The complexities of narratology are beyond the
scope of this book,^4 but we can begin our study by
distinguishing between two fundamental elements:
Story and Plot
Story and Plot
Although in everyday conversation we might use
the words story and plot interchangeably, they
mean different things when we write and speak
about movies. A movie’s storyconsists of (1) all the
narrative events that are explicitly presented on-
screen plus (2) all the events that are implicit or
that we infer to have happened but are not explic-
itly presented. The total world of the story—the
events, characters, objects, settings, and sounds
that form the world in which the story occurs—is
called its diegesis, and the elements that make up
the diegesis are called diegetic elements.
In the first scene of The Social Networkwe see
Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and Erica
Albright (Rooney Mara) sitting together in a
crowded bar. They are having a heated conversa-
tion—at least it’s heated on one side. Mark is chat-
tering a rapid-fire monologue involving SAT scores
in China and rowing crew; Erica is struggling to
clarify what exactly he’s talking about. Everything
we experience in this scene is part of the movie’s
diegesis, including the other bar patrons and the
muffled dissonance of the crowd’s chatter mixed
with the White Stripes’ “Ball and Biscuit” playing
on an unseen jukebox. Of course, we pay special
attention to what the featured characters say and
how they look saying it. From this explicitly pre-
sented information, we are able to infer still more
story information that we have not witnessed on-
screen. They’ve been here a while—their beers are
half empty and they’re in the middle of an ongoing
conversation—and they’re a couple. Watching their
interaction, we can even guess the nature and
duration of Mark and Erica’s relationship. As the
conversation intensifies, we can pick up on still
more implicit information. Mark is obsessed with
getting into a prestigious student club—his inten-
sity implies that he is not exactly popular with the
elite crowd. We learn Mark is going to Harvard and
that he looks down on Erica for merely attending
lowly (in his eyes) Boston University. The tone of
her angry retort about Mark’s Long Island roots
lets us imagine a relatively humble upbringing that
might be fueling his need for prestige. The story
includes everything in the diegesis, every event and
action we’ve seen on-screen, as well as everything
we can infer from watching those events.
The plotconsists of the specific actions and
events that the filmmakers select and the order in
which they arrange those events so as to effectively
convey the narrative to the viewer. In this scene,
what the characters do on-screen is part of the plot,
including when Erica breaks up with Mark and
stalks off, but the other information we infer from
their exchange belongs exclusively to the story.
The distinction between plot and story is com-
plicated by the fact that in every movie, the two
concepts overlap and interact with one another.
Let’s continue exploring the subject by following
the jilted Mark as he slinks out of the bar and
makes his way back to his dorm. In this sequence,
we hear the diegetic sounds of evening traffic, the
tread of Mark’s sneakers, and the muted chatter of
his fellow pedestrians. We watch Mark trudge past
the pub, trot across a busy street and down a
crowded sidewalk, and jog across campus. As we
can see in Figure 4.2, these explicitly presented
events, and every image and sound they produce,
are included in the intersection of story and plot.
But remember that story also incorporates those
events impliedby what we see (and hear) on-screen.
In the case of this particular sequence, that might
involve the portions of Mark’s journey that were not
captured in any of the shots used to portray his
journey. In addition, everything we infer from these
images and sounds, from the supremacy of the
great university to the sophistication of the young
scholars strolling its campus, is strictly story. The140 CHAPTER 4 ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE
(^4) This discussion of narrative theory adapts material from, and
is indebted to, Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narra-
tive Structure in Fiction and Film(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1978) and Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative
in Fiction and Film(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1990). Other works of contemporary narrative theory are rec-
ommended in the bibliography at the end of this book.