Negative Time: Defining Narrative in the Films of David Gordon Green

Okay, I’ve been kicking this idea around for a while… I think I’m still kicking it around, but I figured maybe I’d just give it a go and hammer it out. This is very long, but if you’ve got fifteen minutes or so and you really want to geek out on film theory, take a look. Some of you will be into it, the rest of you can wait until we post again about Barbara Hershey’s witchcraft or X-Men porn or something.

By the way, I invented the term that I overuse in this piece, so if you see it being used elsewhere (in this context, at least), let me know so that I can sue the ever-loving hell out of someone.

A common tool in the visual art world is the notion of “negative space,” which is generally accepted to refer to the area around the subject of a piece, or the area between two or more subjects. That is, the negative space is the “empty” portion of a picture, the part outside the apparent central focus. This idea is likely most explicitly demonstrated by psychologist Edgar Rubin’s “vase” illusion, in which the common vase in the center of the picture is defined by the space around it—space which, itself, forms two human faces staring at one another. Though this tool is generally used in far less overt ways, the idea is plainly clear—a figure, a form, an area is defined not solely by the space it creates, but also by the space around that form, by the empty areas between the subjects of the visual piece.

But does this idea have any parallel to art works that operate not just in space, but also in time? That is, can the concept of “negative space” apply to the narrative structure of, say, film? Certainly, one can easily see how it exists in the visual composition of a film, as this is just a slight extension of photography and, despite film’s dynamic aspects, many of the same basic compositional conventions apply. But can one then extend this notion—the idea that we can define one thing by the area surrounding it—to the temporal nature of storytelling? Can one have a narrative in which the major points are given shape more by what surrounds them than by the points themselves?

The films of David Gordon Green, starting with his feature debut George Washington, would seem to indicate that this is not just possible, but effective. If we can define “negative space” as the physical space surrounding a visual work’s subject, space which then contributes to defining that subject’s form, then Green’s consistent attention to moments which would generally be considered filler between the “important” plot points in a narrative film creates a sort of “Negative Time”—a set of seemingly “empty” moments which, when viewed around the conventional climactic points in a film’s narrative, give definition to both the story and its underlying themes. In doing this, Green is able to tell multiple stories and to explore multiple themes in ways that would not have been possible had he focused simply on driving the plot– or, similarly, had he neglected plot entirely (think, again, of Rubin’s vase). In fact, we can chart the effectiveness of this technique in Green’s body of work as a kind of arc, as he’s searched for the proper balance between narrative structure and this “Negative Time.”

Green’s first feature film, George Washington, can easily be seen to exhibit the purest form of the Negative Time concept, though, in a narrative sense at least, it suffers from ignoring a balance between that idea and a consistent plot movement. The film follows a group of children in a Southern industrial town during one summer, examining their interactions with each other and the adults in the town, their emotions, and the rhythms of their lives. As any schoolchild—or, indeed, anyone who ever was a schoolchild—will attest, summertime is made up entirely of those little moments, those moments between moments, that give shape to the summer as a whole, but rarely could be written as points in a conventional “story.” As such, George Washington, for much of the film, becomes about texture and cadence, rather than narrative. We see the children play on trains, struggle with love, hide behind rubber alligator masks; we hear the adults talk about fear, responsibility, broken dreams. Green’s film is undoubtedly influenced by Charles Burnett’s 1977 masterpiece, Killer of Sheep, which, itself, does little more than follow working class children and adults as they simply live their lives. But it, too, has little story and is, itself, almost purely Negative Time. To be sure, the points, here, are not to drive plots, but to present people as they are, to evoke feelings, to create tone. In that sense, we can see that an overuse of this Negative Time concept, while highly effective in conveying these abstract notions, can detract from creating a cohesive narrative.

One major plot point does exist, though, in George Washington, and it’s brought into sharp focus precisely because much of the rest of the film floats along in Negative Time. Two-thirds of the way in, one of the children we’ve gotten to know, who we’ve seen laugh and love and feel, dies. His death strikes an especially difficult note as we’ve been drawn into his life by this unyielding use of supposedly mundane moments that shape our perceptions of him and his friends, and we soon realize that we would not be hit nearly as hard by this event had we been distracted by other important narrative points along the way. We are hurt because we care, and we care because we’ve seen his life unfiltered. Even so, as effective as this technique becomes for Green in this scene and in the film as a whole, we (and he) must realize that this vast imbalance between Negative Time and driving narrative cannot be sustainable over an entire body of work. Imagine staring at a black canvas containing one small, white circle in the corner—effective enough, but not the sort of thing many people are likely to be interested in again and again. For this reason, Green needed to search for more balance in his future films.

