20th."
the events of Die Hard (1988) span a few hours. we would read about them in the newspaper as a "tense standoff yesterday evening that ended at midnight." somewhere, they're summarized in a few dull paragraphs of a police report nobody would find remarkable. to john mcclane, they were certainly memorable, but to the rest of the characters in the movie, nothing happened. they stood around for three hours drinking coffee, then some people came out and they all went home. those characters told their families "crazy night, we really thought something was gonna happen."
The events of Alien and Terminator and all the Star Trek films also span a couple days each, at most. to us, it's impossible to imagine "before" and "after" existing in the contexts of those universes. nothing was written before or after, so we see this world only in terms of one dramatic event that occurred. that's how stories work, but all stories, not just fictional ones.
i think about this a lot because the longer I'm alive, the more remarkable I find it that our experiences can seem so small and meaningless to others.
in so many cases, the things in your life that affected you most, when described, come out of your mouth so limp and pale that you wonder why you ever cared about them. something that was an ongoing nightmare for you, for years, turns into some flaccid sentence like "yeah i was in a bad living situation for a while." and even as it leaves your mouth you're going "they actually understand me worse now than if I'd said nothing."
the importance of an experience is defined by the emotional weight it carries, and that emotion is absolute, it's defined when it happens, and it isn't scaled to the rest of the world, but to you, however big your world is at the time. when it's happening, your universe can get so small that something seemingly petty can eclipse it, and then when your consciousness expands to encompass the world around you again, the emotion grows with it, and maybe eclipses things that happened on a much larger absolute scale.
something that lasts only a few minutes can affect you as much as something that went on for years, and in either case it can be so simple in nature and so small in actual size that there really isn't anything to say about it. it probably does have a date and a time. it happened on the 11th of april, between 3 PM and 3:30 PM. other people were buying hamburgers a couple blocks away at the time. it was tuesday.
it's really weird that one of the most poignant things i've ever heard in my life is a line from M. fucking Bison in the street fighter movie.
In the context of modern Western storytelling, this is an especially interesting idea.
Like, it's probably more relevant with a very specific type of ruthless Hollywood-style economy-class storytelling that insists for maximum impact a story should start "late" into the plot, and also be the most important event in a character's life...
...which makes sequels really hard to pull off effectively, because if the most important event in a person's life has already happened, what else is left to tell a story of?
Aside from a few data points here and there throughout the decades, Hollywood was actually fairly sequel-phobic unless there was a guarantee it'd bring in some cash (frequently done in the kid movie/animation field, since no one really thought kids would find it weird if The Brave Little Toaster went to fucking Mars) Thanks to the MCU and Netflix, Hollywood learned that this isn't nearly as big of a deal as they previously thought, and now we get to follow characters for years and years (with the implications on that being disconcerting if they thought this shit was perfectly okay to pull with kids originally).
And that's when you encounter issues of increasingly absurd one-upping of stakes as a franchise progresses, and can easily lead to "it's just Tuesday" save-the-world fatigue that breaks out of the idea of episodic TV being a careful dialogue between characters and situations. It's the worst of both worlds.
What's it like to be a character that lives in a constant state of adventure and distress? It's gotta suck. I dunno how everyone on the Enterprise didn't walk away with crippling PTSD that kept them from setting foot on another starship ever again. More recent storytelling fare tries to address issues of trauma so they can claim to be more than the silver screen version of a button-mashing brawler, but it's often done in a very cartoonish fashion that frames trauma as a selfish thing to be overcome so the hero can get back into the saddle and help the rest of the team. Oof.
I really don't think the current system of storytelling is capable of handling stories that extend beyond a few days of a character's life, at least not in a healthy way. I don't think there's going to be any willingness to move away from that framework any time soon; I recall my studies being replete with a hearty helping of Western storytelling exceptionalism that viewed other methods as being too weird and ineffectual, and the massive financial success of Hollywood movies being proof positive this is the only way anyone should be telling a story, which should be enough of a red flag to anyone wary of Capitalism. There's other (frankly disturbing) forces at play that conspire to keep this framework; we're seeing a very particular value system being held aloft.
What is this gonna look like a few decades from now? I have no idea. Nothing good, but it's gonna be a fascinating train wreck to watch.
