World-Building and Suppression—How the Best Fiction Creates Immersion by Limiting its Scope

This week I'm wrong about the masterful world-building of Challengers (and Pride and Prejudice), plus the unintentional psychological torture of my neighborhood's dogs

This churro is more important to Challengers than any tennis ball

The three opening shots of Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s new film that pretends to be about tennis, establish an entire world. Three faces—one, concealed by sunglasses, full of simmering anger and resentment—another, existentially exhausted—a third, sweaty, worn-down, but smiling, swaggering—all beautiful, angular, sharp, dangerous.

Challengers is not about tennis—it’s about competition. It’s about how competition is inherently relational, and how easy that makes it for relationships to become competitive. It’s about the difference between spectating and participating, between fighting and surviving, between admiring and loving and wanting and being disgusted by and actually seeing and destroying other people and ourselves. It’s about lust for power and the vulnerability and weakness that can come from actually achieving and maintaining it. It’s about the strength and fragility of bodies, and how bodies can break and bend and captivate and manipulate. (It’s also about eating phallic foods and a soundtrack that makes me want to run through a wall.)

And all of that is captured in those three opening shots. Literally every bit of it.

Those establishing shots are reinforced by the rest of the movie—Guadagnino shoots the tennis sequences in the film like a western, focused on the rituals of engagement and the pent-up tension that precedes the action, and then the reactions and consequences of that action, far more than the play itself. You can tell he doesn’t care about the sport at all.

The result is some of the best world-building I’ve seen in a movie.

World-building is a concept I think about a lot, especially as a lifelong fan of sci-fi and fantasy. With the ubiquity of those genres in popular culture over the past 25 years—from superhero content to YA fantasy to Game of Thrones and Harry Potter and their many imitators—it has become an increasingly discussed and criticized aspect of genre fiction, especially.

Most of the discussions of world-building I read and take part in deal with “rules”—with what a fictional world allows and doesn’t allow, or how EXACTLY the fantastical elements work and integrate into the story. World-building becomes a kind of uber-exposition, a measurement of the minute detail of the artist’s creation that can be nit-picked for inconsistency and contradiction. This is also why the past 25 years have seen an explosion in concern about plot holes, canon, and continuity. Contemporary speculative fiction is often overwhelming in its explanations and descriptions and justifications and its obsessive building of lore, to its detriment (I wrote about this a bit last year). Frankly, it’s exhausting.

In the past few years I’ve begun to think of effective world-building differently—not as something descriptive, but as something suppressive—and also as something equally important to realist fiction as to genre.

All fiction flattens experience by cutting moments unimportant to the central story and its themes. Usually these cuts are obvious and uncontroversial—such as not showing a character ride the subway silently for twenty minutes, or sleep for 8 hours. We don’t need to see those things to understand a narrative.

Some cuts are inherent to specific media—it’s almost impossible to communicate subtle differences in smell or temperature on screen, for example, or to communicate multi-faceted simultaneous choreography in a book without dramatically slowing down a story. Choices to emphasize these elements require a massive and obvious effort by the story and by the audience—which can be worth it, but can only be used sparingly.

But many of the experiential gaps in fiction are active and interesting choices, and have profound effects on a work of art. Challengers communicates almost immediately that the minutiae of tennis technique and strategy don’t matter to the movie at all, or only in a decorative, non-substantial way—we as the audience don’t need to worry about understanding tennis to understand the movie. It’s also not a movie concerned with training or athletic growth (which is not to say its not interested in physicality, because it very much is), or with parenthood and mentorship, or with race and class—all of which are ideas and themes other movies address, which it very much could include within the frame of its basic narrative, and that the film briefly but insignificantly gestures towards. And while that could easily be frustrating in a lesser movie, the immediate work of the opening shots and scenes establishing that we should primarily care about interpersonal conflict and desire and competition—and therefore that we don’t need to worry about anything else—makes the movie feel whole and complete despite its intentional omissions.

Effective world-building makes it easy to know what matters in a story. The best world-building doesn’t make you think, it makes you experience—art isn’t about thinking, it’s about feeling, being immersed, being lost—being swept away. It primes you to see and feel what matters to its vision, which allows you to surrender to the experience and fully suspend disbelief. All fiction is unbelievable, and the artistry is about suppressing the parts of us that care.

When Jane Austen opens Pride and Prejudice with “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” she is masterfully building her world by eliminating everything that doesn’t matter to it. This is not a book interested in Britain’s agrarian economy. It is not concerned with the vast majority of the people who exist within its setting—the workers, the servants, the laborers. It is not concerned with the material, physical basis of money. It is a book interested in the upper class, in the social choices they make and how they define and ascribe status to each other and themselves, and in love and marriage and to what degree those things are economic or personal decisions. As the book progresses, the world-building continues by ignoring the personality and human presence of lower class characters, by making physical danger and illness an abstract plot device with emotional significance rather than a physical threat, and by otherwise zeroing in on the book’s actual interests. We can embrace—and be fully captivated by—the story of Elizabeth and Darcy’s courtship BECAUSE we have been given permission—more than that, we have been instructed, forced, seduced—into forgetting about and moving past so many fundamental parts of real human experience. Austen is a realist author, but that realist world is created through a suppression of reality, not by a recreation of it.

A compelling fictional world is built by active negation, not by obsessive additive description. It should focus rather than overwhelm.

This is a lesson genre should take and emulate, and it may be starting to—the best genre book I’ve read in years was Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, which exists in a world so abstract and absurd it would be laughable if she tried to fully explain it and justify its existence. So she doesn’t—instead establishing the significance of the protagonist’s lively and curious mind, of social dynamics that suppress and encourage that curiosity, and paying fleeting attention to the physical needs of the primary characters (mostly as a way to inform the social and power dynamics). I could feel my desire for “answers” and for rules fall away as I was drawn into the story. I knew what mattered to the story and I was too compelled to care about anything else.

Challengers reminded me that I love movies and storytelling not because I love having a story explained to me but because I love being drowned in tension and conflict and being challenged (ha) by its resolution. I hope more movies (and books and shows) respect us as an audience enough to do the same.

Tragedy and Romance

In October, when I returned to Brooklyn after almost 4 months away, I was struck by how much my neighborhood had changed. The bones of several massive new apartment buildings had erupted from formerly empty lots. Pretty much every restaurant and bar on my block, specifically, had closed (I would later find out so the landlord could open their own restaurant in those spaces).

I greeted most of these changes with suspicion and unease, but there was one new addition that has become one of my favorite local gems. The Ripped Bodice is a romance only bookstore that opened its first location in LA, but that now has a thriving business in Park Slope. Owned by two sisters, featuring a charming pink storefront, and with a healthy sense of humor in its merchandise and presentation, the bookstore almost immediately became a place I would take friends and visitors to the city for a fun browsing session. One of my favorite features is a blind date section, where you can buy a concealed book based only on a vague description and the fundamental tropes and relationship type of the central romance (two patrons of my bar once opened their blind date books while I watched, and were slightly horrified by the semi-bestial fantasy romance they had acquired).

But while I have welcomed my new neighbors, there is one demographic of Park Slope who have suffered from their arrival. The previous tenant of that storefront was a pet store–a pet store with a generous policy of distributing treats to neighborhood dogs. The memory of that generosity is evidently stronger than the aesthetic changes made by the bookstore: on at least four different occasions I have witnessed a helpless dog-walker be dragged to the entrance, where their dog had planted itself, determined to wait for a treat that would never come.

I guess not every romance has a happily ever after.