Listening to the first part of Ira Glass reminded me of Aristotle's Poetics, especially the part about Mythos and there is no doubt that Glass, being a student of Semiotics and a part of Thespian society, would be aware of it and indeed, drawing from it as a source. I have always been dismissive about the idea of Mythos as something that's too restrictive since a lot of the movies that I like, don't follow the usual flow of storytelling. However, listening to Glass made me think this whole idea again. He says that the plot should generate a series of questions, which must be answered leading to a moment of reflection. This reflection should then lead into the next part of the story and this cycle should generally not exceed 3-5 minutes. It'll be interesting to analyze this in construction of one of my favorite movies Memento and explore both Aristotle and Glass's position.
In Memento, the flow of the story is non linear which means at first glance, it doesn't seem to follow the idea of Poetics, that of "logical series of events". However, in my opinion, this follows Ira Glass's idea of storytelling and applies it to the T. Each segment of Memento is not longer than 5-10 minutes, each of these segments generate their questions and the logic is satisfied within the black box of that particular segment. But, of course, this logic is only sustainable within the small, narrowed view of the protagonist and elements in those segment seem out of place within that logic. By following Glass's idea of storytelling, the movie manages to keep our interest while the logical grounding is swept away from beneath us. The bigger picture is revealed only at the end and everything falls into place for us, the viewers, in an Aha! moment.
So you can see this as an act of conscious subversion. The story begins in a very Aristotelian way, presenting us with a series of self contained segments that seem to follow one from the other. It's only at the end when we realize that this logical flow was not actually there. At least, not the way we generally think of it.
This difference between Aristotle and the way Ira Glass (or Nolan) have accommodated this is objectivity and subjectivity. When Aristotle wrote his Poetics, he was mostly writing about Dramatic Arts. Greek Theater at the time, dealt with stories that the crowd was already aware of. The tension was created between the objective knowledge that the audience had and the subjective awareness of the protagonist in the play (an example of Dramatic Irony). However, in Memento, as like many other movie, the audience is placed in the same subjective space as the protagonist and we think, from the events we're witnessing, we have the objective truth.
In defense of Aristotle, however, I'd say that the most attractive thing about this movie was that it subverts his idea of plot progression.