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marinessOk, disclaimer: I'm watching Burn Notice through Hulu.com, which means I'm a good month behind, so although I really don't mind spoilers for this show, bear in mind that I may not have seen any counter-examples yet.
But Burn Notice is featuring some, shall we say, irritating narrative issues this season that I wanted to discuss, in a writing process sort of way.
Edit: This got long, so, part one now; part two in a bit.
If you missed Burn Notice, it more or less goes like this: a former CIA spy, Michael Westin, who has been "burned" (i.e., kicked out of the CIA) finds himself in Miami, with, as the credits cheerfully inform us, a trigger-happy ex-girlfriend, another spy who used to inform on him to the CIA, another spy who was accidentally also tossed from the CIA thanks to Michael's obsession with going after the people who got him tossed from the CIA, and his mother and other nutty Miami folk. The show is filmed on location (more on this in a bit) and apparently picked Miami Beach since it gives them multiple excuses to show skinny women in bikinis getting in and out of pools every time the action slows down. (I'll just note that although South Beach certainly has its share of Beautiful People in my own personal experience South Beach also has considerably fewer skinny bikini clad women strolling around than this show would suggest. They often wear, for instance, shorts. Sometimes even, and please don't be shocked, dresses. But moving on.)
Despite the bikini stuff in its first few seasons, Burn Notice was otherwise generally decent with the geography, dropping in small tidbits like, "Dania? Look, that's going to be an hour from here at best, and that's without traffic." The show then faithfully showed the characters indeed needing a full hour and a half to get from South Beach to Dania, and followed this up by showing, gasp, Dania. (I say "gasp" because really if you are looking for photogenic places in South Florida, Dania generally isn't it, and I speak as someone who visited and/or lived in it on a relatively steady basis from 1973 until 2008. Awesome ice cream shop, though, and if you head to John Lloyd State Park, gorgeous beaches despite the planes overhead.) Even better they had the characters having to shout over the sound of the planes, which is exactly what happens at the Dania marina. Later they thrilled me by having an hurricane episode where, more gasp, they followed what actually happens during hurricanes: 1) people really don't go outside to fight bad guys (to move lawn furniture, maybe, in a cat 1 or 2 storm, and for the record I have gone outside in those and even driven through a category one storm, and that's fine, but at cat three or higher you are not standing up, it's loud as hell, and the last thing you want to be doing is firing bullets) and 2) the power goes out, and specifically, the power for traffic lights goes out and power lines and cables are everywhere making driving difficult. All of this added a nice grounding of reality to the show.
Which leads me to the first problem with this season: the geography, which has moved from the occasional and understandable mistake to being distractingly wrong.
Example: Episode 4, "Under the Gun." In this episode, Sam has been kidnapped by Probably Evil Girl Rebecca who is holding her gun to his head in fairly standard Burn Notice format. They are driving down Main Park Road on Everglades National Park in a stolen vehicle.
Now, here's the cool part: this was filmed on location. I know that road very well, so well that when they were stopped for speeding by a Park Ranger, I knew exactly where they were – just south of Mahogany Hammock. (It helped that you could see Mahogany Hammock in the distance.) I assume they picked this location because there's a working bathroom at the Hammock, not something easily found on the rest of the road.
So that was cool.
Anyway, Rebecca wants to shoot the park ranger, which seems unnecessary. Sam begs her to let him talk. Sam spins a story to the Park Ranger that goes something like this: Rebecca is fleeing from her abusive husband which is why they are in the husband's stolen vehicle, and Sam assures the Park Ranger and Rebecca that as soon as they reach Flamingo, she'll be safe, really.
I had to pause the Hulu feed to laugh and laugh.
