BUTTERFLIES AND TORNADOES

The principle of unity

“Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.” - Prince Gautama Siddharta.

Nothing stands alone. It is unified in both obvious and subtle ways. This is more or less what the first philosopher of drama, Aristotle, was talking about with the “The unity of place, action and time”. Traditionally this has been taken in a more or less literal sense. Many theatre plays take place in a single day, in the same location and all about a singular event. And this normally works really well, because they follow this Aristotelian principle to the letter. But taken in a broader sense, the principle means that things are connected. They don’t exist in and by themselves.

The reference above to the famous butterfly-effect, the idea of the so-called chaos-theory, which uses the image of a butterfly flapping its wing in Japan, which initiates a chain of reactions that leads to tornado in America, as a metaphor to explain the immensely complex and connected systems that determines events all over the world. Actually this is not chaos at all, but something called self-organizing critical systems. It only seems like chaos if you are used to think within the framework of the classical physics of linear cause-and-effect.

What we do, when we create a drama is basically to create a self-contained universe, a micro-cosmos. And the peculiar thing is that both in aesthetic and scientific terms such a universe, or system, seems to work most convincingly when we make sure that all elements are somehow connected. And this goes for any level of your script, from the obvious plot-connections, over the psychology of the characters, the weaving of your theme(s), use of visual imagery and all the way to signaling of your grand motif (the big fat secret of your drama). All these should have as many plain visible or hidden connections as possible, because this creates complexity – not in the sense of being intellectual high-brow – but in the simple sense of creating a system (a work of art) that each and every time you immerse yourself into it seems alive and able to generate a fulfilling reflection of human experience and life.

There is quite a number of well-known script techniques and models, which relates to this principle – that I will return to later on – but as a principle it simply means that when you are creating a script, you just have to keep connecting your dots inside whatever universe you have chosen, with whatever logic rules that cosmos. Every time you introduce new elements you will know that eventually they have to be integrated into your system, in the sense that they connect to other elements. If for example you have a character that only appears once, maybe it doesn’t really belong in your universe, or maybe you need to take a good long look at how the character connects, how this character, within the logic of your world, creates more ‘meaning’ than what it is in itself. This is the mechanism behind the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – exactly because the parts ‘interact’ they generate more meaning than they have in themselves.

Again with the example of a single appearance of a character, I want to mention “Apocalypse Now” as film where even though the ‘villain’, the Marlon Brando-character, Colonel Kurtz only appears in the final scenes of the film, the script constantly creates connections to him in advance of his appearance, so when we finally experience him, it is with the full resonance of all that has gone before.
This is a good example of why I don’t really believe in rules and models, even though they can be really helpful, because what we are dealing with in drama is so complex that for every rule you can come up with, there will always come along a new rule to undo it. For me at least is has been more creative and productive to focus on principles, and only use the rules as temporary tools.