by Ben Brady
TERRY
Yeah—yeah—I guess I do—but there’s a lot more to this whole thing than I thought, Charley.
CHARLEY
You don’t mean you’re thinking of testifying against—
(turns a thumb towards himself)
TERRY
I don’t know—I don’t know! I tell you I ain’t made up my mind yet. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.
CHARLEY
(patiently, as to a stubborn child)
Listen, Terry, these piers we handle through the local—you know what they’re worth to us?
TERRY
I know, I know.
CHARLEY
Well, then, you know Cousin Johnny isn’t going to jeopardize a setup like that for one rubber-lipped—
TERRY
(simultaneous)
Don’t say that!
CHARLEY
(continuing)
—ex-tanker who’s walking on his heels—?
TERRY
Don’t say that!
CHARLEY
What the hell!!!
TERRY
I could have been better!
CHARLEY
The point is—there isn’t much time, kid.
There is a painful pause, as they appraise each other.
TERRY
(desperately)
I tell you, Charley, I haven’t made up my mind!
CHARLEY
Make up your mind, kid, I beg you, before we get to four thirty-seven River . . .
TERRY
(stunned)
Four thirty-seven—that isn’t where Gerry G . . . ?
Charley nods solemnly. Terry grows more agitated.
TERRY
Charley . . . You wouldn’t take me to Gerry G . . . ?
Charley continues looking at him. He does not deny it. They stare at each other for a moment. Then suddenly Terry starts out the cab. Charley pulls a pistol. Terry is motionless, now, looking at Charley.
CHARLEY
Take the boss loading, kid. For God’s sake. I don’t want to hurt you.
Hushed, gently guiding the gun down towards Charley’s lap.
TERRY
Charley . . . Charley . . . Wow . . .
CHARLEY
(genuinely)
I wish I didn’t have to do this, Terry.
Terry eyes him, beaten. Charley leans back and looks at Terry strangely. Terry raises his hands above his head, somewhat in the manner of a prizefighter mitting the crowd. The image nicks Charley’s memory.
TERRY
(an accusing sigh)
Wow . . .
CHARLEY
(gently)
What do you weigh these days, slugger?
TERRY
(shrugs)
—eighty-seven, eighty-eight. What’s it to you?
CHARLEY
(nostalgically)
Gee, when you tipped one seventy-five you were beautiful. You should’ve been another Billy Conn. That skunk I got to manage you brought you along too fast.
TERRY
It wasn’t him!
(years of abuse crying out in him)
It was you, Charley. You and Johnny. Like the night the two of youse come into the dressing room and says, “Kid, this ain’t your night—we’re going for the price on Wilson.” It ain’t my
(MORE)
TERRY (CONT’D)
night. I’d of taken Wilson apart that night! I was ready—remember them early rounds throwing them combinations. So what happens—This bum Wilson he gets the title shot—outdoors in the ball park!—and what do I get—a couple of bucks and a one-way ticket to Palookaville . . .
More and more aroused as he remembers it:
TERRY (CONT’D)
It was you, Charley. You was my brother. You should of looked out for me. Instead of making me take them dives for the short-end money.
CHARLEY
(defensively)
I always had a bet down for you. You saw some money.
TERRY
(agonized)
See! You don’t understand!
CHARLEY
I tried to keep you in good with Johnny.
TERRY
You don’t understand! I could have been a contender. I could’ve had class and been somebody. Real class. Instead of a bum, let’s face it, which is what I am. It was you, Charley.
Charley takes a long, fond look at Terry. Then he glances quickly out the window.
[EXT.] MEDIUM SHOT WATERFRONT NIGHT
from Charley’s angle. A gloomy light reflects off the street numbers: 433—435—
INT. CLOSE CAB ON TERRY AND CHARLEY NIGHT
TERRY
It was you, Charley . . .
