Wednesday, August 03, 2011
Arcs as a Plot Device
I only realized what "arcs" are when I rented all 6 seasons of "Sex In The City" and watched the directors commentary. An "arc" is a sub-plot and many TV series and even entire movies are made up of a host of sub-plots. In some shows each arc illustrates some common theme like "oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive" or perhaps, say, to abandon a loyal but less glamorous to court the friendship of a very popular person who will prove disloyal. Arcs seem to run in the same time frame but are otherwise unrelated. I dont suppose we can look to Cervantes' Don Quixote for an example of arcs since it is more likely a sequence of adventures which happen one after the other to the same hero and side-kick. I wonder what is the earliest example either in cinematography or literature of such arcs?
