New Ways of Looking at Film and Fiction
Fiction becomes more fun when you understand the structure of the underlying world
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Here’s one of my all-time favorite tweets:
The joke is funny because it highlights something obvious about fiction—that the story isn’t taking place in our reality despite sometimes bearing resemblance to the real world.
Every novel and every film takes place in a fictional world. Some genres, like fantasy or sci-fi, expend great effort on world-building. Authors will invent languages, religions, race, magic, and physics to give texture to the fictional world. What about realist fiction? Although it mirrors our reality, it still unfolds in a fictional world.
I’d argue that the fictional world is something readers and moviegoers enjoy just as much as the traditional elements of fiction, all the stuff we’re taught to look for in middle school English such as plot, thematic concerns, and point of view. Yet we don’t have the same vocabulary for talking about fictional worlds, nor do we quite appreciate how an author or filmmaker builds a fictional world.1
Six Elements of Fictional Worlds
I’m pulling most of these ideas from a neat scholarly work I read in college by Eric Hayot titled On Literary Worlds. He himself borrows from other scholars, so I feel okay acknowledging him broadly here, and also putting my own spin on some of his ideas.
There are six different elements that help explain the foundation of fictional worlds. It’s not an exhaustive list, but it covers the major building blocks.
Here are quick, one-sentence summaries of all six elements arranged from simplest to most difficult to understand. Following that, I dive into each in more detail and point to examples in popular books and movies to illustrate the concept.
Character Structure: The number of characters and their significance.
Conventionality: The reliance on genre conventions and tropes.
Completeness: The wholeness and level of detail in the fictional world.
Connectedness: The level of acknowledgment to the “real world”, or our reality.
Symbolic Density: The quantity and importance of symbols and allegories.
Psychological Depth: The degree to which meaning is either explicit or unstated.
Each of these elements is somewhat quantitative—there can be fictional worlds with high or low amounts of each2. No element is good or bad, it’s simply present or not present.
Character Structure
Some fictional worlds contain lots of characters. Others focus on a few. Equally important is each character’s significant to the plot and how much we understand each character’s point of view.
The Office is a great example of a fictional world with a large character structure. Additionally, because of the interviews the cast members give, you gain access to each character’s thoughts and feelings.
The Martian is a good example of a low character structure. We stay focused on one character the entire time and it’s his point of view we’re privileged to see.
Most fictional works fall somewhere in the middle with four or five main characters, though insight into minor characters can vary.
Star Wars has many characters, but we’re only privy to the perspective of three heroes or villians in any film or series. Someone like Darth Maul pops up and we don’t even get a backstory. Star Trek, on the other hand, goes deeper into the backstory of the crew and antagonists. Which one you prefer may be in part to your preferences around character structure.
High Character Structure: The Office, Star Trek, Avengers, Harry Potter, Anything by Charles Dickens
Low Character Structure: The Martian, Fahrenheit 451
Conventionality
Most fiction falls within a specific genre, though some fiction utilizes genre conventions more than others. Conventionality can pop up in various places—plot structure, character types, settings, even objects.
The use of convention has an anchoring effect. It helps the audience understand the world of the plot. Things don’t have to be explained, since the audience brings a pre-packaged understanding of the fictional world.
For example, when you see a cowboy hat, a pistol, and a swinging saloon door, your mind recalls everything you already know about Westerns; the director doesn’t have to explain the significance.
Great fiction can exist in very conventional worlds. Who doesn’t love a 90s romcom? Still, audiences love it when a book or film plays with or breaks genre conventions. It makes it harder to predict the plot, toying with your expectations, sometimes even giving you misdirections.
One of my favorite novels and movies, No Country For Old Men, is a prime example. It’s a Western, and when you first see the sheriff or a rough-and-tumble war veteran, you’re tempted to think this story will pan out like other Westerns, with the bad guy behind bars. Instead, until the very end, you’re uncertain what will happen next.
Conventionality can be difficult to judge when you start thinking about the classics. Take The Lord of the Rings. Is it conventional or not? By today’s standards, it’s the conventional, quintessential fantasy novel. When it was first published, though, despite pulling from older fantasy texts, it was unique, or at least unique enough to change the whole genre going forward.
