Half and Half

I’m really giving you two posts today, only they’re both short. Both relate to the creative value of leaving something out. And both refer to movies I’ve seen recently, but I am using these movies to talk about writing.

Fantastic Voyage

There’s a Dar Williams song that refers to a movie in which “a spaceship is riding through somebody’s brain.” When I first heard it, I thought the line was referring to Innerspace, an entertaining Martin Short comedy that did not make a strong impression on me. On reflection, though, I’ve realized the reference must actually be to Fantastic Voyage, a serious sci-fi flic that won an Oscar for best special effects in 1967. I saw the movie this week, and I must say, I agree with the Academy on this one. Without modern CGI, I doubt it would be possible to do better.

The premise involves a small sub (not actually a spaceship) and its crew being shrunk down to microbe size and injected into a comatose man in order to remove an otherwise untreatable blood clot in the brain. There is more to it than that, of course, a plot involving an international arms race and a possible saboteur, but the point of the movie is to watch a tour of the body. It’s a special-effects vehicle and an anatomy lesson. That it’s also a fine movie in other respects is a happy surprise–it’s rare for a movie or a book to hit on both levels.

Fantastic Voyage pulls it off by being very deliberate about what science it tackles at all.

The thing is that miniaturization, a relatively common trope in fiction, is not justifiable through physics. Even if the shrinkage itself were possible, which I doubt, a radically shrunk human would immediately run into all sorts of problems, most of them lethal. Basically, while some physical processes scale up and down without trouble, others don’t, and a body designed to work at human-size would not work at microbe-size, and vice-versa. Also, being microbe-size would not mean being able to see microscopic objects with the naked eye, because that’s not how optics works.

Also, there’s no light inside most of a human body, so how can the characters–or the audience–see what’s going on?

But the movie ignores all that, making no attempt to explain how the shrinkage is accomplished. There’s no technobabble hand-waving at all. It’s just the premise of the movie. It’s a bit like some of Randall Monroe’s “What If” scenarios, where various impossible hypotheticals are used as a doorway into some very interesting and accurate science.

You can’t have just a little physics. I discovered that accidentally as a kid when I tried to draw a picture of Peter Pan floating mid-air next to a child on a zipline. I drew the ziplining child first. I was and am a pretty good visual artist, and the child looked believably in motion–I’d gotten the angles of his body and of the zipline and related equipment correct so that if one assumed that the lines on the paper represented physical objects moving in the normal way through spacetime, the eye saw a child zipping. Them I drew Peter, and suddenly both children appeared to be floating, because Peter’s presence made clear that the rules had been suspended. The eye no longer assumed gravity. Similarly, you can include fantasy elements in your story, but if you do, the entire story becomes subject to the rules of fantasy and not to those of real life, and any attempt to pretend that your story is realistic except for this one little exception over here just dumbs the whole thing down and makes even the fantasy harder to engage with.

Fantastic Voyage uses fantasy (it’s right there in the name) unabashedly with respect to physics in order to allow startling realism with respect to anatomy. Because the fantasy is clearly bounded, it enhances the science rather than interfering with it.

Physics hasn’t been overlooked, it’s been deliberately excluded in order to make the story work.

Lincoln

I saw the movie, Lincoln recently. I’d seen it before a couple of years ago and was impressed, but I enjoyed it more this time, being able to catch a lot more nuance, in part because I’ve become more familiar with some of the people and events the movie covers.

The movie follows Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to get the 13th Amendment (freeing all American slaves) through the U.S. House of Representatives before the end of the war–but the movie is not really about the Amendment but about Lincoln. It’s a character study. And it’s very, very good.

