TNCOM, #3 & 4

3. How strange, it came to me then, are the patterns of human experience! The meaningless life lines that start out singly and so simply from here, from there, draw slowly toward one another over a period of time, until finally they come together, mesh, to form into a design that never could have been guessed at, foretold, by what had gone before. And the completed fabric is the sum of all the threads that have gone into it.
—Cornell Woolrich, The Black Angel (1943)

4. Life, on the larger scale, though full of effects which are the direct results of causes, is apparently plotless. It is too complex. There has never yet appeared in life a causal relationship involving even 80 incidents and 34 strands that can be as unified as one artificially created. And it is this artificial relationship, this purely fictional web-work plot, this bit of life twisted into a pattern mathematically and geometrically true, that fills the gaps in one's spirit which rebels at the looseness of life as it apparently is.
—Harry Stephen Keeler, The Mechanics (and Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction (1928)

Oscar Stephen Keeler?

Have you seen the Academy Award-grabbing film Crash? I thoroughly enjoyed it—the verb is perhaps inappropriate, given that the movie was widely praised for its piercing look at race relations. I found this aspect of it sententious and frequently absurd. But as an example of Harry Stephen Keeler's webwork method of storytelling, Crash is brilliant and completely watchable. Several different plot threads (an accident, a carjacking, etc.) are introduced right up front, with no apparent linkages, but gradually it turns out that these early incidents will have repercussions later on, when a character from strand A intersects with one from strand B, and so forth. By the end, the web becomes very tightly woven indeed, and you can trace every single character by just a few degrees of separation. Perhaps Paul Haggis and company would consider filming an update of, say, The Box From Japan?

In a recent Times review of Babel, A.O. Scott wrote:

The splintered, jigsaw-puzzle structure...will be familiar to viewers who have seen ''Amores Perros'' or ''21 Grams,'' the other two features Mr. Arriaga and Mr. González Iñárritu have made together. Indeed, this movie belongs to an increasingly common, as yet unnamed genre—''Crash'' is perhaps the most prominent recent example—in which drama is created by the juxtaposition of distinct stories, rather than by the progress of a single narrative arc.

May I suggest "webwork" as a name?