Tag Archives: parallel plots

“She Wants to Dance Like Uma Thurman” Fallout Boy

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Thank you Fallout Boy for reminding me of another plot structure. Consecutive stories in   parallel narratives are one of the special ingredients in Pulp Fiction directed by Quentin Tarantino. Granted, there is plenty to love or hate about the film. Before I first watched Pulp Fiction, I knew people who had left mid-show because of the graphic scenes. I also knew cinematography buffs, who quoted the film verbatim. For this post, I ask you to consider only the story structure and to forget about Uma Thurman dancing, the drugs, the language and the violence.

Deceiving and confusing for a majority of the movie, Pulp Fiction keeps the audience off-balance with a scrambled time sequence. The first two scenes escalate to a moment of high tension and then abruptly end. In the opening diner scene, Tarantino pauses the action at a point where guns are drawn and a robbery is in progress. The film leaps to an unrelated scene with Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield driving to Brett’s apartment. In the middle of the apartment scene, the film shifts ahead to follow Vincent Vega, the main character of the first of three consecutive stories.KarenBlog1-8-16

After the third story concludes, the diner scene comes into perspective as a book-end, both a prologue and an epilogue to the three plots in Pulp Fiction. On her website, Linda Aronson describes this structure as a portmanteau or bag structure, one story that contains the other stories.

Titles in the movie provide a swift transition from one story to the next. The first story is Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife. The Gold Watch is Butch Collidge’s object story; a flashback shows the receipt of his father’s important watch. The Bonnie Situation is Jules Winnfield’s revelation story. The order is not chronological because Pulp Fiction employs a fractured frame portmanteau, one story split to bookend the other stories within a shifted time frame. I confess to mapping the time sequence on a notepad only after erasing half a dozens times and marking shifts with arrows, numbers and letters. Consider the scenes below. The number bullets show the films order. The alphabet bullets reveal the true chronological order. Not every scene is on my list—only the scenes with time shifts.

 

                        Film Order (1-9) / Chronological Order (A-J)

1D) DINER SCENE Honey Bunny and Pumpkin

——-Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife——

2B) VINCENT and Jules in Brett’s APARTMENT SCENE

3F) Marsellus tells BUTCH to lose the fight and VINCENT to escort wife

——The Gold Watch——

            4A) BUTCH receives watch FLASHBACK

5G) BUTCH returns for watch / shoots Vincent

——The Bonnie Situation——

6C) JULES miracle in Brett’s APARTMENT SCENE with Vincent

7E) DINER SCENE JULES, Vincent and Pumpkin

The intersection of the plots gives the viewer only a few hints to order the scenes. The initial scene with Honey Bunny and Pumpkin’s robbery-in-action hooks the viewer at the beginning of the film, but chronologically, this scene is in the middle of the movie. “The Bonnie Situation” occurs before the diner scene but is shown at the end of the film. In the Gold Watch, Butch Coolidge shoots Vincent. The movie, however, leapfrogs backward in time to show Vincent alive with Jules in “The Bonnie Situation.” Jules’ words foreshadow Vincent’s fate. The viewer knows of Vincent’s coming death because it has already played in the out-of-order time continuum. Sound confusing? It is.

This film’s fractured frame provides a building of the plot’s violent intensity. After Bret’s apartment, the film departs to lighter topics before coming back to the most graphic scene in “The Bonnie Situation.” Perhaps my word choice of lighter topics sounds absurd for scenes containing a drug overdose, a brawl to near death and sexual bondage. In this film, however, greater incidents of violence lead to greater examples of hope—resurrection from death, rescue of an enemy, and repentance—in Tarantino’s portrayal of darkness or nihilism. Both the cause and consequences are plot.

Paula Picked a Plighted Path of Parallel Plots

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KarensSeveral chapters into Paula Hawkins’ best seller The Girl on the Train, I note the thriller’s structure of three character point of view with parallel plots. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, by David Shafer, which I also read in the fall, follows the same three character parallel plot. Although the point of view and plot structure are similar, these two books are vastly different.

Shafer begins his novel in Mandalay, Myanmar which I recently toured via tablet, the safest way to sightsee an exotic setting with movie backdrop potential. Location organizes the three equally-weighted plots and is shown at the beginning of each chapter. After round one of each of the points of view, the reader knows which location indicates which character. Portland is Leo. Mandalay begins Leila’s story. New York is Mark’s departure point.

Ansen Dibell, author of Plot, identifies this structure as a braided plot where the “pace, tone and color” of each plot blends and adds to a deeper and richer whole. Shafer’s novel is also a tandem narrative according to Linda Aronson because each of the stories presents a linear progression in time. Although the plots begin separately, a convergence occurs three times: Mark and Leila meeting at Heathrow Airport, Leila escorting Leo from Whispering Pines Rehab, and Leila and Leo rescuing Mark from a motivational speaking gig gone bad. Elizabeth Sims appropriately calls this a swallowtail plot because the convergence and interaction of the characters continues for a significant portion of the story.

The characters in Shafer’s novel are unique and humorous. A Goodreads review describes my favorite character Leo as the “unhinged trustafarian.” He’s a trust fund baby and Harvard graduate who works at a daycare. The problem with having a favorite is I don’t want to read the other plots in this dark comedy, such as Mark, the “phony self betterment guru.” And yawn, I skim the chapters on the too serious, Leila, “disillusioned non-profit worker.” The balance of each characters lows and highs keeps the overall novel’s pace clicking along with plot and subplot.

For something completely different, Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train shows Dibell’s mirrored pattern of plots. The three women are connected as opposites, and at other times, as complements in emotion, life stages, themes and imagery. Each chapter in the story begins with a character’s name, day of the week, date and time of day. In the first chapter, the main protagonist, Rachel, travels morning and evening for five days on the train. The story’s motion feels like commuting, stopping, starting and sharing an awkward space with the same faces going the same way at the same time each day. The reader learns of Rachel’s alcoholic behaviors, cheers her sobriety and dreads what will come of her next drinking binge and her calls to ex-husband, Tom.

As for Rachel, her plot and Megan’s are true parallels in a geometric sense and never intersect. These two plots and points of view alternate for the first third of the book before Anna’s point of view presents. Anna intersects with Rachel and with Megan but at different time periods–one in the present and one in the past. Hawkin’s story illustrates what Aronson calls a fractured tandem, current time for Rachel and Anna but a past time frame for Megan. Aronson identifies this parallel plot structure as good for “unexpected, often tragic connections between disparate people.” That sentence pretty much sums up the book for me.

The technique of parallel plots is a time tested convention. Contemporary writers borrow from 16th century Shakespeare who copied from first century Greek philosopher, Plutarch. In “King Lear,” Shakespeare mirrors plot and subplot to intensify the drama. Both The Girl on the Train and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot benefit from the intricate weaving of plots and mirroring of characters.

Tags: parallel plots, writers craft, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, David Shafer, Linda Aronson, Ansen Dibell, Elizabeth Sims, Shakespeare, “King Lear”