Todorovs Theory

What would you find in music videos?

Todorov came up with a theory that most narrative storylines include similar conventions, his theory argued that many storylines had 5 common conventions and that many story’s follow these conventions.

These 5 conventions are:

- There is an equilibrium

- Some sort of problem disrupts this equilibrium

- The characters realise that there is a disruption of equilibrium

- They attempt to fix the problem

- Returns to equilibrium or new equilibrium

 

An example in a music video would be the song from the artist Beyoncé- If I Was a Boy.

This song starts with the second stage where there is a problem. The problem is that the women is not getting enough attention from her man.  This is followed by the third stage where there is a realisation of the problem and she thinks about being in his situation instead and ‘not caring’. In the video there isn’t much of an attempt to fix this problem and the girl just goes with what is happening.

From this video I can see that some of his 5 conventions within the music video are included but not all. This shows me that different videos will have different amounts of this theory involved but will usually at least have a couple.