Time and Narrative

 I recently saw a play (Our Town on Broadway) and a film (Challengers) that made me think about how narrative sequence plays into dramatic urgency and character development. 

Thornton Wilder's Our Town won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1938, along with wide admiration for its stripped-down, innovative "modern" structure (e.g. Edward Albee called it the greatest American play). I mostly know it as a vehicle for high school and community theater, perhaps because of its immediacy, simple prose, and many characters, offering community troupes lots of participation. Oddly, this lauded Broadway production was my first exposure to it. The play depicts the life (from childhood to death) of members of the town of Grover's Corners New Hampshire. His three acts (Daily Life, Lover and  Marriage, Death and Eternity) do not mess with time sequence, and lay out a very linear chronology, mostly following on the young couple Emily and George. We see a series of snapshots of life without dramatic foreshadowing or other literary devices that are often used to knit plot events into a larger integrated narrative. The play was revolutionary in that we are asked to take these characters as they are, with minimal subtext or interpretation, at least for the first two acts. Act 3 is more experimental, as we are taken to a conversation of the dead (recent and distant) in the town cemetery, where these spirits comment on the living and on their past lives. Wilder rigorously avoids sentimentality during this--its almost a photographic portrayal, stripped of lofty prose. Even the dead speak as they would if they were still alive. The realism is emphasized by an on-stage narrator (the Stage Manager) who narrates, pointedly comments, and sometimes joins in the action. This was well played by Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory), whose casting in this role was brilliant, as his Asperger's-like character on the TV show is well suited to the unemotional observations required in this stage role. 

On the surface, Grover's Corner is a prototypic and idyllic US small town. Of course, there are no utopias, and this town has its share of dysfunction (drunks, graft, adultery). But Wilder is no Sinclair Lewis, the great revealer of the hypocrisies of The American Dream. Wilder shows nostalgia without mawkishness, largely accomplished by the plain compositional style. The simple structure, minimalism and realism seen in Our Town can be a good thing--I often object to teens talking like 30 year old screenwriters as seen in many modern movies and TV shows. But the challenge, not always met by Wilder, is how to show true character development and make us care about the individual character within such an austere, stripped-down format. Our Town can be seen as a tonic to the Shakespearian prose of Eugene O'Neill, the dominant US playwright of that era. In O'Neill (and Shakespeare) characters are usually symbols or surrogates for larger eternal concepts, and their elevated, exciting language reflects that. I think Wilder is saying here that eternal values (good and bad) can be seen in any common character found in a small town, and that elevated prose or poetry is not required to see this. However the very plain dialogue and rigid synchronous plot removes poetry and resonance from the play. I guess there can be poetry in seeing life progress from one event to the other, with minimal connection or back-looping, but this did not make for a compelling night at the theater for me. I was bored. 

In film, non-linear plotting has become common. Of course, foreshadowing and flashbacks have been around for centuries in literature, but in modern film we are frequently asked to move our minds back and forwards in time during non-linear narratives, not just for experimental effect, but to better understand the characters' evolution, outcomes and motivations. This device is not artificial, but reflects the way our minds work, flashing back and forth between our life events in order to explain our current dilemmas and problems. Prominent examples include novels of Faulkner and Joyce, and the movies Annie Hall (1977), Memento (2000), and Pulp Fiction (1994). The 2024 movie Challengers by Luca Guadagnino is another entertaining example of this, and a good example of how a rather common plot about a tennis thruple can be enhanced by bouncing back and forth in time. The very steamy and attractive threesome (Zendaya, Josh O'Connor, Mike Faist) manipulate and sleep with each other while playing professional tennis. 

It's a beautiful movie. The tennis is really well photographed, including sweat dripping on you through an invisible floor, and an extended scene filmed from the tennis ball's perspective. 

All this would have been a titillating but conventional soap opera if the director had used a strict linear narrative, the easiest directorial choice. Instead, the frequent looping between the college version of these athletes and the mature, on-the-decline versions allows lots of speculation and rumination on their character and motivations and immeasurably deepens the movie. It's also made possible by the actors' youthful appearance (they are convincing as college students despite their early 30's ages) and acting versatility. Their their young and old appearances are not really that different, and are apparently not altered by computer-generated aging/de-aging, as used (not always convincingly) in Benjamin Button and The Irishman. The actors did a great job in subtly showing a 10-year age difference by their differing words and actions, with only minimal cosmetic/hair changes to keep the audience on track. 

There's not much deep about this movie, and it mostly exists for us to admire really attractive actors doing sweaty things (a nice sauna scene, btw). However, the nonlinear plotting gives the screenplay a boost that elevates the film out of typical romance film territory. It's worth a watch.