The year 2014 will go down as one marked by a series of troubling news events that just happened to occur on elevators, dark moments photographed on surveillance videos. Beyonce’s sister went after Jay Z in an elevator at a Met Gala party. There was a CEO of an arena concessions franchise, Desmond Hague, who lost his job when he was captured on video in an elevator repeatedly kicking a friend’s dog. And there was the most notorious and news-worthy event of all, when Ray Rice brutalized his fiancé in the elevator of a casino parking garage.
But this is not an essay about family rage, or animal abuse, or intimate partner abuse, all of which deserve public attention. No, this essay is about elevators – and the stories inside them.
I imagine that every family can tell a story about an elevator. My grandmother was robbed at knifepoint in an elevator in a New York City apartment complex known as Knickerbocker Village. Her son, Peter, was a police officer. He took days off to hunt down a local drug addict who victimized old ladies. The story goes that before my Uncle Pete arrested him, he “tuned him up,” that is, gave him a good beating. Even with that guy behind bars, I was afraid to ride in that elevator again.
And why wouldn’t I be. An elevator is a box of phobias:
— Claustrophobia – fear of being in closed places
— Acrophobia – fear of heights
— Agoraphobia – fear of crowds
— Triskaidekaphobia – fear of the number 13 (often skipped in the numbering of hotel floors).
Add to this list any extraordinary circumstances, like having the lights go out, or the power, or being trapped inside with a violent or obnoxious person, and the elevator becomes a kind of story container, a pressure-cooker of human courage and fallibility.
One of the most memorable stories from 9/11 was written by Jim Dwyer of the New York Times. At 8:47 a.m. that morning six men “boarded Car 69-A, express elevator that stopped on floors 67 through 74.” And then, “The car rose, but before it reached its first landing, ‘We felt a muted thud,’ Mr. Iyer said. ‘The building shook. The elevator swang from side to side, like a pendulum.’” There are lots of horror movies in which elevators do things like that, but this was not make-believe. This was one small consequence of a terrorist attack. Fortunately, one of the men on that elevator was a window-washer. The group used all the parts of his squeegee to break out of the elevator, through the walls of a restroom, and out to safety.
Dwyer’s story was about a group of strangers, one tool, and old-fashioned resourcefulness. That it took place in an elevator made the story, I believe, more memorable. I once rode in an elevator with my daughter Alison in that very building to a restaurant near the top. An elevator in one of the world’s tallest buildings is more than an elevator. It a kind of spinal cord, a line of energy, transportation, and potential danger.
I once had a friend named John who worked for Otis Elevators. Any time I saw him, I asked him the same question, and got the same vaudeville response:
“Hey, John, how’s business?” I’d say.
“Lookin’ up,” he’d say.
In the television drama, Game of Thrones, a hoisting device, a kind of primitive elevator, lifts watchmen to the top of a great wall of ice, a barrier that protects the world against terrible invaders from the north.
The elevator, I’ve learned from Wikipedia and other sources, preceded the invention of electricity and the Industrial Revolution that created cities filled with skyscrapers. By the late 19th century, the elevator had become an essential technology, especially in concrete urban landscapes. It actually reversed the social order. We now think that rich people want to live on the tops of buildings, penthouses that provide the most spectacular views. But before elevators, the rich wanted to live on the ground floors, absolved from the rigor of climbing all those steps. The poorest lived near the top.
In narrative terms, the elevator has joined a more ancient collection of enclosed spaces used to create conflict and suspense. In the beginning, there was the secret garden, the tower chamber, the cave, the labyrinth, the tunnel, the dungeon, the coffin, the ship at sea.
Those confined spaces still exist, but take different narrative forms: the classroom, the refugee camp, the bus or taxi, the bathroom or shower stall, the interview room in the cop shop, the courtroom, the subway car, the submarine, the frat house, the trailer. How about the trailer turned into a meth lab in Breaking Bad? How about the overpopulated toilets and showers in Orange is the New Black? Think of how many times in the past half century that 007 has had to escape from tight quarters?
