Very early cinema engaged its audiences with a purely ahistorical occupation of time. The novel and spectacle of cinema itself was enough to hold the audience’s attention. Almost immediately, however, a complex of commercial, technical and aesthetic motives led filmmakers to seek more complex systems of temporal representation. Dramatic fictions could be produced at a more predictable rate and cost than topical or actuality films, and the industry’s wholesale switch to story-film production was instigated by the manufacturers rather than by audience demand. As well as allowing producers greater opportunities for stabilizing and controlling the market, they also offered ready opportunities for the development of forms that could sustain audience interest for longer durations.

What Barbara Klinger has called the “consumable identity” of a movie—the promotional values by which it is identified as a commodity—may distract the viewer into selecting some other aspect of the movie than its story to entertain us: performance, mise-en-scène, star biography, or the conspicuous display of budget and technical wizardry. From a consumerist perspective, these digressions are not so much evidence of a malfunction within the aesthetic system as the manifest signs of a commercial entity. Both during a viewing and afterward, movies provide frameworks for what Klinger calls “momentary guided exits from the text…set off by promotional narratives that address how a scene was done, the star’s marital history or status as a romantic icon, what other films a director has made.” Hollywood, she suggests, is less concerned with producing coherent interpretations of a movie than with promoting “multiple avenues of access to it,” so that it will “resonate as extensively as possible in the social sphere in order to maximize its audience.

Hollywood narration must negotiate the pleasurable interruptions of performance or spectacle, before reasserting itself in order to bring them (and consumption) to an end. The two elements of story-telling and spectacle are held in an essential tension, and the movie exists as a series of minor victories of one logic over the other. Narration is therefore crucial to the organization of the audience’s pleasure, but this is far from saying that story-telling in itself is the primary source of that pleasure, or the main instrument by which it is provided.

Formalist criticism also ultimately withdraws from the suggestion that every hole can be plugged and every string tied together, choosing instead to suggest that stories do have excess material that escapes the unifying narrative structure, revealing the hidden psychic or ideological processesat work in the text. According to this account, narrative is the attempt to contain this excess, an attempt that is paradoxically bound to fail…This account, too, leaves open the possibility of incidental pleasures available to the audience outside the inexorable progression of the “completely unified, satisfying tale of events.”

Maltby and Craven, Hollywood Cinema, p. 294-5, 334, 339, 335