LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! The Movie “Gravity”

LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! looks at popular culture for lessons we can drag back to our cold, damp cave of fiction-writing. This time: the new movie Gravity.

I saw Gravity last weekend, and I’m so, so glad I did. It’s the best action movie I’ve seen in years, and also the best thriller, and it has no more than two characters. (I’m being careful not to spoil things for those who haven’t seen it.)

Gravity also came up during workshop today, when I suddenly realized something about a student’s novel-in-progress: in telling the story of a father and son on a group fishing trip in an exotic location, she may not need all the run-up to the trip, which had occupied a good many chapters; all she may need is the trip. This is something that’ll be sorted out once she finishes the first draft, of course, and god knows there’s more than one way to tell a story. But I did point to Gravity, a movie whose magic comes almost entirely from the fact that you are stuck in space with the main character(s) for the whole 91-minute running time.

In the case of my student’s novel, there’s a lot of backstory for her main character. But this trip itself is where all the present-day action happens. I can’t imagine it not being a better story for playing off the compression of being IN that trip from start to finish.

I’m not saying every story should take place in a single location. But Gravity does remind me of both the delights of story compression and the perils of starting your story too early.

Gravity’s director, Alfonso Cuaron, gave an interview yesterday where he revealed all the studio meddling he’d had to fight off to make Gravity his way. Je-sus Christ.

Cuarón highlights a demand for constant cutting to Mission Control in Houston, a la Apollo 13: “You need to cut to Houston, and see how the rescue mission goes. And there is a ticking clock with the rescue mission.”

Not to get dramatic, but cutting to Houston would have killed the movie. Instantly. Besides, you know what provides a real “ticking clock”? Being trapped in space with a limited oxygen supply and your ride home smashed to bits. Here’s another gem:

Another request was for the script to include flashbacks: “You have to do flashbacks with the backstory.” Then there was the suggestion that Bullock has “a romantic relationship with the Mission Control commander, who is in love with her.”

Again: flashbacks would take you out of space, which would remove that “ticking clock” you’re so fond of yet not somehow seeing right in front of you. I’m not going to talk about the romantic relationship with the Mission Control commander who is in love with Sandra Bullock.

These suggestions, by the way, read like made-up dialogue from a movie about the frustrations of filmmaking. There’s nothing in The Player that’s any dumber or more outlandish than the things these executives said to Alfonso Cuaron. And this is why our movies are mostly terrible.

But those suggestions are hugely instructive, if only to remind us what not to do. What’s unnecessary. I remember being in graduate school and reading an interview with Ben Marcus where he said he refused to give backstory to his characters. I thought that was fantastic. I also thought it was, for me, maybe a little unrealistic: most of the stories I was writing at the time were dealing with the push-pull between where people were going in their lives and where they’d been. But it did make me very aware of not giving too much — I’d long had a habit of just piling on the backstory and the flashback and all the reasons why why why.

I ended up making a rule for myself, thanks to Ben Marcus: I could use backstory to echo or provide counterpoint to things in the current storyline, but I couldn’t use it to “make a case” for why a character was the way she was. I still think that’s a good rule of thumb, though rules (like thumbs) were made to be broken.

I also remember an interview with a novelist — I can’t remember if it was Louise Erdich or Alice McDermott — who said this about the scope of her books (and I am paraphrasing): “I write it, starting it where I think it should start. Then I give it to my friend, who reads it, and she tells me where it really starts. And it’s always, inevitably, about a third of the way further in than I’d thought.”

This was another thing that came up in today’s workshop, for another novel, and it’s something else illustrated beautifully by Gravity: try starting only as far back as you need to in order to get the story moving. So many other writers/filmmakers would’ve started Gravity earlier. I guarantee you someone would’ve had Sandra Bullock’s alarm clock going off, and her hand flopping over the shut it off. Then she shuffles through her morning at home and then she gets in her car — we still think she’s just going to some boring job — and CUT TO she’s at the launch pad, because holy cow, she’s going to space! And here George Clooney attempts to banter with her, but she’s not having any of that because she’s sad and CUT TO flashback of what happened to make Sandra Bullock sad.

Guess what? You didn’t need any of that. There’s a smidge of backstory given in dialogue at the beginning, as they’re fixing the Hubble telescope, but even so much of that is kind of unnecessary. Know why? Because really only a certain kind of person would go work in space. Because it’s space. The situation, like any deeply specific situation, helps define the character; her dialogue and her actions and inactions fill in the rest.

And that’s what really carries us along with Sandra Bullock as she goes from one “OH GOD, NO!” moment to another. She’s in space because of one aspect of her personality, but she’s also not made of the same stuff as Clooney, and so we want her to get back home. We’re as desperate for it as she is.

(Without spoiling anything, I will say that I also like the ending of Gravity. It might end earlier than some people would wish, but for me it ends exactly where the story of the movie ends. Meaning: oftentimes we wish for wrap-ups or and-thens, but these things don’t always honor the stories that preceded.)

It’s good, basic character work, which means it’s good writing. But Gravity is a terrific reminder that good writing isn’t just a bunch of effective words on a page, and it’s not just the A-to-B-to-C progression of plot. It’s also the choices you make — where to start, where to end, what to show, what to leave out. It’s about knowing the exact dimensions of that metaphorical iceberg Hemingway so famously discussed. And it’s about ignoring the urge to show everything. A movie executive in 2013 would demand not only to show the entire iceberg, but also to have a flashback scene where we see the moment from that iceberg’s childhood that explains everything about the character of the iceberg.

Go see Gravity. Have a good time. Ask yourself: do I really need all the backstory and flashback and external elements in my story? Then ask yourself: Why aren’t more movies like this being made, movies that take narrative risks and attempt to do more with less? But I fully expect we’ll hear about a bunch of scripts being bought where people are trapped in space, or trapped in something (water? Sand? Methane clouds?), and that’ll show us that the exact wrong lesson was learned, yet again.

The lesson isn’t to copy all the surface elements of a thing that worked. The lesson is that a one-person action movie — WITH A LADY — just came along and ate everyone’s lunch and it did so because it ignored all the things that are supposed to make for a blockbuster while not ignoring all the things that make for a good story. Even if movie executives take away the wrong lessons and keep making crappy movies, let’s steal from Gravity everything we can with regard to our own work. Including ignoring the executives in our heads!