The setting is a crucial part of any film. It establishes mood by showing the audience the physical and emotional lives of characters. In films like Lady Bird, Buffaloed, After Hours, and True Stories, setting plays an especially important part. When a filmmaker loves a city or town, this love helps create a rich and detailed world for characters to inhabit. This in turn helps convey characterization and motivation to the audience.
In these films, the attention that is paid to the setting, and the major role the setting plays in the films’ subtext means that these cities and towns become characters in their own right. The settings of Sacramento, Buffalo, New York City, and Virgil, Texas, act as a force within the films.
The setting can distract or disorient, or even stop a character in their tracks. This is clearest in Buffaloed, the 2019 comedy about debt collecting. A scene where a mass arrest at a bar is put on pause by everyone stopping to cheer for the Buffalo Bills playing on TV completely demonstrates the power this setting has over the characters.
In the 2017 film Lady Bird, Sacramento — where writer and director Greta Gerwig grew up — has similar sway over characters. Lady Bird spends the whole film wanting to move away, but when she finally does, she calls her mom to talk about feeling emotional about driving in Sacramento for the first time, re-experiencing a city she’s known her whole life. Much like the power Lady Bird’s mother Marion and their fraught relationship has over her, Sacramento has a power over her, controlling her desires and decisions.
Another way the locations of these films become characters is the incorporation of references unique to a city. In Lady Bird, it’s never explained that the ‘fabulous 40s’ is a neighbourhood in Sacramento, but the audience figures it out through dialogue, and it makes the world of the film feel more vivid and lived-in. In Buffaloed, the ongoing debate over the best place to get buffalo wings — Anchor Bar or Duff’s — is used for comedic effect but still fleshes out the film’s setting.
These small details that most viewers won’t immediately understand don’t serve to alienate the audience. In fact, they do the opposite. They let the viewer in on the joke, letting them be part of the in-crowd. Every city has its own localized slang, and when that slang is included in a film, it helps sink the audience deeper into the story. Comparable to imbuing a character with details about their likes and interests, when cities are written as characters it makes them feel more realistic.
A major role setting plays in films is to inform characterization and motivation. In Buffaloed, a struggling city past its prime is a symbol for failure, mediocrity, and protagonist Peg Dahl’s desire to financially succeed in life. Much like the oft-mentioned Buffalo Bills, who have never won a Super Bowl, characters are stuck in their lives and wishing for better things. Without this setting, the film would not be as thematically strong.
Setting plays a similar role in Lady Bird. Lady Bird spends the film trying to leave her hometown, and when she describes Sacramento as “the midwest of California”, it makes perfect sense why she would want to leave. To viewers with a limited knowledge of California, it could appear that the whole state was magical and free, like how Los Angeles is presented in film as a haven for artists. But these small details exploring what it’s like to be a young creative person growing up in Sacramento change the audience’s perspective, and with it, their understanding of Lady Bird’s motivations.
After Hours and True Stories similarly use their settings to explore character motivation. The 1985 film After Hours is directed by Martin Scorsese, who is known for his gritty crime-filled takes on New York City with films like Taxi Driver, Gangs of New York, and Mean Streets. But After Hours is particularly noteworthy for departing from Scorsese’s typical New York gangster movies.
Scorsese’s most comedic film, it trades seedy gangsters for a tale about a normal guy on a nighttime odyssey through New York as he tries to get home. Along the way, he encounters increasingly ridiculous characters and increasingly insurmountable odds.
Watching the film nowadays, the viewer expects that the characters will be bizarre because cinematically, New York is known to be full of bizarre characters in films like Desperately Seeking Susan, Being John Malkovich, and even Men in Black. And part of the reason we know New York to be full of bizarre characters is because of After Hours itself. For example, author Fran Lebowitz has said that “[After Hours] was the beginning of crazy cab drivers” (Pretend It’s A City, episode three), one of the obstacles the protagonist faces in the film.
Scorsese used the setting of the film to help create a longstanding mythology of that setting. A mythology other filmmakers such as Woody Allen and the Safdie brothers have also contributed to in their films exploring the quirky characters of New York.
1986’s True Stories takes a similar route in using setting to explore the inhabitants of a small town. The only film directed by Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, True Stories takes place in the fictitious small town of Virgil, Texas, and follows a wide range of strange individuals as they prepare for a celebration to mark 150 years of Texas’ independence.
Since the film is directed by David Byrne, it has that love for the absurd for which Talking Heads is known. And because the film takes place in a small town, the absurdity of the characters makes perfect sense to the audience. For directors like Byrne, David Lynch, and the Coen brothers, small towns are used as a conduit to explore strange characters and a warping of ‘typical’ life. Much like Twin Peaks, the isolation of a small town stuck in the past is the perfect breeding ground for weirdness.
When a film like True Stories takes place in a small town the viewer doesn’t have to struggle to understand why characters act so strangely. Of course they act strangely, they live in a tiny town that’s just one part of a longstanding cinematic tradition of unusual small towns.
Examining these four films, it is clear how using setting as an aspect of storytelling improves them. When a filmmaker has a love, respect, and understanding for a city or town, it’s apparent in the art they make as it lets the settings become characters themselves. It makes the film’s world feel more realistic and genuine, and it creates a system of understanding for the audience to get to know the characters.
Using setting in this way is a very smart storytelling technique. It is, in the words of Greta Gerwig, “quick visual storytelling that the audience immediately gets” (Lady Bird, director’s commentary). There’s only so much time in a film to get the filmmaker’s point across, and taking advantage of a film’s setting is a perfect way to quickly show and not tell.
