Three-Act Structure and Narrative Styles (P1)

Three-Act Structure

Three-Act Structure in 'Searching' (2018)

Act 1:

The Kim family are introduced and the childhood of Margot is summarised in a montage.

David Kim lives in San José, California with his daughter Margot. His wife Pamela was diagnosed with lymphoma and died before Margot entered high school.

Act 2:

The majority of the plot takes place here - David's various attempts alongside the police to resolve the disappearance. While this provides them with lots of information and further details about the case, it does not provide the real resolution.

One night, Margot attempts to call David three times, but he is asleep. The next morning David cannot get in contact with Margot. Believing she has gone to her piano lesson after school, David calls the piano instructor, but he is informed that Margot cancelled her lessons six months prior. He discovers that she was pocketing the money and transferred it to a now-deleted Venmo account. He calls the police and the case is assigned to Detective Rosemary Vick. Accessing Margot's accounts, David learns that she had become a loner since Pamela's death. Vick reports that Margot made a fake ID and shows traffic camera footage of her car outside of the city, suggesting she may have run away.

David, unconvinced, discovers that Margot had been using a streaming site called YouCast and befriended a young woman called "fish_n_chips". Vick reports back that fish_n_chips is innocent, having been sighted in Pittsburgh at the time of the disappearance. From Margot's Tumblr, David finds that she frequently visited Barbosa Lake, which is near the highway where she was last seen. At the lake, he finds her Pokémon keychain on the ground. The police locate her car underwater. Her body is not inside, but there is an envelope containing the piano lesson money. A search party is arranged, but a storm slows the process.

After an altercation David has with a boy who claimed to know where Margot is, Vick tells him he can no longer participate in the investigation. Undeterred, David visits TMZ, which displays the crime scene photographs, and notices his brother Peter's jacket. He then discovers text messages between Margot and Peter, hinting at an incestuous relationship. When he confronts Peter, the latter explains that they were only smoking marijuana and confiding in each other. He further states that she was in pain after her mother's death, and chastises David for being negligent towards his daughter in her depression. Vick calls in and tells him that an ex-convict named Randy Cartoff confessed to raping and killing Margot before committing suicide.


Act 3:

This section of the film contains the climactic moment David learns that Detective Vick was in on the case from the start. This leads to the resolution of the plot, and eventually into the final new equilibrium.

An empty-casket funeral is arranged for Margot. As David is uploading photos to a funeral streaming site he notices that the website's stock photograph features the same woman as fish_n_chips’s profile picture. He contacts the woman and discovers that she is a stock model who does not know Margot and that the police never called her. Attempting to report this to Vick, he instead reaches a dispatcher who reveals that Vick volunteered to take the case and was not assigned to it, despite her claims. David googles Vick and finds that she knew Cartoff through a volunteer program for ex-convicts. After reporting this to the sheriff, David confronts Vick at the funeral; the police arrive and arrest Vick.

Vick agrees to confess in exchange for leniency for her son Robert. She reveals that he was using the alias fish_n_chips to get close to Margot because he had a crush on her. Margot sent the money to Robert's Venmo account thinking he was a working-class girl whose mother was in the hospital. Robert felt guilty about lying, so he wanted to return the money to Margot. When he surprised Margot by getting into her car while she was smoking, she ran, and in the scuffle, Robert accidentally pushed her off a cliff into a 50-foot-deep ravine. Vick decided to cover up the incident, pushing the car into the lake and creating the fake ID scenario. After David went to the scene of the crime and found Margot's keychain as well as her car submerged in the lake, Vick then turned Randy Cartoff into the fall guy and staged his confession and suicide.

David asks Vick where Margot's body is, and she tells him she's still in the ravine, but that even if she survived the fall, she could not have lived five days without water. David tells the police to turn around, pointing out the storm that occurred on the third day of the search that would have provided Margot with water. The rescue crew discovers Margot severely injured but alive.

Two years later, Margot has applied for college to major in piano. David tells her that Pamela would have been proud of her, something he was unable to tell her earlier. Margot is then shown changing her desktop picture from one of Pamela and her to the one David sent her of the two of them, indicating a closer relationship between the father and daughter.

 

 

Narrative Styles

 

Circular Narrative - This opens the story at the end, before cutting back to the start and eventually ending where we began. The only example of this I can think of is Phineas and Ferb: Across the Second Dimension, in which the film opens with the characters already very far into the plot. I haven't actually seen this film but it definitely does this.

Linear Narrative (sometimes called 'Cause and Effect Narrative') - The story plays out in regular chronological order. E.G. Face/Off, in which the events of the plot play out in sequence.

Episodic Narrative - The plot is split up into sections, often having an overall linear narrative but with some episodes taking place out of sequence. E.G. Star Wars, in which - while each episode largely works as a self-contained story - a broader story is told over the course of multiple films.

Multi-Stranded Narrative - Various different plot lines take place throughout the media product, sometimes connected to each other and sometimes simultaneously though not necessarily. E.G. Spider-Man 3, in which multiple plotlines are occuring and overlapping simultaneously before eventually coming together at the climax: Peter's interactions with the Venom Symbiote; Flint Marko trying to get back to his daughter and Harry Osbourne's relationships with Peter and M.J. for instance. As with all of the above in the cases of these examples, the fabula and syuzhet are the same.

Non-Linear Narrative - The narrative unfolds in a indirect order. Circular, Episodic and Multi-Stranded Narratives can be examples of this, but it can also include those in which the story is told backwards or jumps between past and present events as if they were A and B plots. E.G. Quantico, the syuzhet of which presents the characters attempting to find a team of terrorists and clear the main character, Alex's name while simultaneously alternating with the same characters a year prior during their F.B.I. training. Each episode showing them being taught something, or events in their personal lives, relevant to the present-day events.

Key Terms:

Fabula - The order of the actual events in the story.

Syuzhet - The order in which these events are told.

In linear narratives, these are the same, but in non-linear anything goes.