by Ben Brady
Look at the protagonists in this chapter. Ben tries to avoid being seduced and fails. Alexander tries to defy the bishop and is broken by the cane and spiritual hypocrisy of the man. Charley is forced to do Friendly’s bidding, only to have Terry change him. Terry begins by wanting advice but ends in a passionate lament of a disappointment long suffered in silence. He leaves emotionally transformed, even more firmly holding onto his nascent conscience.
Not just protagonists but antagonists undergo the same process of change: Charley with Terry; the bishop, forced to reveal indirectly ever more about himself, with Alexander; even Mrs. Robinson, who arrives sure of a conquest but then has to reconquer all over, with Ben. If you are generating conflict, if your characters are acting and reacting on each other, they inevitably, necessarily change each other. Change in drama is constant, constantly building toward climactic revelations, insights, and efforts that pull all the changes together in some final, defining climactic moment of meaning and capacity for the protagonist.
So remember: dramatic action changes characters. It is to see those changes, to feel them, to comprehend them, that we are fascinated with drama, for every character is an act of the human imagination working on our humanity itself: they are possibilities of existence.
Your Third Assignment
Write a scene in which you concentrate on the development of your characters as we have discussed it. Get to your problem as fast as possible so that you can devote your time to your protagonist and antagonist’s struggle. Look at your first draft for its reverses. What material are you giving yourself to work with?
Are there any complications within the scene? What complication sets the scene in motion? Be succinct and clear in the brief premise you write for this scene.
What is immediately at stake? What, ultimately?
We have sometimes assigned a love scene to our students at this point, requiring that the characters either break up or come together in a significant way. We don’t indicate what has caused this necessity: you must invent the problem that precipitates the crisis. The past must have a bearing in such a situation: how to use it meaningfully as part of the present action is the critical question in this assignment. You may have other ideas you prefer, but put your characters at some immediate pitch of decision.
Think about how they have changed by the end, once you have done a draft. If they have not changed, you have a problem. If you write a love scene, it might challenge you to have your characters start with the opposite intention from the result you intend—intending to stay together in the scene in which they end by breaking up or the reverse in which coming together is the result.
The outcome of your scene must matter to your characters desperately. And it must be hard—and getting harder moment by moment—for your characters to do what they attempt.
And that is enough for now!
Notes
1. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. David Grene, in vol. 3 of The Complete Greek Tragedies (New York: Modern Library), p. 76.
2. Buck Henry, The Graduate (unpublished manuscript, March 1967), pp. 51–54; adapted from the novel The Graduate by Charles Webb.
3. Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander, trans. Alan Blair (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), pp. 132–139. English translation copyright © 1982 by Alan Blair. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, Inc. Please note that the screenplay was not accessible to the authors; camera directions, screenplay format, and all bracketed material have been added by the authors.
4. Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront (Carbondale and Edwardsville: South-em Illinois University Press, 1980), pp. 96–105. Copyright © 1980 by Budd Schulberg; used by permission.
8. Achieving Crisis and Climax
USING CHARACTERIZATION TO ACHIEVE CRISIS AND CLIMAX
No part of a scene or screenplay poses more of a challenge to your characters or through them to you than the crisis and climax. All the efforts of your protagonist lead to the crisis and climax: in these the challenge to your craft and insight reaches its peak. It is your handling of the crisis and climax that gives you a chance to achieve something memorable as a dramatist, and by memorable we mean something very practical and simple: a story worth remembering.
Discovery, Revelation, Clarity
The protagonist always has an objective—the cessation of conflict with his triumph over the problem that has generated the action of the story. Yet the problem he faces refuses to be solved and forces him constantly to renew his efforts to overcome it, because any effective dramatic story plunges its characters into a state of continuous crisis. Thus the protagonist is always reacting to the immediate conflict as it is shaped by reverses and complications and never knows all he needs to know to get his way or, consequently, what getting his way really means.
Terry in On the Waterfront does not know that he is involved in an action that involves his transformation from a bum to a hero. He is driven to that ultimate change moment by moment. Michael in Tootsie only knows he is desperate to find work. He has no idea that he will have to face being both a man and a woman or that he will discover that success, which he thought all-important, is less important to him than the love of a woman. Alexander in Fanny and Alexander is nearly overwhelmed by his moment-to-moment need to survive the complications of his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage to Bishop Vergérus. He doesn’t think of himself as caught in a growing-up process; he doesn’t know that he will have the opportunity, magically, to participate in the bishop’s death. Michael in The Godfather thinks he will be able to pursue a non-Mafia career, but events lead him to assume increasing power in the family until he takes the actions that make him the new godfather.
