The trauma plot is a problem play, and the problem is it's boring.

There’s a new kid on the writing block, a technique that has come from seemingly nowhere to dominate plotting. You see it everywhere: almost all contemporary Young Adult fiction will use it, movies love it, and it’s all over TV. I’m talking of the ‘trauma plot.’ WandaVision, Fleabag, I May Destroy You. They all take trauma as a central theme, exploring how the pasts of their respective protagonists are still inhabited months, years, sometimes decades later. This is all well and good from a social perspective, but dramatically they often hit me like a damp squib. And it’s because of this technique’s reliance on backstory.

Backstory in most novels, plays, and films is dramatically inert. It serves no purpose other than exposition. It lets the audience know why the character is the way they are, instead of the important thing: what happens next. The truth is that, in real life, nobody explains to you how they got to be the way they are, instead they let you know what they want. And what do they want? Their coffee, thank you very much, and they don’t need to know why you’re so short with them.

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Nowhere is this more apparent than ‘the trauma plot.’ A damaged, and mostly unlikable, protagonist goes about getting some external goal, or creating some circumstance in the world, all the wrong way, before, about 2/3 of the way through the drama, having some psychological insight into their condition, the source of their trauma, and until that epiphany is dramatically redolent, the play cannot proceed. It’s an absolutely fine sort of story as it is, supplying action alongside psychological insight, as well as moral instruction, maybe, and that should be the end of it. If only. If only this paradigm didn’t produce such dull stories.

Instead of overcoming obstacles, and forces of antagonism in the present tense of the play – say in the way that Hamlet overcomes the darkness at Elsinore – the action is all internal, and the forward motion of the plot is suspended until the character has dropped the baggage they were carrying all along. Baggage which is totally superfluous to the dramatic questions at hand in the play – will the lovers learn to live with their madness outside their private paradise, will the hero slay the monster, will justice be served, will the corruption of the state be cleansed? – none of these questions is served by the introspection of the protagonist. Instead, the MC must create, in front of us, their will to continue. Drama happens in the present tense, and a good many writers could do well to remember that.

When we, as dramatists, substitute explanation for dramatic action, we also run the risk of licencing immoral behaviour. We may seek to expand the circles of our audience’s compassion, but we end up subtly condoning bad behaviour. It was ok that our character was so horrible, she was traumatised. She needed to use her best friend so nonchalantly, it was necessary for her healing.

And again, this would all be fine, if it wasn’t so boring. Nobody cares about the way Nora behaves in A Doll’s House. Nobody cares because of the force of the ending. That play makes the past present and makes the audience swallow it like a hot stone.

Trauma is the perfect theme for genre pieces. The supernatural and the speculative are all ripe metaphors for trauma. Ghosts can return and haunt someone whose guilt eats them inside out; a stranger comes to a Western town, and is the man the Sheriff left for dead a decade ago; the villain in the thriller worked for the spy agency, was left for dead, and now traumatised wants their revenge, a remote scientific research station, far out on the edge of a galaxy, the perfect stage for a monster to torment a scientist fleeing their past. All of this creates an easy theme to deepen what would otherwise be schlocky and repetative films.

This is to say that trauma is a pretty terrible theme, as far as themes go. It is completely at variance to how plays work. Drama charges forward to an unforseen conclusion, made inevitable by our hero’s choices at the start. Oedipus blinds himself because he refuses to let the plague on Thebes run through the city. He must find the source, even if it’s himself. Medea will have her revenge on Jason, no matter what. These aren’t traumatised characters, they are dramatic ones. Trauma pulls characters backwards, always before the play starts, to things the audience will never see. It’s inert, ultimately it offers no real explanation and brooks no arguement.

