Strings

A while back I wrote a post about storyworlds, mentioning one of the key features of a fictional storyworld being internal cohesion. In any non-realist narrative, the rules of the world have to be consistent within the story frame. We all know the frustration of watching movies or reading stories where something happens that's difficult to believe because it lies outside the realm of possibility.

When you're making a film with puppets, well, then your storyworld has to not only be consistent from the perspective of its narrative, but you have to respect the nature of the medium - the puppet - in telling the story.

The Ronnie Burkett show we saw a few months ago, while it didn't foreground the puppeteer, kept him in the audience's view, so that as an audience member, you always saw him and could not forget about the presence of the puppeteer. You saw Ronnie at all times, so you were hyper aware of his movements, and at some points in the narrative, I found myself following the puppeteer, watching him create the show, rather than watching the puppets themselves and attending to their storyline.

During that show, when Burkett got some strings tangled, the audience could see his embarassment, but also delighted in his deviation from the script by inserting a comment about the tangled strings into the mouths of the puppets themselves. Had the puppeteer been hidden during those comments, they would've ruined the storyworld created by the narrative by reminding the audience of the puppeteer. As such, they simply reinforced the audience's awareness of his manipulation of the puppets. In some ways, Burkett's show mirrored metafiction's foregrounding of the author as producer of the text e.g. Calvino's If on a Winter's Night.

Strings (2004) is a movie without a terribly original plot line - royalty, betrayal, love, a quest, death - but it uses puppets to tell the story. What is unusual about the movie is that it, like Burkett's show, does not attempt to hide the strings attached to the puppets (though unlike Burkett's show, we do not see the puppeteers).

Instead, the narrative uses the strings as a way of creating the storyworld.

The strings of a puppet are essentially its lifeline. A puppet cannot come to life without strings, and the realism of a puppet's movement depends on the skillful manipulation of those strings by the puppeteer. In this story, the strings are not just metaphorically the puppet's lifeline - they are its lifeline within the world.

When a puppet's head string is cut, it immediately dies, though puppets can also die if enough of their other strings are cut. But being puppets, with interchangeable parts, they also have the advantage over humans when it comes to regeneration. One of the early scenes in the movie shows the prince having his hand string cut off. All he needed to do was call down to the dungeon, have a hand removed from a slave, and attach it to his body in place of the broken one.

The storyworld rules with the strings going high up into the heavens, beyond sight, mean that a puppet can never go underneath something. So their gates are like reverse portcullises, rising up out of the ground to a height that no puppet could jump, and no puppet can traverse past because the bar prevents their strings from moving forward.

Consequently, all of their buildings are roofless, and with the rain, you can tell who are the oldest puppets because the wood of their bodies shows their long exposure to the elements. Also, in the dungeon, puppets are locked up by dropping them through a grid, so that they can't move outside the lines of the grid.

When a puppet is born, its mother develops a second set of strings that are intertwined with her own. Meanwhile, a baby is carved in preparation to receiving those strings - in the movie, it is the father who is carving the baby, but since it's the only birth we witness during the story, the narrative doesn't indicate whether other people might also be charged with carving the baby. When it comes time, the mother can tell, and she needs the assistance of someone else. The strings that are intertwined with her own life strings start to loosen and that other person - the midwife - grabs the strings before they break (they're fragile at this point) and inserts them into the carved baby. The strings then change color and thickness, as they carry life to the child. When all the strings are attached, the child is alive.

The film is an excellent of example of a storyworld axiom: puppet strings are really its lifeline and extend high into the heavens, that is then carried to its logical conclusion in every aspect of that world. It's like imagining if everyone could change their gender whenever they want to, or that dragons can fly - the axiom is adhered to in every aspect of the character's lives. It's a very involved storyworld, and even though the plot is particularly clever, it's worth watching just to see how the plot unfolds within the confines of the storyworld's rules.