Daniel Day-Lewis is amazing as Lincoln. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of people play Lincoln–generally not seriously (he appears as a character in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, for example), but still. It doesn’t look difficult to do a halfway decent job, in part because he is so easily recognizable and so familiar at least on a superficial level. By the same token, playing this “character” whom everybody and yet hardly anybody knows, presenting him as a full and real person, a man rather than a saint or a symbol or an angel, must be fiendishly difficult. Day-Lewis nails it, even substantially altering his voice and the way he walks to get closer to how Lincoln is said to have been, to the point that now when I read things that the real Lincoln said, I mentally hear it in Day-Lewis’ Lincoln voice. I’d be surprised if anyone has ever done it better, or ever will.

I suspect now that every character, and probably every thing, in the movie, is done with the same care–I read somewhere that the sound of a ticking watch, heard at multiple points throughout is an actual recording of Lincoln’s own pocket watch. But I know too little about most of them to say for sure–For example, I know nothing about the historical Elizabeth Keckley, other than that she existed, so while Gloria Reuben’s portrayal of her made for an interesting character in a movie, I can’t assess whether the character is close to or far from the real woman.

There are exceptions. For example, I have learned enough about Mary Todd Lincoln to know that Sally Fields’ portrayal of her is…I don’t want to over-use “amazing,” but I can’t think of a better word just now. She really gets the humanity of the woman down, including showing her as mentally ill in a very realistic way that does not submit to stereotype or stigma.

But I was most impressed by U.S. Grant, not just because Jared Harris does such a great job, but also because he’s really only on screen for about three minutes, not all of them in a row. Grant is no longer well-known or especially popular, and if they’d just hired a vaguely Grantish-looking person to more or less phone it in, that would have been forgivable–and more viewers would not have noticed. But I’ve been reading about Grant and…that’s him, that quiet, sweet, thoughtful, deeply powerful person. That’s acting, casting, writing, directing all hitting perfectly on all cylinders, just as was done for the title character, just to make three minutes of screen-time (or whatever it was) right.

And then there’s the person who wasn’t there. I wondered if he would be–I couldn’t remember, because last time I saw the movie I didn’t know or care much about him. Now I do. And he wasn’t there. William Tecumseh Sherman.

Of course, most of the movie is set in Washington DC at a time when Sherman was not in town. I’d have to look at dates to know for sure where he was exactly, but he was with his army heading north from Savannah. That he was there is certainly relevant, as it was his victories, not alone but disproportionately, gave Lincoln the political capital first to get re-elected at all, and then to push for the 13th Amendment. And it was he, again not alone but disproportionately, who had frightened parts of the Confederacy to the bargaining table (no bargaining actually took place, but the fact that a peace process had been initiated is important to the story the movie tells). Grant orchestrated the entire end-game of the war, but within that effort, Sherman and his army were pivotal. But he wasn’t in DC where Lincoln was, and it’s a movie about Lincoln.

But there is one scene where Lincoln and Grant are talking, and Lincoln says some things that the real Lincoln also told Grant and Sherman at a meeting the three of them (and Admiral David Porter, who took notes) at City Point. For strict historical accuracy, Sherman should have been in that scene.

Except that would have required all the same care in terms of casting, writing, directing, and acting that went into Lincoln’s portrayal itself–and Sherman would have been a difficult man to cast–for probably less than a minute of screen-time. There are so many levels on which that wouldn’t have worked. The audience could not have come up to speed on the character that fast, for one. For another, Sherman, if depicted well, would have stolen the scene. He wouldn’t have meant to, but he just would not have worked as a secondary character. Unlike Grant, he could not have occupied the background quietly and unobtrusively being as powerful as a small planet. Sherman wasn’t a planet, he was a shooting star. You’d have noticed him. A lot. But it’s not supposed to be a scene about him. It’s not supposed to be a movie about him.

And so he’s not there.

You can’t have just a little Sherman the same way you can’t have just a little physics. He’s either there in full, or he’s not there at all, and trying to include less than all of him in a story is going to make everything else unbelievable and superficial also because it’s suddenly obvious that your story is not a place for real people.

The Art of Absence

The take-home message in both cases is that sometimes something good, important, and fascinating is absent from a story for a good reason. And when it is, it’s usually better for it to be absent entirely.