Robert Eggers and the art of constraint

The New Yorker published a very interesting long profile of filmmaker Robert Eggers last week. Eggers is the writer and director of three films, including The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman, which is due out in less than three weeks. While I found the artsy ambiguity of The Lighthouse too self-reverential and pretentious, I’ve deeply admired both of his previous movies for their attention to historical detail, dialect, setting, and atmosphere. I look forward to The Northman for those reasons, especially since this film will tell a story in my personal wheelhouse.

The whole profile is worth reading, but I wanted to draw attention to two things about Eggers’s craft that I particularly appreciate.

Against Scooby-Doo materialism

First, a point made obliquely, not by Eggers himself but by director Alfonso Cuarón:

Alfonso Cuarón, the director of Gravity and Roma, read Eggers’s screenplay of The Witch in 2013, when the movie was still in development. “I was just in awe of it,” [Cuarón] told me. “I was, like, more than anything, curious.” Cuarón observed that, unlike other filmmakers, who treat the magical or the symbolic as breaks from normality, Eggers makes no such distinction. “It’s as if those elements are as natural as the weather. And people coexist with those elements as a matter of existence,” Cuarón said. “There’s no question about the existence of witches. There’s no ulterior explanation. . . . It was just witches.”

This, indeed, is one of my favorite things about The Witch as well. There’s no ambiguity, no explaining away, and no revelation of fakery at the end (what I call “Scooby-Doo materialism”), just the grim reality that this evil is real, and a real threat. Eggers presents all of this on the characters’ own terms, as people of their time and place and background understood them. I wish more historical films could nail this the way The Witch does.

In addition to selflessly getting modern assumptions out of the way and presenting an alien world as it understood itself, this storytelling technique or philosophy can also have dramatic power. Presenting the supernatural as frankly and doubtlessly real was my plan going into my novel No Snakes in Iceland, in which a 10th-century Christian Anglo-Saxon living in heathen Iceland is recruited to kill a draugr or aptrganga—a corporeal ghost. Unlike The Witch, however, it takes a while for the supernatural to show up, so that it is a surprise when the ghost does appear and does wreak havoc in inimitable Icelandic fashion. More than one reader has told me that the ghost being real, as described by the parade of characters assuring the narrator that it is, was like a plot twist in and of itself.

For artistic constraint

I also appreciate the profile’s attention to Eggers’s artistic restraint and constraint. This theme runs through the entire piece but is especially clear in a few places, as when Eggers’s Northman co-writer Sjón, an Icelandic poet and novelist, talks about situation their film’s story in the middle of a real time and place:

Writing The Northman with Eggers, Sjón imagined the script as a missing saga. Most of the story takes place in the year 914, during the early settlement of Iceland but before the founding of the Althing, the parliament, in 930. “There is still a certain kind of lawlessness,” Sjón said. “I realized that we could slip in a family there, that settled early and then just disappeared from the face of the earth.”

Working within rather than against the history, finding gaps where you can “slip in” a story that will mesh with known history—this is exactly right, and is the approach I worked through for the novel I’m still revising, which is set in the hazy borderlands between the Anglo-Saxons of the Migration Era and the British kingdoms of what is now Wales in a period without a lot of firm documentation.

As I hinted above, Eggers also constrains himself to the viewpoint, beliefs, priorities, and practices of his historical subjects. Eggers is not apparently a religious man, but he presented the bleak Calvinism of The Witch’s Puritan characters fairly. In The Northman he apparently presents the Vikings with uncomfortable accuracy, refusing to step in and editorialize on behalf of modern sensibilities or to (more insidiously) soften their attitudes:

On a bad day, you’re in the tenth month of the edit and you’re trying to deal with notes from a test screening in Texas, where the audience was befuddled by the Nordic accents, character names like Leifr Seal’s Testicle, and the unsettling moral outlook of tenth-century Iceland. “None of those things are changing,” Eggers said, while Ford was processing footage of the young Amleth, hiding in a forest. He started to laugh. “Like, those things can’t change. And those are kind of the biggest obstacles.”

Again, an audience unsettled by contact with an alien world is probably a good sign. Or so I hope, since this is something else I’m dealing with in my current manuscript.

That’s story and setting. Here’s another passage on Eggers’s filmmaking technique. After describing the precise and minutely planned storyboards and utterly minimal camera movement, the essay’s author turns to The Northman’s stars, Alexander Skarsgård and Anya Taylor-Joy:

During the first two weeks, in which Amleth [the protagonist] mostly labored on a farm, Skarsgård felt conflicted by the filming process. “I’m not used to working in that way,” he said. “There was a moment where I was, like, I could either freak the fuck out . . . because you feel like: Well, there’s no space for me to explore my character. I’m a robot.” But Skarsgård chose to submit: “You play around with it, and then small details will then open up, like a flood of inspiration, and suddenly you’re in it.”

Taylor-Joy, who was working with Eggers for the first time in six years, realized how much of her conduct on set derives from their work together. “Who I am, or how I identify as a performer and a collaborator, really does come from ‘The Witch,’ ” she told me. “If you come onto a movie that’s already been storyboarded . . . and you know that’s the way the film’s going to look, I actually find that incredibly liberating,” she said. “I can do my own version of this dance within the parameters that have been set. And I’ll end up with something more interesting[.]”

Modern artists, be they poets or novelists or painters or sculptors or architects or composers or filmmakers, bridle at constraint and are skilled at developing ideological schema to justify casting it off: formal poetry, representational art, realistic sculpture, classical architecture—these are all inauthentic, clichéd, bourgeois, repressive, eurocentric, racist, et cetera et cetera ad nauseam world without end. These are all excuses for ill discipline and chaos. They also obscure bad art. A cynical man would say that’s the whole point.

But real art, like real love, embraces limitation and constraint—even purely artificial, arbitrary ones. Perhaps especially the essentially arbitrary ones. Why fourteen lines for a sonnet, or common meter for a ballad, or rhyme at all? (In two novels now I’ve intentionally limited my vocabulary based purely on etymological considerations no one may even notice. But it matters to me and to the story.) Eggers is an object lesson in the value of rules, order, and form. He doesn’t have to shoot his movies the way he does, but he and his actors all benefit from his willing submission to constraints, even finding themselves, as Taylor-Joy puts it, liberated, freed to explore creatively with a space that wouldn’t exist without those constraints.

Or as a wise man once put it, rules and order “give room for good things to run wild.” That was Chesterton on Christianity, of course, but even more to the point is this on art itself: “Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”

This is wisdom Eggers clearly and rightly intuits, and I’m grateful that he’s let it shape his artistic sensibilities so profoundly. I hope he uses his powers for good.

Conclusion

I’ve written on self-imposed artistic constraints before in reference to historian John Lukacs and, of all people, Jerry Seinfeld. You can read all of The New Yorker’s excellent profile of Eggers here.