The Anatomy of Story (28 page)

The cellar is also where plots are hatched. Plots come from the darkest part of the house and the darkest part of the mind. The cellar is the natural workplace of the criminal and the revolutionary. This technique is used in
Notes from the Underground, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Silence of the Lambs,
and M.

The attic is a cramped half-room, but it is at the top of the structure, where the house meets the sky. When it is inhabited, the attic is the place where great thoughts and art are created, as yet unknown to the world
(Moulin Rouge).
The attic also has the benefit of height and perspective. Attic inhabitants can look out their tiny window and see a Brueghel-like scene of community in the street below.

The attic, like the cellar, is a place where things are hidden away. Because the attic is the "head" of the house, these hidden things, when they are terrifying, have to do with madness (
Jane Eyre, Gaslight).
But more often the hidden things are positive, like treasures and memories. A character discovers an old chest in the attic that opens a window into who that character was or the character's forebears.

The Road

In the man-made spaces of storytelling, the opposite of the house is the road. The house calls us to nestle, to live in a timeless moment, to get comfortable, to make ourselves at home. The road is the call to go out, explore, and become someone new. The house is the simultaneous story, everything happening at once. The road is the linear story, one thing happening along a line of development.

George Sand wrote, "What is more beautiful than a road? It is the symbol and the image of an active, varied life."
⁸
The road is always tenuous. It is a single, slim line, the barest mark of man surrounded by rough, impersonal wilderness. So the road requires courage. But it offers almost infinite vistas of who the traveler can become. The road, no matter how thin, promises a destination that is worth reaching.

Myth stories center on this fundamental opposition between house and road. The classic myth story begins at home. The hero goes on a journey, encountering many opponents who test him, only to return home having learned what was already deep within. In these myth stories, the home at the beginning is not well used. The hero has not created his unique self in that safe place, or he has felt enslaved. The road forces him to test his abilities. But in myth, he will not become someone new on the road. He must return home, this time to realize who he always was, but in a deeper way.

STORY WORLD TECHNIQUE: THE VEHICLE

A
major reason journey stories feel fragmented, besides having too many arenas, is that the hero encounters a number of opponents in succession on the road. That's why one of the keys to making the journey story work is the vehicle in which the hero travels. A simple rule of thumb is this: the bigger the vehicle, the more unified the arena. The bigger the vehicle, the easier it is to bring opponents along for the ride. These are the
ongoing
opponents, and with the hero, they create the single arena within the vehicle.

Traveling stories that use large vehicles include
Titanic
and
Ship of Fools
(ship),
Murder on the Orient Express
and
Twentieth Century
(train), and
Almost Famous
(bus).

The City

The biggest man-made microcosm is the city. It is so big that it breaks the bounds of microcosm and becomes overwhelming. The city is thousands of buildings, millions of people. And yet it is a unique experience of human life, which you must somehow convey in story terms.

To codify the vast scope of the city, storytellers shrink the city down to a smaller microcosm. One of the most popular is the institution. An institution is an organization with a unique function, boundaries, set of rules, hierarchy of power, and system of operation. The institution metaphor turns the city into a highly organized military operation where vast numbers of people are defined and relate to one another strictly by their function in the whole.

Typically, a writer portraying the city as an institution creates a single large building with many levels and rooms, including one immense room with hundreds of desks in perfect rows. The city as institution is found in
The Hospital, American Beauty, Network, Double Indemnity, The Incredibles,
and
The Matrix.

STORY WORLD TECHNIQUE: COMBINING NATURAL SETTINGS WITH THE CITY

F
antasy uses an opposite approach from the institution to find a metaphor for the city. Instead of locking the city down to a regulated organization, fantasy opens the city up by imagining it as a kind of natural setting, like a mountain or a jungle. One advantage of this technique is that it makes the overwhelming city a single unit, with special traits the audience can recognize. But more important, it hints at the tremendous potential of the city, for both good and bad.

City as Mountain

The mountaintop is a common natural metaphor for the city, especially an extremely vertical city like New York. The highest towers, the apex of the mountain, are home to the most powerful and wealthiest. The middle classes live in the middle towers, while the poor crawl about in the low-lying tenements at the mountain's base. Highly stylized crime fantasies such as the
Batman
stories often use the mountain metaphor.

City as Ocean

A more powerful natural metaphor for the city than the classic but predictable mountain is the ocean. With this metaphor, the writer usually begins on the rooftops, which are gabled so that the audience has the impression of floating on the waves. Then the story "dips" below the surface to pick up various strands, or characters, who live at different levels of this three-dimensional world and are typically unaware of the others "swimming" in this sea. Films as different as
Beneath the Rooftops of Paris, Wings of Desire,
and
Yellow Submarine
use this ocean metaphor to great advantage.

The city as ocean is also the key metaphor when you want to portray the city in its most positive light, as a playground where individuals can live with freedom, style, and love. In fantasy stories, the main way to do that is to make the city dwellers literally float. Not only does this give them the power to fly, but also, when characters float, ceilings become floors, nothing is locked down, and people can experience the ultimate freedom that comes from imagining things together. This floating is a

metaphor for the potential that is
hidden
within the mundane city; when you approach the predictable world in a new way, suddenly everything becomes possible.