High Conventionality: Sleepless in Seattle, Top Gun: Maverick, The Ring
Low Conventionality: Psycho, The Great Gatsby, Parasite, No Country For Old Men
Completeness
No author can describe every aspect of a fictional world. That would be impossible. However, some fiction attempts to be very complete by adding seemingly unnecessary details. Many readers dislike this kind of fiction. It’s full of insignificant details that are only there to give the world a feeling of wholeness. Think Les Miserables or The Hunchback of Notre Dame. There’s a reason people read the abridged version.
Films and television are more complete than novels because everything is visual and audible. In a book, you might not know the color of the sky or the sound of a gunshot, but in a movie, you get both.
Furthermore, the way fictional worlds deal with completeness can vary. Some elements can be very complete, while others are not. The Great Gatsby describes Gatsby’s parties in great detail. Orange presses, perfumes, fireworks, glittering dresses. It’s an evocative scene. Yet the book is more mute on what exactly Gatsby is up to, Nick’s life outside his connections to Gatsby and the Buchanans, and New York society aside from the festivities and excursions into town.
Typically, a book or movie gives you just enough to create a cohesive whole.
High Completeness: Les Miserables, The Office, Harry Potter
Low Completeness: The Great Gatsby, Fahrenheit 451
Connectedness
While Completeness is inward-looking, Connectedness is outward-looking. It describes how much a fictional world acknowledges and links to the reality. Some fiction relies heavily on a connection to the real world, like The Grapes of Wrath, or other historical fiction. Others don’t acknowledge it, like Inception.
It’s here that the Harry Potter/Michael Jordan tweet is relevant. In fact, Harry Potter is a case study in the ways writers can deal with connectedness.
Rowling starts the book in the “real world”. The book opens with this line: “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
The Dursely’s have a real address. They are normal. Rowling makes it feel like you could know these people, that the wizarding world is occurring out of sight. However, there’s no actual connection to the real world. The events of 1990s England have no bearing on the novels.
A film like Top Gun: Maverick is only tenuously connected to reality. Tom Cruise fights an unknown foe in an unidentifiable location, using tactics that would be absurd and start a world war if this were real life.
High Connectedness: The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby
Low Connectedness: Harry Potter, And Then There Were None, Inception, The Office
Symbolic Density
Think back to your English classes where you learned that certain colors and objects meant certain things or that events were allegorical of greater meaning. Chekov once said that if there’s a gun on the wall in act one, it needs to fire in act five.
Some fiction is dense with symbolism, others are sparse. Sleepless in Seattle has no real symbols. It’s just a nice romantic story. The color of Tom Hank’s shirt or his job as an architect doesn’t mean a thing.
A work of fiction without symbols doesn’t mean it isn’t without purpose. You won’t find much symbolism in The Catcher in the Rye. The story concerns itself with Holden, the main character, and his fluctuating state of mind.
Sometimes a story is low on symbolism and potentially high on allegory. I say potentially because it’s often our own interpretation that exposes allegory. For example, In The Old Man and the Sea by Hemmingway, individual objects like the fish, the boat, the fishing pole, etc. aren’t very rich in meaning, yet many find the story to be allegorical of man’s struggle, even if Hemmingway didn’t intend it.
High Symbolic Density: The Godfather, Great Gatsby, Harry Potter
Low Symbolic Density: Sleepless in Seattle, The Office, Avengers
Psychological Depth
Hayot has a great way of describing the psychological depth of a story. He calls it amplitude and references the distance between the foreground and the background of a photograph. If you’ve ever used a camera requiring a manual focus, you know that you can blur the background or flatten everything and bring it all into focus. So it is with fiction.
When fiction has little Psychological Depth or “amplitude”, everything is in focus; it’s explained, written out, or shown explicitly on screen. That’s not to say the work doesn’t have deep or profound meaning, only that its meaning is explicit. Other times, the meat of the story might be unspoken, only suggested.
