Film noir landscape writing
How to light a scene in prose, another look at Bears Ears National Monument, and plant of the week
How to light a scene in prose
In thinking about how writers create an atmosphere in prose, I sometimes look to filmmaking for points of reference. Production crews tinker obsessively with a scene’s lighting long before hitting record—whether they’re painting an interview subject with classic three-point lighting or keeping faces illuminated outdoors with reflective bounce cards. Without lighting, things can end up looking flat onscreen. Good lighting accounts for actors’ skin tones, whether it’s cloudy or sunny outside, and how the scene relates to the rest of the story.
Lighting can show the viewer where and how to look. In black and white films, soft lights could skip across paving stones like the moon, and bright beams could cast long shadows from lone figures—as in the The Third Man, filmed in just-postwar Vienna among recently destroyed buildings. In color film, tinted gels fastened over lights or color-themed sets and costuming can act as a tuning note for a scene. I think of how a soft blue glow helps link together different stages of Chiron’s life in Moonlight, or how Greta Gerwig’s Little Women uses contrasting warm and cool color schemes to visually demarcate flashbacks to happier memories from a more challenging present.
A parallel lighting process can happen in writing. Glancing around you, indoors or outdoors, you could probably find an example of every color in the spectrum. But in a book, few words describing color appear relative to the number of colors in the environment. The ones that get into the final product are there by choice, creating a consistent mood—like a colored gel over a light, tying the scene together.
The use of color stood out to me in an instructive way while reading Robert Macfarlane’s Underland. The book examines subterranean places, exploring human relationships with the underworld throughout history. In doing so, Macfarlane reflects on the legacies left by our ancestors, and how we might be “good ancestors” to generations that follow us once we’ve crossed the river to Hades. Like Dante in The Inferno, Macfarlane is led on a series of underground journeys by a large, alluring cast of guides that reveal surprising aspects of our ties to landscapes beneath us.
In its narrative passages, the book doesn’t just describe one view after another, encyclopedically. The process of writing a visually compelling scene in prose parallels the process of developing a memory of a place. Such memories aren’t purely representational. Like maps, they’re symbolic, made of the most salient aspects of the location rather than minutiae. Color can act as a symbolic language, shaping our understanding of a place’s mood or character.
A few visual motifs in Underland help distinguish the surface and the underworld. In a chapter set in northern Italy, near the border with Slovenia, Macfarlane seeks out the Timavo, a subterranean river flowing through miles of limestone passages. He arrives by train on the verdant surface, crossing the Isonzo River: “Round pebbles of limestone, blue water that seems to glow from inside itself and the white of a flock of dozens of egrets moving eastwards over a green-rowed vineyard.” The sunlit day’s reflective green and blue afterimage hovers in the reader’s retinas as the story descends.
The region is a karst landscape, where erosion eats away at limestone to produce sinkholes, networks of caves, sculptural stalactites and stalagmites. The entrance to the Timavo’s cavern is protected by hut. In the hut, there’s “what seems like a shower cubicle” with a hatch in the floor. Macfarlane’s guide here is the quiet, capable Sergio, who opens the hatch unceremoniously and says, “Allora.” Sergio is a reticent, film noir take on the poet-guide Virgil, saying little more than “allora,” a gestural Italian word that means something like “now then,” “well,” “so.”
After a harrowing ladder climb into the dark, the two reach “Black sand. A dune of black sand, with gold grains amid the black. And dunes beyond that, rolling away. … Black sand dunes curving ahead of me, rising up to my left, falling away to my right.” Two color tones—black and white/gold—are struck consistently as Macfarlane and Sergio follow the Timavo through “an underland desert of fine-grained black-gold sand.”
The guide takes a moment to smoke: “Sergio strikes a match to light his pipe, and the dark organizes itself around that tiny bright fire.” The “tiny” flame hints at the scale of the abyss, while sharpened awareness of noise indicates the depth of the darkness: “Clink of my karabiners against the rock. Sergio’s rasping breaths. Hush of footfall in fine sand. Stone dust in the light of our torches. The growing noise of the river. A moon landing. The night ascent of a desert peak.”
There are living things in the dark Timavo, Macfarlane learns: “The beam of my head-torch gives depth to the water, which is silver and silty and – my God – I see there are creatures in it, white forms moving through the silt-clouds in the slower-moving water of the bay.” He considers swimming in the “starless river.” Sergio wards him off with one firm shake of the head.
While reading this passage, I was reminded of the climactic underground chase in The Third Man, where flashlights cause dark waters to gleam and desperate people gasp for breath. Actors in the film convey meaning by look and posture as much as dialogue (Orson Welles, appearing with friendly menace in a doorway.)