I watched a rich collection of YouTube videos that featured elevators as dramatic or suspenseful containers. Particularly helpful was a watchmojo.com collection of 10 great movie scenes on elevators. Here are some of the strategies storytellers continue to use to good effect:
1) The interlude: People on an elevator may be moving from one stressful place to another. But for a brief interlude they are safe, calm, even distracted. The recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie may offer the ultimate example when those heroes escape from monsters onto an elevator and then improvise a cool percussion rap on the way down. (By the way, the word interlude is a great one. The Latin word ludus, means play, game, or song. So an interlude is something lighter than comes in between other darker or more serious elements.)
2) The tick-tock: The elevator is a kind of clock. The floors are numbered, so you can estimate how long it will take to get you from one floor to another. When the doors open, it takes so much time for them to close again, depending upon how many people are getting on and off. An elevator pitch is a proposal that has to be delivered quickly. When the doors open and you see someone you know, you have to blurt out a message for them.
The control of time creates suspense. When a couple tries to escape from a tall building, they often run to the elevator and hit the button. They wait for the car to arrive, hoping it will get there before the bad guy. They get on the elevator and hope that the doors will close before the hand of the murderer stops them. An analogous trope is when someone tries to escape in a car and the engine won’t start right away. Episodes of Law and Order often end with the closing of elevator doors, as if the curtains were closing at the end of a stage play.
3) Privacy and voyeurism: One time, years and year ago, my wife and I, a little tipsy perhaps, began to make out on an elevator. There is elevator romance, elevator sex, and elevator porn. On The Good Wife, after months of sexual tension, Will and Alicia, two of the top lawyers, finally get together, where else – on an elevator. Where the closing of the doors provides privacy, the imminent opening of the doors – or presence of surveillance cameras – offers both exhibitionism and voyeurism.
4) Danger and safety: In narrative terms, this tension may be the most important cinematic element to elevator-based narratives. Mostly, elevators go up and down, but for Harry Potter or Willie Wonka, they are more versatile vehicles. They can trap you, or help you escape. They give you altitude – even turn into a flying ship – or send you into subterranean underworlds. One character, safe inside a glass elevator, may have to watch a friend being murdered outside. The elevator can stop, turning into a cage. Or it can fall hundreds of feet at deadly speeds. You can be in an elevator, or on top of an elevator, or get crushed by an elevator, or hang on an elevator cable.
5) Microcosm: How strange we are on elevators. Chatty people suddenly clam up when others climb in. The rich and the poor find themselves haunch to paunch. People avoid eye contact, looking up at the numbers or down at their shoes. Who farted? Who smells like an ashtray? Is that an elevator music version of Stairway to Heaven? That woman has a nice butt – oh, wait, I think it’s a guy. You can put a motley crew of humans together on a pilgrimage, like Chaucer did. Or, it turns out, you can put them on an elevator.
Returning to the Ray Rice story, my Poynter colleague Lauren Klinger adds some real-life perspective:
You’re talking about stories having to take place someplace, right, and Ray Rice chose to have this happen in this place. Why? He is the actor here. He could have punched her in the hallway, but he chose the privacy of the elevator to reveal who he really was, what he really wanted to do in that moment. So he felt safe to do what he wanted to do in a place that was absolutely not safe for Janay. He chose to hit her, he chose to hit her there. Elevators and stairwells and hotel hallways and parking garages are spaces that can be terrifying to women (because the space isolates them) but they might be comforting to men (because the space isolates them.) Same feeling, but their power imbalance makes it different. Good men should be especially aware of how they might make women feel when they enter spaces like these.
Art imitates reality which takes its cues from art in a never-ending cycle of experience and creativity. It is as true for the journalist as it is for the screenwriter: stories have to happen in some place, spaces that often pressurize and define characters.
