meanwhile, back at the ranch
Meanwhile, back at the ranch is a storytelling device (or maybe just a piece of storytelling advice) that uses the continually building of two separate storylines to keep an audience interested throughout the course of a story.
I think the basic idea is that it’s easier to build tension in two stories at the same time than it is to craft one single engaging narrative.
Basically you build one storyline up to a cliffhanger and then, right when the audience is at the height of their interest in what’s going to happen next, you go back to the other storyline.
You repeat this adfinitum until the stories eventually collide with one another. The most dramatic time for the stories to collide is at the climax. For obvious reasons.
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Meanwhile, back at the ranch, is a story device but also a neat little bit of mythology. That lives and the stories in them don’t happen in a vacuum may seem obvious on its face but MBATR helps us see the relationship between one thing and another.
One thing happens because of another. Or this is similar to that.
Putting two stories back to back has the inevitable side effect of making us compare one to another - an exercise that leads to observations that are often more philosophical than the storylines we’re comparing and contrasting.
It can help us see how things are the same, how things are different, how one thing causes another, how randomness or something like it impacts our lives.
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p.s. this is a note to myself to actually do some romcom critical theory some time. the observation in this post came from The Holiday.