The visual aesthetic of film noir comes as a delightful surprise in a book about landscapes. It’s one of the things that makes Underland remarkable. In addition to grappling with the geological and spiritual legacies we leave, Macfarlane explores aesthetics and atmospheres not often seen in literary depictions of the natural world.
A few pages later, we’re back on the surface. A man named Lucian leads Macfarlane “to the springs of the Timavo, where the river gushes green out of the rock into a parched land of scrub. The springs astonish me, as springs always do. … Groves of cypress and pine cast shade. Damselflies jewel leaves. … Emerald frogs plop into the water from the bank.” We’ve returned to the green/blue color scheme of the arrival by train, breathing a sigh of relief if you’re a bit claustrophobic, like me.
From the tint thrown by the other words here—“green ,” “cypress,” “pine,” “leaves,” “emerald”—my mind creates a damselfly that’s iridescent blue-green, without a specific color word next to the insect. It’s as if there’s a green gel on the scene’s lights, in electric contrast to the film noir underland from a few pages before. The juxtaposition makes the surface world seem as strange, in its own way, as the underworld we just left.
The palette shift, like the shifts between the warm past and cool present in Little Women, helps tell Underland’s story visually, recreating the cues for the emotional effects of the surface vs. belowground—rather than just telling us what a relief it was to see the top half of a tree again.
Other passages feature similar palette contrasts. The following chapter deals more directly with how the karst has hidden the dead in past wars and atrocities, a legacy discordant with the landscape’s beauty. The book is well worth reading in full, as the physical journeys in one section serve to ground the historical discussions in the next. But the Timavo chapter has stuck with me as an emblem for the book’s visual language.
Underland contends that belowground places are uniquely capable of providing a perspective into “deep time,” reaching far back and forward to think coherently about trajectories through the millennia. But in order to explore what the underland means historically and morally, Macfarlane first has to create a tactile sense for subterranean places in the reader’s mind. To me, the color engineering in this chapter and others is key to giving physical form to the underland in prose. Consistency in a book can be just as important as variety.
Some might think that writing about place is a matter of simply listing what’s there—sort of cousin to the myth that to write about yourself, you just have to “open your veins, and bleed.” In both cases (and in their mixture) it’s more about identifying essential elements and carefully balancing them against each other so the resulting structure bears weight. Or, to stay with the film metaphor, angling two or three lights across the subject’s face until the atmosphere feels right.
Another look at Bears Ears National Monument
In 2016, the Obama administration designated 1.3 million acres in Utah as a national monument called Bears Ears. It fell quite short of what an intertribal Indigenous coalition had asked for: 2 million acres. But it still protected an area larger than Rhode Island. The Trump administration more or less undid that protection, reducing the area of the national monument by 85% to 200,000 acres, as well as erasing much of the nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. This opened a total of about 2 million acres to grazing, off-roading, and even the potential of coal mining.
Now, recently confirmed Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, of the Laguna Pueblo, has planned a visit to Utah this week to hear from local leadership, including Indigenous leaders, to inform Biden’s review of Trump’s actions. During his campaign, Biden said he’d restore the two national monuments.
I mention this in case you feel like dialing up your elected officials to make sure they know the importance of protecting ancestral Indigenous lands from commercial and recreational uses that would irrevocably damage them. I also think that decisions in Utah will have ramifications for land protections for other vulnerable places along the Rio Grande, in Alaska, and in your neck of the woods. Powerful industrial interests want to carve up land for fossil fuels and other resources, using complaints about “big government” as their Trojan horse, and it’s critical to turn the tide against them however we can.
Plant of the week: Red maple
Getting a headache trying to tell apart maple trees by their leaves? Now’s the time to let their flowers and bark help you instead! Red maple (Acer rubrum) declares itself well and truly red in spring with its flowers. Sugar maple blooms, in comparison, are greenish-yellow. And silver maple’s ridged, flaky bark sets it apart from the smoother-barked red and sugar maples.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t tried distinguishing red and sugar maples by their bark, but red maple bark is generally “lighter and smoother,” according to this guide. Something for me to try out this week, I guess.
The Missouri Botanical Garden notes that red maple’s frequent use in urban and suburban plantings sometimes leads to problems. The tree’s roots tend to grow laterally outward rather than down, wrecking sidewalks in their path. Hey, at least red maples don’t literally self-destruct like Bradford pear trees, nor smell nearly as weird. (The reek of Bradford pears is how I know it’s really spring. Sad but true.)
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.