ABSTRACT
Storytelling is the process of selecting, arranging, and rendering the events of a narrative, stimulating spectators to perform cognitive activities. To understand the aesthetic pleasure of storytelling, we must draw a common distinction between “plot” and “story”. The aesthetic pleasure of storytelling derives from the mental activity that narration arouses, the result not of watching stories but of constructing them in our minds. In Hollywood storytelling, that challenge comes from disunities in the plot that make it more difficult for a spectator to construct a coherent story. Narrative disunity makes storytelling more demanding, as well as more cognitively exciting and interesting. Unity makes Hollywood storytelling easy to understand. Hollywood narration creates clear linkages between plot events by means of causality, the principle that one event brings about another. Causality organizes virtually every aspect of a Hollywood narrative.