“I wish I was the strongest man in the world sometimes.”

With his next two films, All the Real Girls and Undertow, it became apparent that Green sought to remedy this problem by applying his style to “genre” films (thereby imbuing them with a sort of “shorthand” plot structure around which he could build). All the Real Girls is essentially a straight-ahead romance, a story of young love. All of the familiar plot points are there—the couple meeting, the (figurative) courtship dance, outside forces working to keep them apart, a crisis of trust. These are all ideas which even the novice filmgoer would expect to see from any standard romance, and, considering this, a director who simply went through the motions of presenting these events as the driving forces of the film would render his work unremarkable. Green, though, takes this as an opportunity to make it more. He allows the familiar plot to do its work—just as using a familiar character actor saves a director from having to describe explicitly a character’s back story, so does using a conventional narrative allow the audience to bring preconceived notions to the film which the director does not have to supply—then sets to work using his Negative Time to define the tone of what the audience sees. No longer having to worry about an imbalance (as the narrative is already apparent), Green can develop texture, rhythm, and emotional truth around the story, raising the whole of the film to a greater level than the simple sum of its parts.

Like any real-life love “story,” All the Real Girls is told in the details, in the quiet seconds between the major events. Green is able to capture the nervousness and uncertainty of young love by focusing on the little things—a kiss on the palm, whispers in the ear, walks along the railroad tracks… a haircut that tells you things have changed. The film shows us a small-town lothario who falls in love with his best friend’s younger sister, and we watch as their burgeoning relationship hesitantly unfolds, peaks, and falls apart. All of the signifiers of these major events in their relationship are present—admissions of feelings, sex, betrayal, break-up—and yet these points are given definition and meaning by the fact that the rest of the film takes place during the quiet down-time between these moments. There are conversations that seem to go nowhere, anxious shudders, talks about frightening dreams, hugs in bowling alleys… all things that would generally cause the audience to wonder why they existed at all and would prompt critics to assume the film is aimless. Certainly, it would be easy to view these “throwaway” scenes are simple character development, but, while this must be a part of it, to assume that this is the entirety of their significance is to miss Green’s point. Indeed, as with George Washington, these seemingly unimportant scenes give weight and definition to the “important” plot points that pepper the film. As before, we care because we’ve seen these people’s lives, and we’ve seen their lives because Green has had the fortitude to trust in his Negative Time technique. Green allows the audience to invest emotionally in what they experience by defining the story in the context of the surrounding events rather than the apparent subject, and thereby avoids making a film that would otherwise have been wholly pedestrian.

“I just want to make sure that a million years from now I can still see you up close and we’ll still have amazing things to say.”

If George Washington was a point on one extreme of the Negative Time arc of David Gordon Green’s career, and All the Real Girls was a search for balance between plot and supporting texture, then Undertow represents the apex of these attempts by Green to shape and balance a story by the surrounding area. The film is ostensibly a “chase” movie, in which two boys are pursued by a villainous character, but while many such movies with which we are familiar (The Fugitive, e.g.) are framed around the chase itself and are laced with “down” scenes that allow the audience to catch its breath, Undertow is very much the opposite. In Green’s film the chase is nearly an afterthought, as the majority of the time is spent watching the boys during the moments they’re not running. We see as they meet disturbed street urchins, sit on stumps eating hot dogs, raid junkyards, dine in the home of a couple with a tragic story of their own, and even as they milk a cow. And their pursuer is hardly the omniscient, never-stop-never-give-up antagonist to which audiences have become accustomed in such films—we’re forced to feel his frustration as he has his car towed by a garrulous truck-operator who just doesn’t seem to understand the pressing nature of the situation. The chase is put on hold by real life. Because of these scenes, then, the chase itself (what is, on a surface level, the driving point of the narrative) serves to punctuate the film, thereby forcing the film’s narrative to be defined not by the chase but by the scenes around it—i.e., by the film’s Negative Time.