In nonfantasy movies that treat the city as an ocean, the effect of floating is created with the eye of the camera. For example, in the beginning of Be
neath the Rooftops of Paris,
the camera glides along the gabled rooftops, then dips down below the "ocean's" surface and into an open window. After watching some characters for a while, it "swims" out of the window and into another window, where it picks up another set of characters. All of this is part of the story structure, created by the writer and intended to evoke the feeling of an extended community within the vast ocean of the city.

Mary Poppins

(books by P. L. Travers, screenplay by Bill Walsh and Don Da Gradi, 1964) Mary Poppins
is a story based on the metaphor of city as ocean. Mary floats down from the sky to begin her stay with the Banks household. In the house next door, a ship captain stands on the roof (deck of his "ship"), along with his first mate. From Mary, the children learn that you can float if you love to laugh the day away. And Bert and the chimney sweeps dance on the rooftops, which he calls the "sea of enchantment." With bursting energy, they prance on the waves (the gables) and defy gravity until the captain fires a shot from his cannon and the sweeps all disappear under the ocean's surface until it is time to dance once more.

City as Jungle

City as jungle is the opposite of the city as ocean. Here the three-dimensional quality of the city is not liberating but rather the source of death—enemies lurk all around, and a fatal attack comes from any direc-tion in an instant. This kind of city is typically closely packed, steaming and wet, with the residents portrayed as animals who differ only in the way they kill. Many detective and cop stories have used this metaphor, to such a degree that it long ago became a cliche. Stories that have used the city-as-jungle metaphor in more original ways are
Pepe Le Moko
(the Casbah of Algiers),
Spider-Man
(New York),
Batman Begins
(Gotham),
The Jungle
(Chicago),
Blade Runner
(Los Angeles),
M
(Berlin), and
King Kong
(New York).

City as Forest

City as forest is the positive version of the city as jungle. In this technique, the buildings are a scaled-down version of the city, more human, as though people were living in trees. This city looks and feels like a neighborhood or a town in the midst of impersonal towers. When the city is portrayed as a forest,
it
is usually a
Utopian
vision in which people enjoy the benefits of teeming urban life while living in the coziness of a tree house. We see this technique in films such as
You Can't Take It with You
and
Ghostbusters.

Ghostbusters

(by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, 1984) Ghostbusters
is a boys' adventure story set in New York. The three "musketeers" start off as professors at a warm, townlike university. They work in paranormal studies, which allows them to do all kinds of loony experiments with pretty girls. They create a business where they get paid large sums of money for dressing up in cool uniforms, driving a souped-up ambulance, shooting great gadgets, and living in a firehouse. The firehouse is the ultimate tree house for boys. These boys live in a dorm together, where they dream of sexy girls, and when they have a job, they get to slide down the "tree trunk" or the "beanpole" and take a wild ride. All kinds of floating are
going
on in this city.

Miniatures

A miniature is a society shrunk down. Miniatures are chaos theory applied to storytelling; they show the audience
levels of order.
The order of
the larger
world, which is too difficult to
grasp because we
can't
see it as a
whole, is suddenly clarified when made small.

All man-made spaces in a story are some form of miniature. The only difference is the scale. A miniature is one of the fundamental techniques of the story world because it is such a good condenser-expander. By its very nature, it doesn't show one thing after another in succession. It shows many things at once in all the complexity of their relationships. A miniature has three main uses in a story:

1. It lets the audience see the world of the story as a whole.

2. It allows the author to express various aspects, or facets, of a character.

3. It shows the exercise of power, often of tyranny.

Ray and Charles Eames's classic documentary film
The Powers of Ten
shows how miniatures work in a story. From a yard up, we see a couple lying on the grass having a picnic. A split second later, we see the same couple from ten yards up, then a hundred, then a thousand, ten thousand, and so on. The perspective increases by powers of ten until we see vast reaches of outer space from an incomprehensible height. The perspective quickly telescopes back down to the couple on the grass and then reverses the powers of ten, delving ever deeper into the microscopic world of cells, molecules, and atoms. Each perspective shows a complete subworld, an order of things that explains, in a nutshell, how that world works.

Miniatures provide this same function in stories. But what they show is not simply a factual sense of how the pieces of the story world fit together. They show what matters. "Values become condensed and enriched in miniature."
⁹

Citizen Kane

(by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, 1941) Citizen Kane
is a story built on miniatures. In the opening sequence, Kane, on his deathbed, drops and shatters a glass-ball paperweight that depicts a wooden cabin in the snow. This is a miniature of Kane's childhood, which he lost. Next comes a newsreel about Kane, which is his life story in minia-ture, but told from a distant, pseudohistorical perspective. The newsreel introduces Kane's estate, Xanadu, which is a miniature of the entire world re-created behind walls for Kane's personal pleasure and dominance. Each miniature gives the audience a highly value-laden picture of this rich, lonely, and often tyrannical man. At the same time, the use of so many miniatures suggests one of the themes of the story: we can never know another person, no matter how many perspectives and storytellers we use.