Auerbach famously compares The Odyssey to the Abraham and Isaac sacrifice story in Genesis. In The Odyssey, there’s little depth. Everything you need, all the meaning, is written in the lines. You don’t have to wonder how Odysseus feels—Homer tells you. In Genesis, on the other hand, there’s lots of depth. The real substance of the story, how Abraham feels towards God and the commandment to sacrifice Isaac, isn’t discussed at all. The text sparsely describes the brief narrative of what happened, mentioning the bundle of sticks, the knife, and the angel, but lets the crux of the story go unwritten. It’s up to the audience to plunge in and explore the human dilemma.
To give a film example, compare Top Gun: Maverick to The Godfather. You could say that both films deal with a son’s responsibility to family/friends. In Top Gun: Maverick, this plays out in full focus. Rooster and Maverick both detail their greatest concerns in clear, precise language. There’s still drama, but not a lot is up for interpretation.
In The Godfather, we understand that the Don doesn’t want Michael to join the family business, aka the mafia. Michael’s motivations are apparent, but never completely clear. Throughout the movie you’re left to wonder how far he will go, and even how evil he may actually be. Even as he’s recognized as the new head of the Corleone family, the viewer is left to determine for themselves what this rise to power has done to Michael’s soul.
High Psychological Depth: Abraham & Isaac Story, The Godfather, Psycho, The Great Gatsby
Low Psychological Depth: The Odyssey, Harry Potter, The Office, Avengers
Visualizing the Elements
Since each element appears on a scale, we can plot the elements in a radar chart. This is wholly unnecessary, but I have loved radar charts ever since I played FIFA 07 as a kid (IFKYK).
Here is the plotting of several classic novels. Looking at them together, you can find subtle differences, like Dickens vast character strucutre, or Gatsby’s slightly higher psychological depth. Most classic novels would have a fairly round shape, with moderate amounts of each element.
How about some series in the fantasy genre? These structures also look similar to each other with moderate completeness, high character structure, and a lack of psychological depth or connectedness to the real world. A fantasy film or novel that wanted to play with genre conventions might choose to have fewer characters or add more psychological depth.
Some of the fiction I referenced in this article have very unique shapes. The Office has no depth or symbolism, isn’t very connected to the real world despite taking place in the real world, but maxes out on character structure. It plays with conventionality and subverts the mockumentary genre, especially in later seasons. Sleepless in Seattle, though conventional and complete, scores low on the other elements. Keeping the symbolism, depth, and character strucutre low helps the audience focus on the core of the story.
The Old Testament is not fiction, but if plotted, you can see it has great pscyhological depth, symoblic density, and connectedness to the real world. But it’s pretty low on character strucutre, at least in the individual books, and is hardly complete, focusing only on prophecy or spiritual issues of the Israelites.
Here’s my take on a few films mentioned in the article. Note the similar chart of No Country for Old Men, and Psycho. My guess is if you liked one, you would like the other.
Finally, here are the plottings of your stereotypical book or movie from each genre. Horror has an awesome chart, ramping up the convention and the pscyhological depth to create tension. Also funny how the Horror plot and The Martian plot have a similar structure. Is The Martian a horror movie?
Photos From the Last Month
If fictional worlds are understood, it’s easier to make connections between the kinds of fiction you like. Most fiction recommendations stem from plot, storyline, pace, genre. Sometimes, it’s not just the story you like, but the way the world of that story is presented.
Hayot does not present all his terms as a scale, and there are definitely limitations to my doing so. For example, a book can be high in allegory and low in symbols, or explicit in meaning while still having an unstated psychological depth. Hayot is more concerned with how each text deals with these terms, not just the levels to which they include or exclude them.
Interesting axes to think about fiction.
I felt strong, immediate disagreement with “Films and television are more complete than novels because everything is visual and audible.“ I think I understand the argument, but I’ve read many novels that felt much more complete than any movie I’ve ever seen.
I think I might not be a visually oriented person, so that could be why the “feeling” of the world is far more important to me than the “look”.
But I think it also comes down to time. A movie is 2-3 hours tops, whereas a book can easily stretch over weeks (though obviously not of constant reading) and I think that makes the difference for me. Time to stay in the world makes it feel more complete.