Obviously, by this point one can recognize that it is no happy accident that Green’s filmmaking technique makes such use of this Negative Time concept—it is plainly intentional—but to emphasize this even more, the first few scenes of Undertow tell us visually in a nearly explicit manner that Green’s goal is to turn the conventional narrative on its head, to approach it from its opposite end, to define it by its surrounding parts. As the film opens, an angry man with a shotgun chases our protagonist. As the pursuit goes on, we are periodically shown the same few seconds of footage repeatedly, but with the colors of the picture inverted, or washed-out, or in black-and-white. That is, we are shown the negative (in various ways) of what we’ve just witnessed. This happens multiple times, and at first makes little sense until we take these scenes in the context of the movie (and, indeed, Green’s entire body of work) and we realize that Green is telling us in no uncertain terms that his aim is to tell his story in the negative, to give it definition by using the area around it, to relate his narrative using Negative Time. This stylistic twist occurs nowhere else in the film (or in any of Green’s films) and is therefore difficult to dismiss as simple directorial self-indulgence—Green includes it for a very specific reason: to prime the audience for his particular narrative device, to help them to understand that what they see will be formed by the opposite of what they’re used to seeing. (It can hardly be surprising that Green feels he needs to tip off the audience in this way, Undertow was his first film that used multiple readily-recognizable Hollywood actors—Jamie Bell, Dermot Mulroney, Josh Lucas—and therefore could have been expected to reach a wider audience, an audience that might not be familiar or comfortable with his particular narrative approach.)

“There’s a cow.”

“I know.”

“I wanna milk the hell out of it.”

Having determined that Undertow exhibits the most balanced representation (i.e., the top) of Green’s narrative/Negative Time career arc, one can assume that his subsequent films have come down on the side opposite his early films—namely, a side which shows a shift more toward conventional understandings of narrative and plot. Indeed, this is the case. His two most recent films, Snow Angels and Pineapple Express, display marked departures from his Negative Time-laden era of work. Certainly, they still make some use of the technique, but as Green’s films have moved toward wider audiences, he has unquestionably tempered that aspect of his filmmaking style. Snow Angels, a domestic drama, moves at a quicker pace than did his relatively languid (though hardly sluggish) earlier films, needing to make use of limited time to tell a story of broken families, domestic violence, and death. As in George Washington, a child in this film dies, but the feeling surrounding it is far different. In the early film, the death comes as a shock, as a kind of gut-punch, as it is one of the few moments in the film where something definite and serious occurs (the rest of the film existing in Green’s Negative Time, giving shape to this event—again, the death is the white circle on the otherwise black canvas). In Snow Angels, though, there is a relatively consistent feeling of dread created by the conventional plot points along the way (the conflict between the child’s estranged parents, most notably). Parts of the characters’ lives and personalities are, still, developed by seemingly unimportant scenes—often depicting them at work in a restaurant or a carpet store, or at school, or building a house of cards at home. But Green doesn’t linger on these scenes as he used to do—the editing he uses here is quicker, the camera is jumpier, he seems intent on showing these things and moving on, as if he’s got work to do and other things to show us to advance the plot. The cause of Green’s move away from extended use of Negative Time is unclear (desire for more commercial success, perhaps, or a simple interest in finding other ways to tell stories, or even the feeling that Undertow genuinely was the apex of that style for him), but the shift is noticeable and difficult to deny.

Strangely, then, Green chose to make Pineapple Express after turning away from his former style, despite the fact that one might expect the film—a “stoner” comedy—to be from the most likely genre to benefit from the use of supposedly unimportant scenes to shape the story (the existence of extended moments of “down” time seeming to be an integral part of the drug culture). To be fair, there are a few moments that do wander off the path of the traditional plot structure (long digressions in the woods, bizarre conversations), but they hardly exist in ways that work to define the narrative of the film. No, Pineapple Express exposes another side of David Gordon Green—the director as contrarian. Green fills his film with so much plot, with so many turns, that the audience almost doesn’t know what to make of it. Drug dealers, organized crime, car chases, ninjas, rocket launchers, underground bunkers… were this a painting, it would be hard to designate any of the canvas as “negative space,” just as it becomes difficult for the viewer to designate any of Pineapple Express as existing in Negative Time. Green explicitly defines the film for all to see—he doesn’t need to shape it by using the space around it. Once we’ve recognized that Green is, again, turning away from conventional notions of narrative (in this case, filling a genre expected to be aimless with a deluge of plot points), we can see that this was likely his goal all along with his use of Negative Time—that is, finding new ways to tell stories by changing how narrative boundaries are defined.

To be sure, David Gordon Green is not nearly the only person to define his stories by using the space around the accepted narrative. As mentioned earlier, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep is an apparent influence on Green, as the work of Terrence Malick (the slow, ethereal texture of Days of Heaven) and certain aspects of the films of Yasujiro Ozu (lingering landscape shots, e.g.) must be. But while a number of directors have used similar techniques to examine lofty themes or simply to create tone, few have used this “Negative Time” to define narrative the way Green has done. Like the painter or the sculptor who gives shape to his subject by building space around it, Green’s early work gives form and focus to his stories by drawing us in and showing us the time surrounding the conventional narrative, allowing the audience to begin to see the stories take shape on their own.