Notting Hill: Using Genre to Identify Throughlines

March 15, 2007

An interesting choice had to be made at the User Group meeting Tuesday night: Was the overall story of Notting Hill primarily about manipulations or about activities? Where was the conflict coming from? Was trouble caused by people bumping off one another physically or were they having trouble mistaking one thing for another?

A key aspect of stories about manipulations is that they are often about people with dysfunctional relationships. While this didn’t completely sound right for Notting Hill, it did seem to point in the right general direction.

A definitive answer was simple once we looked at the genre of the piece.

Notting Hill is a Comedy. There are pieces of Drama and Entertainment in there, but as far as the overall story goes, Comedy was the main mode of expression. The four throughlines of a story can be filtered through Comedy like this:

• Situation - Situational Comedies (Sitcoms)
• Activities - Physical Comedy (slapstick, Three Stooges, What’s Up, Doc?)
• Attitudes - Comedy of Manners
• Manipulations - Comedy of Errors

Attitudes and Situations were cancelled out because of previous choices we had made with the Main and Impact Characters (more on this in tomorrow’s full analysis). So, as mentioned before, we were left with manipulations and activities. One would identify the overall story, the other the subjective story (the relationship between Anna and William).

Was tension in the overall story of Notting Hill coming from physical comedy or from a comedy of errors? And what about their relationship? Where did it seem trouble was brewing up from?

It was obvious that the conflict in the overall story was coming from misattribution: Anna’s PR people mis-idenitify William as writing for Horse and Hound, one of William’s friends doesn’t even recognize the major star (asking her embarrassing questions about salaries, etc.), Anna’s boyfriend mistakes William for room service, and even more hilarious scandal arises as Spike goes out to greet the paparazzi (in his underwear no less). Flash bulbs flicker as they misidentify him as another of Anna’s secret beaus. The conflict in the overall story grows from these mistakes (in a comical way).

Where is conflict in the story coming from?

The comedy in their personal relationship is primarily physical: the two physically run into each other spilling orange juice everywhere, their relationship grows as they both try to climb a fence, and Anna starts off the whole thing by kissing him rather unexpectedly (a very physical action). William even feels like he has to clean up the house to make it look nice for her (inspiring even more physical comedy).

Contrast Spike’s actions in the overall story with his comedic actions in Anna and William’s storyline: He tiptoes down the stairs, getting William all excited, then asking if he “can have a go.” Or when he goes up to the bathroom to have a better look at the scandalous pictures of Anna, and instead finds her in the bathtub! Both are examples of physical comedy.

Whereas Spike coming out in his underwear is physically funny, it is how the press will misrepresent him as some lover that is causing the conflict in the story. Spike’s jaunt down the stairs is a physically comedic way of causing conflict in the relationship between William and Anna.

The tension in their personal story comes from the physicality of their relationship.

Genre is an often overlooked aspect of Dramatica. Part of this has to deal with its small footprint in the theory book, and another part has to deal with its complete difference from every other explanation of genre (where are the thrillers, the horror stories, the buddy films?). But as with all things Dramatica, this take on Genre can help refine your understanding of what is really going on in a story.