In his TED Talk, Andrew Stanton claims that in order for a story to be ‘good’, it must do one thing – make a promise that it will go somewhere and that it will be worth the audience’s time.

“What this scene is doing… is it’s fundamentally making a promise,” says Stanton regarding a scene in John Carter. “It’s making a promise that this story will lead somewhere that’s worth your time. And that’s what all good stories should do at the beginning: they should give you a promise. And you can do it in an infinite amount of ways. And sometimes it’s as simple as ‘Once upon a time…’”

I found this concept particularly interesting as I do agree with him, however I feel that the theory is not as black and white as it appears on the surface. While I agree that the story must ‘promise’ that it will progress in a manor worthy of the audience’s time, I feel that as it advances, it doesn’t necessarily have to keep its initial promise.

Today in class we discussed Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Take this story as an example. At the beginning of the film Hitchcock promises that we will see a story about a beautiful young woman who will fight to create a life with the man she loves if she can escape uncaught with money she’s stolen from her boss. This is the story he’s promised is worth watching. In order to make this promise, Hitchcock casts a famous, beautiful young actress and he uses the opening scene of the film to set up a love story between Marion and Sam. However Hitchcock breaks this promise by killing off his glamorous star within the first third of the film. As an audience, we’re no longer watching the story that was, for the want of a better word, ‘promised’ to us in the beginning. None the less, the story in this film is still ‘good’, it is in fact one of the most famous films ever made.

In this way, I do agree that in order for a story to capture an audience, it must indeed make a promise. However I think that the specific promise the author initially makes does not necessarily have to be kept in order for the story to be, as Stanton puts it, ‘good’.