Sorry to keep banging on about Andor, but, well, here we are. One of my Main Theses about screenwriting (screenwriting, specifically: not fiction or plays or other literary forms) has always been that it’s necessarily impressionistic; that the trick of the trade largely stands in giving the illusion of depth or complexity in a format that, by dint of a trillion generic norms that have accrued over time, can’t really contain true depth or complexity.
(There’s nothing actually wrong with this. Impressionism is fine. Asking the art’s audience to meet the art in the middle of the exegetic process and do a lot of the building with the art, instead of being instructed by the art, is probably a Good Thing, Overall.)
Additionally, even in its shorthandedness, the moving image has an ace up its sleeve: that selfsame moving image, which gets superimposed upon on the writing, and can suggest a lot of shit through nominally literary modes like metaphor, irony, analogy, etc.
But otherwise, like, c’mon. A movie — a normal and good one — is two hours long*, a hundred and ten-ish pages of script (a hundred and nine if you’re nasty, or you’re me). And those pages? Lotta white space. Read one sometime, if you never have.
*but also, this is a good example of what I mentioned above, re: a lot of this being based on accrued norms. There’s no reason a good movie is two hours long. That’s just sort of where we landed, attentionspanwise, and now even that is under threat. The Russos are saying Avengers Doomsday will be made for “the TikTok generation,” whatever the hell that means. But I digress.
I used to have an idea, a while ago now, that I wanted to write what I mentally referred to as “Dark Star” stories — by which I meant, I wanted there to be an unseen centre of gravity in the middle of each thing, never seen by the audience or revealed in any manifest way, but around which all of the character choices or story points would orbit. You could guess the shape of the thing, by the size of the orbit, the boundary of the ecliptic, and so forth; but you’d never actually see it. But again: the audience would be doing any or all of the work in that construction; they might be able to guess at what the shape of the dark star was, but they’d never get to know if they were right; and (importantly if they never figured it out, it wouldn’t impact their overall experience.
(God, I hope I haven’t just described what J.J. Abrams thinks is “Mystery Box” storytelling. I don’t think I have. He did a TED talk about this, didn’t he? I don’t want to watch it again.)
My point being: that’s not a lot of real estate in a screenplay upon which to thoroughly flesh out an idea, a character, a personality, a theme, anything. A buncha heuristics are doing the heavy lifting, in all those regards.
Back to Andor. Maybe I’m just uncommonly Andor-pilled at the moment — I think I have listened to every postgame interview Tony Gilroy has done, along with numerous long chats with the key members of the cast — but the more I break down those scripts in my head (because no one gets to read them, thanks A.I.) and then consider the totality of the series and its effect, the more I think the project has blown my impressionism premise to smithereens.
tl;dr, I think the depth is there, and it isn’t even on the page; but it’s clearly in the wellspring of work that went into constructing the page, and is so well-understood by the series’ writers, directors, production designers, and cast, that each and every one of the “hidden” connections or meanings isn’t hidden at all: it becomes manifestly clear with the viewing (or, usually, the re-viewing) of any given part of the story. The rigour of this thing, I guess I’m saying, blows my mind.
Here’s a slightly different assertion along a similar line. I can’t remember if I said this last time (newsletterwise) or just messaged it to a friend, but every time I read one of A.R. Moxon’s LOST recaps I spend the first half thinking “man, I really gotta watch LOST again!” and by the end I’ve firmly landed on “jesus, I never want to watch LOST again.” That kind of happened this time as well, except this time, Moxon has something really interesting to say about LOST‘s dangling threads, which — back to the writing chat above — has something to do with the rigour of what you leave in, and what you take out.
Re: one of LOST‘s many, many, many “things that were never explained,” in this case the identity of an offscreen benefactor of two minor characters:
Why doesn’t this element of the story ever become the focus of the story? Quite simply put, because it’s not the focus of the story. It’s not an oversight; the omission of these details from the story defines what is an important focus of the story by defining what is not an important focus. Jacob is important. R.C. isn’t. The story looks at what is important to the story; it doesn’t look at what isn’t important.
Seems ridiculously self-evident when you put it like that, but the idea that there was rigour to LOST — a network television series that ran, on average, 18-episodes per season for six seasons, and only got the go-ahead to craft an “ending” halfway through its run — honestly never even occurred to me. That the shaggy ends are, themselves, part of how you tell the audience what is and isn’t important in your story is, per Moxon, a pretty nifty trick for LOST (or any storytelling project) to play.
(Obviously, per several of my previous pieces, the implication that modern media audiences are also just profoundly unwilling to accept uncertainty and doubt is, itself, enough to get my attention under pretty much any circumstances. But more on that another time.)
Circling back to Andor to close: one of the things that comes out of all those Gilroy interviews I mentioned is that once you’ve decided, in the middle of season one, that you definitely absolutely for sure cannot do four more seasons at this pace to close the four-year gap to Rogue One, and decide therefore to simply do a single follow-up season, broken into four chapters, each chapter covering one of those years… well, once you do that, the question of what you leave in and what you leave out becomes really fucking central, doesn’t it? And Andor‘s success lies not just in what it chooses to leave in, but how brilliantly it sketches in what it’s left out, rigorously, coherently, using (sometimes) single lines of dialogue or even non-verbal glances between characters, or pieces of set design.
If screenwriting is shorthand, this is some of the best shorthand I’ve ever seen; if it’s haiku, Gilroy might be the haiku master of all time. The fine detail is at the level of small gears in a pocketwatch. And the thing keeps perfect time. It makes me want to throw my laptop off the balcony (meant in the most reverential, awestruck of ways). There’s not being able to play at a master’s level; and then there’s not even being able to find your way to the arena. I’m the latter.
Anyway, speaking of writing
Fuck writing
Anyway, speaking of “fuck writing”
Friend of the bloobslettog, Kat G, is polishing the final draft of her novel and has laid out a level of practice detail here that has, once again, made me feel like an absolute poser in the realm of doing anything, ever (but specifically, writing fiction).
Honestly, I’m fully aware at this point that both my novel drafts could use this kind of rigour (and that both, at 97,000 and 104,000 words respectively, could stand to lose at least ten grand’s worth of words). I’ve also been reading Kacen Callendar’s Infinity Alchemist, which has such a lovely idea for how gender identity would manifest itself in a semi-magical, alchemical world, that it’s got me thinking about some things that I have to get to with Kya in the sequel to my own The Last Alchemist (the title parallels are coincidental; Kacen’s is better). And thus, I am also like, woof, maybe it’s stop-the-presses time for some deep tissue massage on that project, too.
The tl;dr on this, I guess, is ughhhhhhh. How the fuck do you ever know that you’re moving in the right direction, in the right order, taking the right steps, on projects like this? Do you just… not? (See above, re: profoundly unwilling to accept uncertainty and doubt.)
More next time. Thanks for reading.