Conclusions

To sum up, technology does influence narrative construction. If someone had been supposed to adapt Miller's comic books a few decades ago, there's no doubt the result would have been very different, as different as if someone tried to make a Superman movie in the 1930s. As quickly mentioned before, a comic book author, like a cartoonist, can enjoy a great level of freedom, the greatest after the one a writer can enjoy. It is so much easier to make things happen with words or with a drawing than to have to actually make them happen in order to film them, or at the very least look for the best compromise between cheating (special effects, miniatures, etcetera) and giving up. But with the advent of digital technologies, the advancements in CGI and compositing, the difference between a writer, a painter and a filmmaker is gradually shrinking. Many things that were absolutely impossible to achieve just a few years ago are not only becoming the norm, but the expertise level necessary to achieve them is decreasing, while quality is steady increasing. If it's true that whatever special effect or technology the big studios have today is going to be available to the desktop computer user in four years (Dean, 2003), this means that the tools that allow for the construction of new forms of narrative are going to be available to a bigger and bigger number of creative people, and this will probably also increase the speed at which narratives evolve.

In light of the examples presented in this blog, it can be argued that technology (and technological innovation) is a driving force in relation to narrative because it enriches the set of tools a creative person can use to tell a story. In this context, the driving element is represented by the technology itself, the knowledge and mastery of which can push the storyteller's imagination and craft towards new and previously unexplored horizons. However, an opposite case could be made with the analysis of films and filmmakers that, for the purposes and limitations of this research, could not be deeply examined. People like Kubrick, Lucas, Cameron and Jackson, other than taking advantage of what tools the technology makes available to them, have also gone the other way around. They conceived new forms of narrative and pushed the technology in order to create the tools they needed to make new kinds of storytelling possible. Whenever the technology needed to achieve the new forms of narrative they sought was simply too far away in the future, rather than subdue to the practical limitations and adjust the narrative to adapt to it, they simply waited for the technology to become sufficiently sophisticated to fulfil their needs.

If we consider both aspects of the process, we can argue that the relationship between technology and narrative is truly circular, with one pushing the other forward and then being pushed forward on its own, in an increasingly faster and faster attempt to keep narrative constantly fresh and original and technology constantly evolving.