Macro to Micro

SCRIPTIN' FANCY-LIKE: It's a big, overly detailed world

Right then, the other night I watched a film which bears some broad similarities to a project I am working on. It was last year's Children of Men. If you don't want to risk spoilers, you'd best stop reading now.

Watching it has helped remind me of my priorities for a project of mine which also takes place in a near future with a dramatically altered world stage. I must confess to having almost entirely fallen into a trap I knew would be a danger with such a script...I became obsessed with world building, with the macro, with the background...and neglected the story! Good thing it's not too late.

A nit picking obsessive could take some real gripes with Children... and on the surface, that nit picker might not seem so much of a narrow minded idiot. There is no explanation for why children have ceased to be born, nor is there ever any explanation for why one woman - a MacGuffin/character hybrid if there ever was one - is suddenly able to be pregnant after an eighteen year gap between her pregnancy and the last one humanity has seen. This, and several changes between the book and the film, certainly got up this person's nose.

But there is such a thing as knowing what's important to the story - what's needed to simply have a story. It's an old truism, but we really do need a compelling human connection to care about any story. Alternate history novels are particularly vulnerable to forgetting this, though there are some stellar examples of what can happen when the writer does remember. I'd also argue that these kinds of stories are even more vulnerable than usual to having plausibility tossed aside in favor of expressing a personal agenda, but I'll try not to digress!

So you get this tug of war between wanting to have a world with a unique enough hook (No new kids for 18 years and the world is falling apart) to snare people who see a trailer or read a blurb, while having that compelling human element which will maintain interest while the film is actually viewed, as well as hook those potential viewers which are not so fussed about high concepts. The latter is expertly achieved in Children of Men and even a high concept junkie like myself found himself, during the tense chase scenes, finding myself drawn in because I cared about the fate of the people I was watching - not the hypothetical fate of humanity as represented by the growing fetus inside one of them.

You have a paternal relationship between Michael Caine's marvelous character (Jasper)and the protagonist, Theo. Though you quickly learn that Theo and his former wife (Julian) have been apart for some time, something which was certainly contributed to by the untimely death of their child, they are shown as still having troubles but not having forgotten why the came together in the first place. There are only a few glimpses of their love for each other, the last of which is very wisely placed moments before Julian's death. Sucked into the individual level, you are quickly pushed back out to the macro as you are made to want to know what might threaten the surviving characters.

The same dynamic plays out with the human cargo/MacGuffin character, Kee. She's more interesting for her mouthy attitude and burgeoning friendship with Theo than her carrying the sole human fetus on this broken Earth. Removed from context, it rightly seems absurd to come out with something like "Of course she is carrying the sole human fetus, what else has she got?" - but let's face it, in a film with high concepts and higher stakes...that sort of thing is expected, for without it there would not be the story being told. It's her mouthy attitude, immature approach to her role (i.e. wanting to name the first human baby in eighteen years "Bazooka") and the development of her relationship to and with Theo that makes the viewer give two shits.

So therein lies the challenge which I must force myself to undertake, if I want my own thing to get anybody excited. Having looked broadly across geography, history, economic theory, political theory, environmental theory and even some sociology...the time has certainly come for me to shove my nose right down to the ground level and create some engaging individuals to inhabit this world. Sometimes I would, not always incorrectly, tell myself that the world needed further work because of how it's details would trickle down into those which define the characters and their immediate settings. A certain even might be the direct cause of one character's cynicism, say. But what I've needed to remind myself is that it can work the other way too, plus not all facets of an individual are shaped by the world at large. I gather that people can influence people? Personal events as well as world events, yes?

So that's that then. Next time I post on this, I'll discuss another challenge which I am currently facing and which every alternate future or history story has had to wrestle with - how to convey and prioritize the information which makes up the world itself.

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Meanwhile, the Writers Strike seems to be having a rather large monetary effect on the industry?