Consider the following version of “The Darling,” in which the internal dynamics have been neutralized as a source of meaning:
“Once upon a time, Olenka had a lover, Kukin, to whom she conformed completely. She loved him at 9 on a scale of 10. They were together six months. Then he died. Then she had another lover, Vasily, to whom she conformed completely. She loved him at 9 on a scale of 10. They were together six months. Then he died. Then she had a third lover, Smirnin, to whom she conformed completely. She loved him at 9 on a scale of 10. They were together six months. Then he died.”
That’s not a story. It lacks the specificity that creates internal dynamics. (How, exactly, did Kukin die? How long did Olenka mourn? How long, comparatively, did she mourn after Vasily died? Which of her loves was the most physical? The harshest? And so on.) In the above version, nothing is felt to cause anything else. So none of it means anything. The writer has failed to exploit a source of beauty: the internal variation by which things like “progress” and “tragedy” and “reversal” and “redemption” are made to appear to have occurred in a work that is entirely invented.
In an inferior version of that halftime show described above, the people on that football eld just drift around, wearing randomly colored street clothes, conveying no meaning. The difference between a master halftime-show choreographer and a hack is the attention paid to the details of internal dynamics.