Critical Theory: Vladimir Propp - Narrative

Propp's theory was produced after Propp himself read 100 folk tales, and came across a link that bound them all. He found that across all the stories there were only 8 character types and these characters fit into all other stories.

These characters are:

The Protagonist

The Antagonist

The Donor

The Helper

The Father Figure

The Dispatcher

The Princess

The False Hero

The purpose of our music video was to promote a song, so unfortunately doesn't give us anything near a tale of grand proportions, but it does have its own small narrative.

The Protagonist (or The Hero) in my video is clearly the detective as he is in the spotlight for most of the time and we follow him on his journey. He provides the video with a focal character and we feel for what happens to him, which tends to be humour and happiness due to the type of video we have produced. The band members could also be seen as protagonists as they are providing us with the pleasure of listening to their song with which the video is promoting.

There are a few antagonists as the only constant character is the detective. We could say that the wire itself is an antagonist as the detective trips over it, and it leads him through troublesome areas that see him chased, run over and thrown out. The dog, the security guard, the old man, the cinema viewers and the golfer are all antagonists as they hinder the detective along his journey.

The detective could also be called a false hero. This is because he eventually gets to the band practice and prevents the other protagonists, the band, from playing their song for a period of time. This in turn would make the security guard "The Helper" by removing the detective from the bands practice.

Unfortunately our video does not use all character types, but in the future we hope to make more that fit these profiles in other productions.