Ellipsis

 Ellipsis is a narrative technique, used in films, books, and other such story-based mediums, which is the cutting out of a portion of an event or series of events, to either save time or to pace the story in a certain way. In Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, this usually quite obvious but never noticed aspect is given particular attention: 

Supergirl gets assaulted a lot supposedly, and a lot of the incidents are cut out for narrative sake. The whole story, being a travel narrative, does this quite a bit. The use of space travel is another scheme which uses ellipsis quite a bit. Space is of course an extraordinarily vast area, but the quick travel between planets (making them feel more like travelling between town to town) is waved away by unrealistically fast technology or some sort of wormhole, hypergate type explanation of almost instant transportation. But these are just general, and useful, techniques, whose use is so frequent and ingrained within all stories that a story without these techniques is likely to be the product of some pretentious abstract French film auteur who elicits groans from the general public. Ah yes, this scene of her brushing her teeth is very essential, and all of those stairs must be climbed in realistic time! 

It is reminiscent of compression within computers. Of course there are some algorithms that preserve all data when compressed (lossless), but the most efficient compressions come from cutting out data and making generalizations (lossy). Sure, you lose some data, but your files are able to be stored in a much smaller space. By cutting out these large parts of stories, sure some stuff will get lost, but it is not relevant, and does not really matter. 

Or does it? Think of history. In non-well documented times, there are sometimes one (or even zero!) sources that talk about a certain event or area. Now, there are hundreds of sources reporting on every little thing that happens. Just by having the increased amount of data available, there are thousands of possible perspectives. By constructing a narrative throughout disparate points of data, entirely different takes can be made. 

This may sound like I am applying data principles to narratives, and I am. While using ellipsis makes things much more tolerable on the viewer, it is just one string of data points from the author. Sure, things like going up every flight of stairs could be considered noise variables, basically completely useless. But isn't including all of the data and allowing the viewer to create their own line through it much more interesting? 

With the rise of the consumption of media, ellipsis seems to be a much more common part of the daily diet of everything. It does paint an unrealistic picture, but of course that is because it is only practical. But what is the effect of seeing everything through a certain angle of the camera dictated by somebody else, a certain line in the data? Arguably news and any sort of digital, or heck, even physical, transfer of ideas or words involves ellipsis. But without all of the data, there may be a missing line, an interpretation of several points that reveal a much greater truth than initially revealed. So yeah, hit me with that several book long bus travel scene, and let's see if there can be anything gained from it! Maybe I am that French film auteur from earlier, at least in spirit.