There are no humans around, and yet the Cars regularly refer to human things. They talk about food that a car wouldn't eat. Why would a character in a purely car society know that wasabi is spicy? Why would car society create Webber grills? Why do the cars have doors if there's no one to use them? How did cars develop a written language that doesn't consist of tread marks, and why do their languages, cultural costuming, and political boundaries align with our own?
Torchinsky has a long history of scrutinizing the holes of Car's world building and coming up with no prize answers, and what he generally comes up with are theories that humans used to exist but don't anymore or there is a human inside every car, giving it it's personality and soul.
Jay Ward is having none of this. He seems to think that these are nitpicky things and Torchinsky's constant questioning is both abnormal and detracting from any enjoyment of the movie as a good, popcorn having time. He addresses the interviewer's questions with a couple of good points. First, "You have to make the world in the film a relatable world. It's not a real world...but it's a believable one." The cars have to speak English because otherwise how would the audience understand them? Subtitles? The cars make jokes about wasabi and wear sombreros because the audience understands those references. Secondly, he says that they focused on picking cars that had great stories (using the example of the Jeep character that was in "the big one"). That car has a story, which we know (going back to the relatable point) and the story of that character is more important than the story of how car society works or the story of all of car history. They are picking their battles on the world building front and deciding to focus more on character than on detailed world building. He says, "And if you can relax your mind enough to enjoy the film...kinda relax and go with it."
But Torchinsky makes the point that when people engage with the film, when they like the film and want to think about it more, they start asking the same kinds of questions that he asks, and the holes in the world building become really obvious, really fast. So "relax and go with it" is set up in conflict with engagement with the movie--there's no way to enjoy it and think about it. (Of course there is, because sometimes worldbuilding holes are fun to get upset about or fun to try and rationalize.)
This exchange gets at the heart of how Ward...doesn't get it.
T: "There are bulldozers and tractors, and they're kind of in the role of bulls...The only reason one would keep a lot of livestock type animals would be either you're getting some product from them or an eventual slaughter, you're going to harvest them."...But who is the wheat for? He seems to completely miss that this is a problem for people.
W: "No, no, no! Tractors are used on a farm all the time. Lots of tractors on farms, harvesting the wheat."
I bring all this up because it's reminding me of a bunch of discussions about world building that I've seen recently.
Lincoln Michel recently wrote "Against Worldbuilding" for Electric Lit. His argument here seems to be "While worldbuilding is an important part of some types of fiction in a couple genres, it’s a largely counterproductive concept for most types of fiction". I think my main problem with this essay (aside from the condescending tones against people who worldbuild) is that he and I are using different definitions of "worldbuilding." He says, "In a perfectly executed work of worldbuilding, there would be no gaps in the world for the reader to fill in." Then he goes on to describe checklists for the author to fill in about the world's currency, building materials, and transportation would look like. He thinks that the author must know ALL OF THIS and EVERYTHING ABOUT EVERYTHING in order for it to be worldbuilding. Now, if we go with this definition, he's absolutely right. There's no need for me to know all of that if I'm writing a short story about a trip to an actual-existing-in-the-real-world ER or about taking my kid to the actual-existing-in-the-real-world pond to see the ducks. What are the main exports of the country I'm in?...You know, it's kind of sad that I don't know that, but would not matter much to those stories.
He says these check lists are for beginning writers so they can trick themselves or trick their readers into thinking they have a realistic, flushed out world. He compares it to the same kind of checklists that exist for characterization. What's your character's favorite color? What's their phone number? It's true: you don't need that. But sometimes if you're stuck, you can find something helpful looking at one of those. And maybe the better question isn't "What's their phone number" but "Whose phone numbers do they have memorized? Whose do they have on speed dial? Whose do they have on a post-it in the mess on their desk that they have to dig through to find four months later?" So the question isn't "What building materials do they use?" but rather if you're writing fantasy or magical realism or speculative fiction "Does the weird thing, the central conceit, you've thrown into the world affect building materials? No? Cool, move along." Or if you're writing about a setting that people may not be familiar with--a swamp, the Sahara, the basement of the astrophysics building at a research university, a Martian settlement--"Would describing the building materials help convey the spirit of the setting or provide a better understanding of how people interact with the buildings and with each other?"
I believe this second worldbuilding question is still worldbuilding, even if the answer is "No, this fact doesn't matter or add anything, so I'm not going to think about it ever again." Deciding what aspects of the environment or of history or culture are important to include in your story are important. Michel wants to call this "world conjuring" because...worldbuilding is for Tolkien nerds and he doesn't be associated with those people even to the extent of using the same vocabulary? I guess. It's unclear.
So this seems to fit with what Ward is talking about. Who cares what the wheat is for? Why are you getting hung up on details, that's not what this story is about!
These both remind me of "The Mercurial Worlds of the Mind," an essay by Matthea Harvey that I am not going to pretend I understand. She says
"The near invisible stilts are a wonderful metaphor for how our invented worlds never let us fully leave the world we live in. As Frederico Garcia Lorca put it, "the imagination is limited by reality: one cannot imagine what does not exist. It needs objects, landscapes, planets, and it requires the purest sort of logic to relate those things to one another. One cannot leap into the abyss or do away with terms of reality.""Ward says the same thing. Yeah, it would make more sense for the cars to not have doors, but the cars we know have doors, so that's how they're presented so that we can immediately recognize it.
Michel says something similar. Why are you making up a new language that no one will understand? If the point is to have a language no one understands, something foreign that triggers the brain to think "I don't understand. I'm an outsider", then just make up some nonsense sounds and be done with it.
I think they have a point that the worlds we create have to be relatable, have to have something for the reader to latch onto as familiar. But I also think it's important to explore how the world you create is different, what affects your changes have, to give color and tone and a bit of tension. And I think it's important to be aware when the familiar and the strange openly contradict each other. Yes, I recognize a car, but I would not be able to recognize a car that was the product of a world populated and created only by sentient cars. The premise has made it unrelatable if we expand the world building.
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