From the "staring into space" school of drama

This show epitomizes a symptom that is always a sign of mediocre (or worse) writing. it consistently resorts to the empty tactic of having characters stare into space. They stand on balconies, or at high-rise office windows, or sit in cars, or on couches (always with beers), etc. and stare.

Always accompanied by portentous music, and if glass is involved, with aesthetic reflections beautiful or grim, with striking lighting, bokeh effects, dribbling rain, and so forth. In other words, literal window dressing.

Fast-forward any given episode of Marcella, and you will note an astonishing number of such "scenes." Cumulatively, the season is bloated with them. This recycling of the same behaviour pattern -- no matter which character -- and meaningless variations on the same basic image, takes up a tremendous amount of real estate.

Marcella is so egregious that at a certain point I couldn't ignore the sheer, absurd volume of it. The "spot the space-out" game started to compete with the pleasure of watching for clues related to the murder-mystery, which unfortunately was not super-fascinating to begin with.

I take this symptom, in any show, as a red flag that the writers are, if not hacks, at least uninspired. It's a warning to manage expectations and not get my hopes up. Because I have yet to see a show with a lot of space-staring that turned a corner and became a first-rate drama.

Tension dissipates due to diminishing returns of watching the same pattern, and opportunity for character exploration and possible revelation are denied. Momentum bogs down, and the rhythm becomes repetitive. What's left is mostly empty portent.

The pattern cues you to expect what will happen: a significant event will occur, and soon enough any given character's default response will be to gaze into space. This is especially true of Marcella. This constant echoing makes the characters seem to be made of the same stony material. Most of the time, with few exceptions, their repetoire of emotional expression is staring into short, middle or long distances.

In a character study, the writers' job is to find ways unique to character that can externalize their inner lives. In a drama with inspired writing, characters don't constantly and simply stare at the view. When they do, they are also doing something interesting. For example, they are looking at something specific. Or they are doing something interesting and revealing with their hands, their bodies, or with some object. But neither the writers nor the directors have given these scenes life. They're dead. They sound and look foreboding and intense and deeply felt, but after a dozen repeats or so they just seem like a looped video.

You can see the desperation of the director to make these "scenes" do something without actually finding substance. We get what Billy Wilder called "The Santa Claus shot," meaning a camera positioned in meaningless, ridiculous places (in Wilder's example, inside a fireplace). We get tracking shots behind objects that look like the POV of someone spying in this intimate moment. We get wide-angle depth-focus, telephoto shallow focus, we get rack focus (a face, then reflections over the face)...

The DP strains to find or create interesting optical effects. Then there's the effort of the actors to muster up meaningful facial gestures when they've "played" this moment a dozen times already, essentially required to stand still and, well, emote something. Cue music. Did they block shoot these scenes, spending a day shooting everybody's staring moments?


"You must not judge what I know by what I find words for." - Marilynne Robinson