The trauma plot is a contemporary manifestation of the ‘Problem Play’ but where psychology is substituted for injustice. It’s a form of drama where a social issue is ‘debated’ but nobody has to rethink their initial positions. The most striking feature of problem plays is that the hero is never a member of the oppressed class themselves. They fight racism but they’re white, are opposed to homophobia but they’re straight. The problem is that it’s not their problem. The hero can just walk away if their quest fails, there’s no stakes personal or otherwise. At the end of the play we’re solemnly told that homophobia is defeated, gays are people too, and those that held wrong views duly repent and beg forgiveness. But nothing really has happened. The repentance isn’t real, the hero untransformed. They end the play like they entered it: convinced of their own righteousness.

Ibsen could see right through this sort of playwriting. Which is why in An Enemy of The People once Dr Stockmann announces that he’ll cleanse the town’s waters, the town conspires to destroy him. They hate his interference, and make him culpable for the town’s ruin. In the end he’s driven out of town.

Trauma plots revolve around secrets and disclosures, and are similarly manipulative. The protagonist spend two thirds of the play being an ass, weeping over some undisclosed past. Finally, it’s revealed, in the last 20 minutes or so, that they are traumatised, with bonus points for having some part to play in their downfall. Maybe the writer is being clever and shows events out of order, and the traumatic event (which the audience sees at the end) is really the inciting incident (which happens to the protagonist at the beginning). But this ordering makes you wonder: why not just tell the story out in order? To do so, however, is to reveal an uncomfortable truth: that some evens we only walk away from in part, we never heal, not all of us. Reordering the events creates sympathy in the audience, licencing the bad behaviour of the main character: how could they be any different? What with all that happened to them?

Similarly, we can look to Isben for guidance here. He’s a master of making the past present. Nora comes a cropper when Kronstadt comes calling, and Hedda regrets here choices once it’s clear Lyborg has made a success of himself. The plot depends on some backstory, but the action happens in the present tense. It’s why Fleabag needed the Sexy Priest: some character to challenge Fleabag’s obsession with the audience, to confess to (although she never confesses her culpability for her friend’s suicide).

In Ibsen’s plays the present addresses the past in the first few minutes. We see Nora’s frivolity with money in the first seconds when she tips a heper a large sum of money. In the next scene Torvald reproaches her for being a spendthrift. The dynamic of the play is set, and all that’s left is for something to intrude to disturb this balance. And of course, it comes in the form of Krondstadt and the past. The past is active, present, destructive.

And that’s the final nail in the coffin for the trauma plot: it’s an acceptable flaw for otherwise nice, and normal, characters. It allows us the pretence of drama, without having to deal emotionally with the real dark side of humans. Howard Ratner isn’t traumatised, he’s addicted. He’s given a way out when Garnett offers to buy the opal which he rejects, sealing his fate by placing more, ever larger bets. Each time believing that the next payoff will make him happy, which it never does. Uncut Gems is a rollercoaster because it has teeth that the trauma plot can’t muster. Traumatised characters are just too nice to carry the plot.

The traumatised want to sacralise the past. When I was nineteen another man raped me, and that caused a lot of trauma. It was very painful and difficult, and also very boring for anyone who wasn’t wrapped up in my drama. Essentially anybody who wasn’t me. Trauma also gave me a convenient excuse not to do all the things I didn’t want to do. I didn’t pursue a relationship, court love and wholeness but risk rejection, because I was traumatised. Instead I slept with strangers. I didn’t have to make an honest effort at my degree, because my memory would fail me, because I was traumatised. I had all the talismans of curse: the anti-depressants, the therapy sessions, the crippling loneliness. I made a sacred object of my pain, because then I could deal with how incomprehensible it all was, and all on my own terms. In the hidden recesses of my heart, I had let my rapist’s judgement define me. It was in my own heart that I needed to free to myself, and once I did that the fantasy was over. I’d made a sacred object of pain and I could put it down.

If everyone is traumatised, nobody is. Trauma is multifaceted, it presents itself differently in different people in different ways. So, for the writer, it’s easy to make trauma a substitute for thinking. She didn’t end her marriage because of her ideals, and has to live with some of the culpability: she was traumatised. We can avoid telling the truth: which is, once the fantasy has burst, we were just not very nice people.