I want to talk about why I like small story spaces. Recently, the shows Tris and I have been talking about on the podcast have had a reoccurring problem: the area the story takes place in is too big. John Wick, The Mandalorian and most recently Fast X all take place over enormous areas. In my last post I talked about sci-fi being too big, but it’s a problem not exclusive to that genre. In action too, there is a trend towards varying the shoot locations and telling a story that takes place across the entire globe.
It always irks me when a character like John Wick can transport himself from Tokyo to Berlin in one cut. I understand that supposedly glamourous settings are for some reason important to these action movies, but the sudden jump always shatters my immersion. It is good writing practice to only write what is necessary. We cut out the mundane aspects of our characters lives in favour of the drama rich moments that move the plot forward, so it makes sense that we don’t show every character’s bus journey between scenes. To do that would be a huge waste of time and bore the audience no end. But when it’s intercontinental travel, I find it jarring how effortlessly characters get around. One cut and the protagonist has made it halfway across the globe, presumably with at least twelve hours of flight time and a layover in Timbuktu.
What I don’t understand is why so many writers and directors feel the need to include all these different settings. Speaking of cutting out the superfluous, are these location changes actually all that necessary? What happened to having one definitive location for a story to take place? At best it’s a cheap way of impressing the audience with an illusion of scale and importance. The cynic in me wants to accuse the film industry of trying to influence the modern psyche by glorifying cities as travel destinations, and I wonder which travel companies have shares in these franchises.
French dramatists of the sixteenth century believed that true drama is made up of three classical unities:
unity of action: a tragedy should have one principal action.
unity of time: the action in a tragedy should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours.
unity of place: a tragedy should exist in a single physical location.
These rules, supposedly being interpreted from Aristotle’s Poetics, are about as prescriptive a set as you could come across, and we’ve obviously come along way from a time when they were adhered to them strictly. The unities were an outdated idea before even Shakespeare was writing. But at the risk of sounding overly conservative, I think we’ve strayed too far.
Of course, I don’t believe that all modern drama should conform to the unities- I certainly don’t think that all drama should have a time limit of twenty-four hours. But I think there is value in these traditional ideas of storytelling that has been forgotten. Most of my favourite shows and movies tend to have a strong awareness of at least one of these unities. A Place Beyond the Pines, for example, is a beautiful film in which the story is driven by a single momentum, despite being told through the eyes of various characters. The story has one principal action and that’s what makes it so engaging.
Good drama is built on good problems, and a very simple way of creating a good problem is by trapping your characters.
I think that the third unity, the unity of place, is the most overlooked now. Good drama is built on good problems, and a very simple way of creating a good problem is by trapping your characters. If you restrict the movements of your characters and put them in a situation where they can’t leave by choice, you not only force them to interact, but you limit the possible decisions they can make too. You save yourself from having to justify why they’re still in the room if they are literally locked in.
Before I knew anything about the unities or drama theory at all, it was always the shows with small story spaces that appealed to me the most. The most memorable Doctor Who episode I watched as a kid was one where a bus full of commuters was transported to a desert on another planet, and, confined to the bus for shelter, the group of strangers had to relate in order to survive. The Exam had a concept that I remember being really excited for: a group of interviewees have to answer a written question in an small exam hall, and they can’t leave until they have submitted and answer. But the exam paper is blank, so the competing candidates must work together to figure out the question. The young adult fiction of the very early 2000’s made a lot of good use of small spaces. The Maze Runner and The Hunger Games rely almost entirely on the idea of trapping their characters. There is something so engaging, and indeed horrific, in the simplicity: locking characters (especially kids) in an arena or maze and forcing them to confront dangers, or each other, to escape.
Showtime is currently airing the second season of Yellowjackets, and I’m finding it incredibly refreshing. It’s the first show this year that has been both original truly gripping. It has a lot of merits, but what stands out for me is that use of a confined space. In many ways a spiritual sequel to Lord of the Flies, Yellowjackets is about a group of young people who become stranded as the result of a plane crash, but this time instead of young boys, it’s teenage girls, and instead of a desert island, it’s an Alaskan wilderness. (A wilderness like this is technically a very large space, yes, but the girls are trapped, confined to a cabin with no way of leaving, so the technique holds up.) Like Lord of the Flies, the story follows the slow decline into madness the girls experience through starvation and exposure to the elements. The mystery, desperation and horror all come through with powerful effect and ensured I was totally hooked. It is an example of how when you take characters out of their usual environment and force them into a closed space, be it a desert island, a forest, or the centre of a maze, they are forced to relate, to adapt and to expose who they really are.
Small spaces are a recipe for rich and exciting drama. I wish writers would stop with the whistle stop tours of major cities and set aside spectacle for story. A return to the simplicity in the ideas of the early French dramatists is in order. Set a clock, plant a gun, and lock your characters in.
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