See, here's the thing. Yes, Flamingo, a lovely place on the ocean, really does exist. Right now, it consists of a very tightly controlled RV park, a small store selling terrifically overpriced snacks and drinks, a café that is open in season and only on the weekends for lunch, some very needed bathrooms, and a place where you can rent little kayaks and boats. And that's it. A hotel on the premises was taken out by Hurricane Wilma's storm surge; the idea was to replace it with a nice eco-friendly lodge with solar powered showers but that seems to have gone nowhere quickly, in part because the last hotel was difficult enough to staff and manage.
And why?
Because Flamingo has exactly one road leading in and out of it. One. The same road they were on. A road that is only two or three feet above water, and therefore has a tendency to flood out, closing that part of the park. It is also somewhat accessible by small boat, but by small boat, I mean, not to get repetitive, small; depending upon the tide you have anywhere from four to eight feet to work with. If you have a kayak, awesome. Anything else, not so much.
Oh, and before you say "airboat," those are banned for various reasons in this section of the Everglades.
In other words, if you are fleeing from your husband, I suppose it's not the worst place to hide in, as long as you have a tent or an RV and have brought your own supplies, but the problem, and this is a big problem, is that if he does find you, you'll have no place to go. You won't be able to flee.
Think about this for a moment, because I'm going to come back to it.
The park ranger, who would know all this, and would also know that anyone planning on staying at Flamingo long enough to hide from a husband would need to have a camping/RV permit (not to mention a tolerance for overpriced snacks), fails to ask them for the permit and waves them on to Flamingo, which is even more hilarious since they are clearly driving in the opposite direction to Florida City.
Well, ok, camera angles. The reason they are going to Flamingo, by the way, is so that they can get on a touristy sort of helicopter – the one that flies over Biscayne Bay and other touristy things – steal it and fly away away away. As you might have been guessing, Flamingo does not offer any helicopter services. At all. At one point, however, Florida City did.
Anyway. Hijinks. Remarkably enough, even though they are going in the other direction, they eventually end up going on Bear Lake Road, which is close to Flamingo. (You can walk there from the Flamingo parking lot.) Let's all pause to congratulate them for arriving on Bear Lake on one of the very very few days of the year where the road isn't flooded out, but also criticize them for failing to read all of the little signs warning you that Bear Lake Road is very narrow and goes ONLY to Bear Lake where there is a very, very very narrow turnaround spot and really, under the circumstances, wouldn't you feel better walking it, instead of driving it, since it's only two miles? (I'll answer the question; on four separate occasions we decided to do just that.)
Bear Lake offers insects (lots), salt water crocodiles and freshwater alligators (it's a good place to compare both), birds, fishing, and insects. What it lacks, quite distinctly, is private homes sheltering meth labs. Have I mentioned that this is two hours into a national park that bans private residences? It also has no airboats, since, to repeat, those are banned in this section of the park. However this is more or less the point where Burn Notice decided that, hey, wait, we've never really had an airboat chase before so let's have that one to follow up on the meth lab. (I have no idea why drug dealers would need or want airboats, which are loud and noisy, but maybe they were all high when they went to go buy the boats.)
Here's the fun part: each and every plot part of this – the fleeing from the abusive husband, the helicopter ride, the one lane dirt road through wetlands, the hidden private shacks/mobile homes in the Everglades making meth and the airboats all would have made perfect sense (well, up to a point) had the action been moved just slightly north, to the Tamiami Trail. Which, not at all incidentally, is lined with bits of the federal park, private land, dirt roads leading to really out of the way residences, airboat tours, and at one point a helicopter tour. It's all there – about an hour, two max, from where they were doing most of their filming. They could even have gotten creative and continued on to the part of the Everglades that looks exactly like Dagobah, heavy swamp and all, one of the most amazing sights in Florida. It happens to be on a rather amazing one land dirt road, which happens to have – yay! private homes. Which may or may not be sheltering meth labs. But some of which ARE sheltering airboats that if not quite waiting to be used for a high speed airboat chase with guns are at least waiting around.