CHARLEY
(turning back to Terry, his tone suddenly changed)
Okay—I’ll tell him I couldn’t bring you in. Ten to one they won’t believe it, but—go ahead, blow. Jump out, quick, and keep going . . . and God help you from here on in.
[EXT.] LONGER ANGLE—CAB NIGHT
as Terry jumps out. A bus is just starting up a little further along the street.
EXT. MEDIUM LONG SHOT—RIVER STREET NIGHT
Running, Terry leaps onto the back of the moving bus.
INT. CAB—RIVER STREET NIGHT
CHARLEY
(to driver as he watches Terry go)
Now take me to the Garden.
Charley sinks back in his seat, his hand covering his face. The driver turns around, gives him a withering look, steps on the gas, and guns the car into—
EXT. MEDIUM LONG SHOT—RIVER STREET NIGHT
the garage they have reached, and which the car now zooms into through the entrance. We catch a glimpse of Truck, Sonny and Big Mac.
FADE OUT4
The first scene from On the Waterfront is simple, direct: its pattern of reverses and complications are nearly synonymous with its BEGINNING, MIDDLE, and END, as in the scene between Ben and Mrs. Robinson. It works because of its threatening nature and Charley’s horror at his situation, and because it immediately propels us forward. But note how changed Charley is in this scene—far more than Ben was or Adrian in Rocky. Charley starts just worried: he leaves with a life-and-death situation on his hands. Much more is at stake for him, and because more is at stake, it was possible for Schulberg to write with more emotion and meaning.
All their motivations make sense and give the scene a strong emotional reality. How swiftly Charley is established: he is the one they keep for advice, but not for the real dirty business. For that you need the unseen but menacing Gerry G. We know Charley is upset: he can’t drink. We know he cares about Terry: he puts up a spirited defense right away. But a real complication has entered Charley’s life, a menacing problem in this scene, and the cause of the next scene: Friendly puts the life and death of his brother in his hands or those of Gerry G. The efforts Charley makes to placate Johnny Friendly suffer a serious reverse at that point, which coincides with the crisis. Charley is in danger, too. There is no middle ground for him with Johnny Friendly, with whom he is hopelessly implicated in any wrongdoing. If Charley doesn’t carry through, then everyone is in trouble. Climax: Charley will try to solve the problem.
Note the elements of preparation. First, Big Mac calls Terry a bum, someone who bites the hand that secured him the cushy job in the loft unloading ships. Then set up are Gerry G. and that there will be consequences if Charley fails with Terry. All three of these bear fruit immediately.
Jot down your own sense of the second scene’s structure. What complication has set it off? What complication does it introduce? What are its reversals?
BEGINNING. Charley introduces the problem quickly for Terry: he doesn’t want him to testify and is prepared to bribe him with better money at the docks.
Reverses:
1. Terry is easily deceived about the purpose of going to River Street.
2. His resistance to having a better job is not overthrown but compromised by Charley’s bribe to k
eep him silent.
MIDDLE. The bulk of the scene, steadily rising to the point at which Charley pulls out his gun and threatens Terry, preventing him from leaving, makes up the second part. Crisis: Terry’s efforts to talk fail. A series of reverses move the scene forward:
3. Terry demands not to be called “a rubber-lipped ex-tanker who’s walking on his heels”: he could have been better. Charley tells him he doesn’t have the time.
4. Terry can’t believe Charley would take him to Gerry G. When he does, he tries to flee.
5. Charley stops his flight with a gun. Terry pushes the gun aside. Crisis.
Complication: Terry discovers what not having time means: he must make an immediate choice one way or the other. His effort to temporize, which he persuades Charley to go along with, results in Charley’s being driven to see Gerry G.
END. The appeal to Charley, the passionate outburst of how Charley had failed him, of how Terry could have been someone, finishes the scene. Climax: Charley lets him go.
