On Tuesday, I mentioned the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie (as one that should suffer damnatio memoriae). M. Night Shyamalan is to blame (no doubt along with a lot of studio-based decisions) for that monstrosity). And thus the post got me thinking about Shyamalan. I only recently learned about the Kishōtenketsu narrative structure and suddenly Shyamalan’s consistent plot twists made more sense to me.
The term Kishōtenketsu comes from the stages of the narrative:
- Ki: introduction
- Shō: development
- Ten: the (plot) twist
- Ketsu: Conclusion
This four-part structure differs from traditional Western plot structures, which tends to be conflict-oriented. Kishōtenketsu, on the other hand, centers around the twist (Ten), which not confrontation but rather a surprise which reorients audience understanding of meaning of story. Much like Shyamalan does in his movies.
When I first saw The Sixth Sense, I loved it. Then after awhile, I was put off a bit about how all his films (at that point) seemed to have a twist. While I have no idea if Shyamalan is trying to work in the Kishōtenketsu tradition, knowing about it makes me (ironically) look at his works in a different light.
Ramblings 
That’s very interesting. I didn’t know any of that — and in reading at the link, I read also about the five-paragraph essay and realized that what Ford K. Brown (one of my St. John’s tutors) taught me was basically to outline in that structure. For my second try at my Sophomore annual essay, he demanded that I provide 4 sentences:
1. What the essay said — not what it was “about,” but what it said, the point made.
2. Three sentences that, together, provided the argument that supported the first sentence.
The idea was then that the start of the essay would establish the thesis, and each of the three sentences would become one part of the essay. Then the conclusion would pull it all together.
I would bring my sentences and he would read them, reiterate what they should do, and send me away to do them again. When I finally sat down to write the essay, I found the experience unlike my previous essays because I knew clearly where I was going and what to do, and I could tell when I got off the track, something I had never experienced (because in earlier writing I did not know where I was going).
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