Now, yes, admittedly, keeping to their script this way would have involved several problems, not the least of which trying to get permission to film on the Tamiami Trail. It's not the world's busiest road, but it's one of only two ways to drive across the Everglades, the other one being I-75 Alligator Alley, so I can see that getting filming permission would be tricky. So since they had gotten permission to film in Everglades National Park, why not try something radical?
Create a story constrained by the geographical realities of Everglades National Park.
For instance: You know the bad guys are at the entrance of the main road – the only road in and out of the park. Gulp. Cellular service sucks. (I was rather surprised they didn't play up this part, because, really, cellular service in that area sucks.) You know you can't drive off the road – it's surrounded either by heavily wooded areas too thick to get a car through, or, water. Even places that look like clear prairies are deceptive – it's just water and mud. You can kayak up to Everglades City and find several more escape routes – but that's at least three to four days (usually a week) in the heat and you've got to bring along food and water, not to mention you don't want random tourist kayakers killed, not to also mention the alligators. If you want to add a touch of unreality, you can add a random panther. (The Florida panther is a) no longer exactly the Florida panther after some Texas cougars were introduced to try to keep the Florida panther from expiring thanks to inbreeding after the population dropped down to 20 or 30 panthers, and b) still not exactly flourishing, with only 120 or so panthers in the entire state, so your chances of actually seeing one in the wild in the Everglades much less having it interfere with your chasing down/escaping bad guys activities are slim indeed. On the other hand, Panthers Are Cool.)
The story possibilities are really endless, which brings me (finally) to the main point of this post:
If you are working with real geography, use it.
Real life example from me, showing two ways it can help: in
And The Hollow Space Inside, I just threw in two real life places – Florida mangroves and a state park on the Intercoastal Waterway where I've watched space shuttle launches – as bits of background so that I could focus on the other more important parts of the story and not have to waste time making up geography. But also, in that same story, I used the very real geography of the distance between Mars and Earth to create a need that I could then use for the plot. That same sort of real life plot/need created this.
And, of course, if you use real life geography, and stick with its limitations, you won't have people like me shrieking "BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT THE EVERGLADES IS LIKE!" Just saying.
Another post, about my other big issues with Burn Notice this season, coming up. Probably.
But Burn Notice is featuring some, shall we say, irritating narrative issues this season that I wanted to discuss, in a writing process sort of way.
Edit: This got long, so, part one now; part two in a bit.
If you missed Burn Notice, it more or less goes like this: a former CIA spy, Michael Westin, who has been "burned" (i.e., kicked out of the CIA) finds himself in Miami, with, as the credits cheerfully inform us, a trigger-happy ex-girlfriend, another spy who used to inform on him to the CIA, another spy who was accidentally also tossed from the CIA thanks to Michael's obsession with going after the people who got him tossed from the CIA, and his mother and other nutty Miami folk. The show is filmed on location (more on this in a bit) and apparently picked Miami Beach since it gives them multiple excuses to show skinny women in bikinis getting in and out of pools every time the action slows down. (I'll just note that although South Beach certainly has its share of Beautiful People in my own personal experience South Beach also has considerably fewer skinny bikini clad women strolling around than this show would suggest. They often wear, for instance, shorts. Sometimes even, and please don't be shocked, dresses. But moving on.)
Despite the bikini stuff in its first few seasons, Burn Notice was otherwise generally decent with the geography, dropping in small tidbits like, "Dania? Look, that's going to be an hour from here at best, and that's without traffic." The show then faithfully showed the characters indeed needing a full hour and a half to get from South Beach to Dania, and followed this up by showing, gasp, Dania. (I say "gasp" because really if you are looking for photogenic places in South Florida, Dania generally isn't it, and I speak as someone who visited and/or lived in it on a relatively steady basis from 1973 until 2008. Awesome ice cream shop, though, and if you head to John Lloyd State Park, gorgeous beaches despite the planes overhead.) Even better they had the characters having to shout over the sound of the planes, which is exactly what happens at the Dania marina. Later they thrilled me by having an hurricane episode where, more gasp, they followed what actually happens during hurricanes: 1) people really don't go outside to fight bad guys (to move lawn furniture, maybe, in a cat 1 or 2 storm, and for the record I have gone outside in those and even driven through a category one storm, and that's fine, but at cat three or higher you are not standing up, it's loud as hell, and the last thing you want to be doing is firing bullets) and 2) the power goes out, and specifically, the power for traffic lights goes out and power lines and cables are everywhere making driving difficult. All of this added a nice grounding of reality to the show.