6. The climax and the sixth reverse are the same: the appeal succeeds.
Reverses aren’t necessarily events that happen opposite of the way your protagonist wants but only in some way he doesn’t expect: he may even get his way—after a struggle—as Terry does when he persuades Charley to let him go. Reverses are minisequences of action—the action-reaction pattern we emphasized in Fanny and Alexander: Terry has to defend himself against being called rubber lipped or a used-up boxer; Terry discovers to his great surprise he’s being taken to Gerry G. and then fails to escape.
The relation between reverse and insight is also particularly clear here. Terry is incredulous at Charley’s taking him to River Street: what kind of man is this who calls himself his brother? Neither Terry nor Charley is a villain, any more than Joanna or Ted Kramer. That is a crucial element in the emotional realism of the scene. So when the gun is pulled, the most important fact is that Charley can’t use it. Instead, stung to passion, Terry forces a moment of reckoning between the brothers neither knew was coming that night. Both are changed by that: Terry by having it out in the open at last, Charley by hearing it and realizing it is so.
The cause-and-effect relation between the reverses is also particularly clear here. Terry comes to talk: he’s talked to. He insists on his right to talk and not be called names: he’s told he doesn’t have time. He can’t believe where he’s going—he tries to get out. Charley’s stopping him prompts his outburst. Moreover, step by step through the reversals, Charley is upholding Johnny Friendly and again letting Terry down, just as he did in the past. The accusation Terry finally levels against his brother has been exemplified in the immediate action for us. It doesn’t depend on Terry’s accidentally assuming a boxer’s position and setting off a casual train of memory in Charley: past and present failure are intimately related. Every reverse is leading these characters to the perception of that linkage between past and present.
The Appearance of the Past
This brings us to a crucial understanding about good writing and the function of complication and reverse. No matter how light the subject, you are not creating some sort of machine for killing time when you write. At the very least you are creating the illusion of people suddenly having to make sense out of their lives that have been profoundly disturbed by some fundamental complication. But most of our lives exist either in the past, almost all of which we forget, or in the future, all of which is unknown. Our present experience, gone in the moment we think about it, is a meager point of light between these two oceans of our unknowing. We can fantasize about the future, but being in ignorance of it, our fantasies will tend to project our inner conflicts on the future’s blank screen. Or we can try to understand how we have become what we are at the same time we struggle to realize who we are.
That is why we have stressed the appearance of the past in Bergman’s and Schulberg’s scenes. The pressure they subject their “people” to, the accumulation of complication and reverse, forces their characters to search for that understanding as they struggle to justify some immediate, dramatic decision. “You can’t do this, because . . . ,” Terry says and reaches into his heart to find that “because.” “You must give in to me, because . . . ,” Edvard says to Alexander and searches for one reason after another until we sense he has bared some of the punishments that warped him as a child. “You must let me go, because . . . ,” Joanna says to Ted, and his resistance forces her to say more than she wanted, to reach both into the past and to admit the thing in the present (her lack of love) that she had never been under enough pressure to bring out to Ted before.
This pressure toward the past as something immediately bearing on present action typifies all of the most enduring writing. We could instance Oedipus Rex again, in which present action propels Oedipus systematically to recreate his past as he tries to dispel a plague for his city. During these efforts he discovers that how he had seen his past was wrong: that, in fact, he had done everything he thought he had avoided. In Hamlet, the protagonist spends the greater part of the play trying to establish in his mind whether or not Claudius really is guilty of his father’s murder, an event that happens before the action of Hamlet begins. Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, one of our most enduring contemporary plays, also recounts a search of the past. Successfully produced as a movie with Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh and recently adapted for television with Treat Williams and Ann-Margret, the play centers its action around the relentless attempt of its hero, Stanley Kowalski, to penetrate the truth about the past of his wife’s sister. Any drama—for stage, screen, or television—that takes place wholly in the present, must, of necessity, be impoverished because so little of our lives can be found there.