Which leads me to the first problem with this season: the geography, which has moved from the occasional and understandable mistake to being distractingly wrong.
Example: Episode 4, "Under the Gun." In this episode, Sam has been kidnapped by Probably Evil Girl Rebecca who is holding her gun to his head in fairly standard Burn Notice format. They are driving down Main Park Road on Everglades National Park in a stolen vehicle.
Now, here's the cool part: this was filmed on location. I know that road very well, so well that when they were stopped for speeding by a Park Ranger, I knew exactly where they were – just south of Mahogany Hammock. (It helped that you could see Mahogany Hammock in the distance.) I assume they picked this location because there's a working bathroom at the Hammock, not something easily found on the rest of the road.
So that was cool.
Anyway, Rebecca wants to shoot the park ranger, which seems unnecessary. Sam begs her to let him talk. Sam spins a story to the Park Ranger that goes something like this: Rebecca is fleeing from her abusive husband which is why they are in the husband's stolen vehicle, and Sam assures the Park Ranger and Rebecca that as soon as they reach Flamingo, she'll be safe, really.
I had to pause the Hulu feed to laugh and laugh.
See, here's the thing. Yes, Flamingo, a lovely place on the ocean, really does exist. Right now, it consists of a very tightly controlled RV park, a small store selling terrifically overpriced snacks and drinks, a café that is open in season and only on the weekends for lunch, some very needed bathrooms, and a place where you can rent little kayaks and boats. And that's it. A hotel on the premises was taken out by Hurricane Wilma's storm surge; the idea was to replace it with a nice eco-friendly lodge with solar powered showers but that seems to have gone nowhere quickly, in part because the last hotel was difficult enough to staff and manage.
And why?
Because Flamingo has exactly one road leading in and out of it. One. The same road they were on. A road that is only two or three feet above water, and therefore has a tendency to flood out, closing that part of the park. It is also somewhat accessible by small boat, but by small boat, I mean, not to get repetitive, small; depending upon the tide you have anywhere from four to eight feet to work with. If you have a kayak, awesome. Anything else, not so much.
Oh, and before you say "airboat," those are banned for various reasons in this section of the Everglades.
In other words, if you are fleeing from your husband, I suppose it's not the worst place to hide in, as long as you have a tent or an RV and have brought your own supplies, but the problem, and this is a big problem, is that if he does find you, you'll have no place to go. You won't be able to flee.
Think about this for a moment, because I'm going to come back to it.
The park ranger, who would know all this, and would also know that anyone planning on staying at Flamingo long enough to hide from a husband would need to have a camping/RV permit (not to mention a tolerance for overpriced snacks), fails to ask them for the permit and waves them on to Flamingo, which is even more hilarious since they are clearly driving in the opposite direction to Florida City.
Well, ok, camera angles. The reason they are going to Flamingo, by the way, is so that they can get on a touristy sort of helicopter – the one that flies over Biscayne Bay and other touristy things – steal it and fly away away away. As you might have been guessing, Flamingo does not offer any helicopter services. At all. At one point, however, Florida City did.
Anyway. Hijinks. Remarkably enough, even though they are going in the other direction, they eventually end up going on Bear Lake Road, which is close to Flamingo. (You can walk there from the Flamingo parking lot.) Let's all pause to congratulate them for arriving on Bear Lake on one of the very very few days of the year where the road isn't flooded out, but also criticize them for failing to read all of the little signs warning you that Bear Lake Road is very narrow and goes ONLY to Bear Lake where there is a very, very very narrow turnaround spot and really, under the circumstances, wouldn't you feel better walking it, instead of driving it, since it's only two miles? (I'll answer the question; on four separate occasions we decided to do just that.)