Whatever it is a character reaches in a moment when the present action forces something of his or her past into the present may have lain on the heart a long time, without the character knowing that or ever having found the way to say it. At a critical moment it emerges. Neither Ben nor Mrs. Robinson has recourse to the past, nor Rocky or Adrian. In consequence, whatever else may be said of their scenes, they are simply not as meaningful to us. But in those scenes in which the past is brought in as a necessity to explain and propel the present action forward, then we are given, as an audience, through our identification with the protagonist, a sense of some of the mystery of human life being illuminated. This is equally true in comedy, even in a scene as light as that between Les and Michael-Dorothy. The moment of critical dramatic action that plumbs the past and uses it, as Terry does in his outburst to Charley, brings a sense of meaning into human struggle. In that moment we share the characters’ sense of illumination, the sudden ending of their blindness or self-deception. Through them we have the experience of seeing the past truly and how, as a result of that perception, present action must be changed. As we have seen, Charley is changed because of that moment: he lets Terry go, even though Friendly has threatened him with consequences if Terry testifies. This creation of the meaning of lives through conflict, however upsetting it may also be for your characters, is utterly central to dramatic writing and profoundly satisfying to us as the audience.
Another practical point is important here. Authors write, too, to be remembered. It is unlikely that we would still be looking at Schulberg’s drama if he had avoided the past and let the scene turn into a shallower debate between Terry and Charley about being a canary or sticking with the boys. The more you give your characters to deal with, the more you can achieve dramatically. The more emotion and tension you build up in them through their struggles, the more you build in yourself. Then when you reach the critical point with your characters, you will be able to supply out of your imagination the answer to the question: how can I justify the action my character wants to take now? Reverses challenge you to insight, just as they lead your characters to the same things. You show your vision through your characters’ actions and reactions. “Vision” is deliberately used here in place of “motivation” to emphasize t
he real source and nature of motivation. A piece without vision is worthless.
The connection between complication and reverse is also particularly clear in On the Waterfront and bears on this point. The real complication in Terry’s life began years ago, before the story begins, namely, that moment when he took a dive and started his slide into being a bum. The story slowly brings that out and gives him a chance to redeem himself. He innocently sets someone up, who is killed. Then he falls in love. Double complication. That involves him with Edie and Father Barry and opens him to the crime investigation, which he wouldn’t have responded to otherwise. He turns to his brother for help, and his brother is killed. Because of that, he testifies. Because he testifies, he becomes persona non grata on the docks. Because of that, he directly challenges Johnny Friendly and, despite being beaten up, leads the dockworkers to work in place of Johnny Friendly. There is a constant, implicit link between complication and reverse. In the end, the bum Terry has become a hero.
We said at the start archetypal patterns underlie much of what is written. The making of a hero is one such pattern, and typically the hero starts off as a fool or a compromised innocent of some kind, just as does Terry. The oldest example that springs to mind is Beowulf from the epic of the same name, a heroic slayer of monsters and leader of his people, who, we are carefully told, as a young man seemed less able and less bright than others. Schulberg didn’t set out to do something of this kind: that overtook him as he wrote, because he wrote well, because he was not content to write a dock expose. Demanding more, he asked himself, Who are these people? and that question inevitably propelled him into the past.
Change
We began this chapter perplexed by the way in which the immediate obstacle for the protagonist seemed to change constantly within a scene, even though what was ultimately at stake within the play remained consistent. Now it is time for you as a writer to realize that in good writing, change is constant. Your characters constantly change. Certainly your protagonist is never the same at the end of the scene as at the beginning, if you have done your job as a writer.
Go back to the beginning of this book. Remind yourself how Bonasera changes from a man asking for justice to a man who receives it at the price of compromising his integrity. Or look at Michael in Tootsie in his persona of Dorothy. He sets out to let Les down gently, fails, and leaves the restaurant in confusion—as confused as a “woman.” He too has undergone a change from how he began in that scene.