Bear Lake offers insects (lots), salt water crocodiles and freshwater alligators (it's a good place to compare both), birds, fishing, and insects. What it lacks, quite distinctly, is private homes sheltering meth labs. Have I mentioned that this is two hours into a national park that bans private residences? It also has no airboats, since, to repeat, those are banned in this section of the park. However this is more or less the point where Burn Notice decided that, hey, wait, we've never really had an airboat chase before so let's have that one to follow up on the meth lab. (I have no idea why drug dealers would need or want airboats, which are loud and noisy, but maybe they were all high when they went to go buy the boats.)
Here's the fun part: each and every plot part of this – the fleeing from the abusive husband, the helicopter ride, the one lane dirt road through wetlands, the hidden private shacks/mobile homes in the Everglades making meth and the airboats all would have made perfect sense (well, up to a point) had the action been moved just slightly north, to the Tamiami Trail. Which, not at all incidentally, is lined with bits of the federal park, private land, dirt roads leading to really out of the way residences, airboat tours, and at one point a helicopter tour. It's all there – about an hour, two max, from where they were doing most of their filming. They could even have gotten creative and continued on to the part of the Everglades that looks exactly like Dagobah, heavy swamp and all, one of the most amazing sights in Florida. It happens to be on a rather amazing one land dirt road, which happens to have – yay! private homes. Which may or may not be sheltering meth labs. But some of which ARE sheltering airboats that if not quite waiting to be used for a high speed airboat chase with guns are at least waiting around.
Now, yes, admittedly, keeping to their script this way would have involved several problems, not the least of which trying to get permission to film on the Tamiami Trail. It's not the world's busiest road, but it's one of only two ways to drive across the Everglades, the other one being I-75 Alligator Alley, so I can see that getting filming permission would be tricky. So since they had gotten permission to film in Everglades National Park, why not try something radical?
Create a story constrained by the geographical realities of Everglades National Park.
For instance: You know the bad guys are at the entrance of the main road – the only road in and out of the park. Gulp. Cellular service sucks. (I was rather surprised they didn't play up this part, because, really, cellular service in that area sucks.) You know you can't drive off the road – it's surrounded either by heavily wooded areas too thick to get a car through, or, water. Even places that look like clear prairies are deceptive – it's just water and mud. You can kayak up to Everglades City and find several more escape routes – but that's at least three to four days (usually a week) in the heat and you've got to bring along food and water, not to mention you don't want random tourist kayakers killed, not to also mention the alligators. If you want to add a touch of unreality, you can add a random panther. (The Florida panther is a) no longer exactly the Florida panther after some Texas cougars were introduced to try to keep the Florida panther from expiring thanks to inbreeding after the population dropped down to 20 or 30 panthers, and b) still not exactly flourishing, with only 120 or so panthers in the entire state, so your chances of actually seeing one in the wild in the Everglades much less having it interfere with your chasing down/escaping bad guys activities are slim indeed. On the other hand, Panthers Are Cool.)
The story possibilities are really endless, which brings me (finally) to the main point of this post:
If you are working with real geography, use it.
Real life example from me, showing two ways it can help: in
And The Hollow Space Inside, I just threw in two real life places – Florida mangroves and a state park on the Intercoastal Waterway where I've watched space shuttle launches – as bits of background so that I could focus on the other more important parts of the story and not have to waste time making up geography. But also, in that same story, I used the very real geography of the distance between Mars and Earth to create a need that I could then use for the plot. That same sort of real life plot/need created this.
And, of course, if you use real life geography, and stick with its limitations, you won't have people like me shrieking "BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT THE EVERGLADES IS LIKE!" Just saying.
Another post, about my other big issues with Burn Notice this season, coming up. Probably.