Hamlet has no idea when he comes home that the ghost of his father will ask him for revenge against his murderer—his mother’s new husband, Hamlet’s uncle. Nor does Hamlet know when he begins to try and prove his uncle’s guilt to his own satisfaction that he will be plunged into a confrontation with himself that will paralyze him. At the crisis, when he realizes the depth of his previous failure, he finally reveals himself capable of action and avenges his father. But his climactic outburst continues his bungling: the play ends with the stage strewn with bodies, including his own.
A character, then, begins in the dark. He thinks his problem and objective are one thing but discovers they are something else as he is tested and changed by the conflict. He finds his way. His moments of discovery are all-important, especially when he discovers his efforts seem about to fail at the crisis. Three things happen at that point:
1. The final nature of the problem the protagonist must face or overcome is revealed.
2. The protagonist’s response (the climax) reveals the ultimate extent of his physical, intellectual, moral, and creative resources.
3. The protagonist’s final effort lays bare the deepest wellspring of his motivation.
Flip back to the scene between Terry and Charley from On the Waterfront At the crisis as Charley pulls the gun Terry discovers, first, what problem really faces him: be quiet or be killed. In response, second, he evokes the past and makes Charley see it was he, Charley, who was betraying him then, just as he is now. Third, Terry’s lament peaks when he says, “I could’ve had class and been somebody.” The revelation of that lament is that Terry once again wants to be someone: this time Charley doesn’t stop him.
Even 007 in the James Bond series is constantly challenged until he finally finds a way to pull victory out of the jaws of defeat. In winning he reveals the capacities that make him the best agent. In Private Benjamin, successful as a movie with Goldie Hawn and then as a situation comedy on television, Julie reveals the ability at the crisis to shake off her dependence on others, associated with a comfortable, high society life-style, in favor of independence and perhaps a renewed career in the despised Army. Whether in comedy or drama a dramatic action, then, rises to a culminating moment of revelation.
That revelation can be of an ultimate capaci
ty in a protagonist (he “has what it takes”), an uncovering of something in the past that still determines motivation, the true nature of a character or situation, or a piece of all-important knowledge. These are usually found together with varying emphases.
We want to emphasize the active nature of revelation, too, that it emerges from the final struggle your protagonist makes to overcome the crisis. Moreover, that final struggle to overcome the apparently final defeat offered by the crisis also forces the obstacle that has confronted and thwarted the protagonist to take its final shape. Everything becomes clear—the nature of the antagonist, what your hero or heroine must do, and what he or she can do. The culminating moment of action in the climax brings a final clarity to your story.
We said characters constantly change in effective dramatic writing: your protagonist changes decisively. That change is dramatized most sharply through the protagonist’s response to the crisis (the climax).
Motivation
Motivation is a vast subject: just the volumes written to explore Hamlet’s motivation would fill a small library. Why a character behaves as he does, how the reasons for his behavior are affected and transformed by the conflict, and how the dramatic action generated by conflict brings a character to a final testing at the crisis and climax go to the heart of any drama. As an audience we are constantly judging a character’s motivation, asking ourselves whether or not it makes sense and is justified by the premise or subsequent complications or moment-to-moment reverses. Your insight as a writer is being judged constantly in this way, for the wellspring of motivation shown by a character is only what you can envision for him or her.
Yet two things need to be said: First, central as considerations of motivation are in judging the success or failure of a story, they cannot be talked about in the abstract. We must always talk about some particular character in some particular conflict. Second, however much prior thought you may give to a character’s motivation and the structure of the story that will reveal and explore it, the entire depth or variety of a character’s motivation must emerge immediately and gradually through the actual structure of conflict reverse by reverse, complication by complication.
There are multiple aspects to motivation. When we spoke of emotional reality, we emphasized that your characters’ behavior must always seem appropriate to their circumstances. Whether we believe how they feel and, by extension, how they make us feel as the audience depends on their responses to the immediate challenge they face being neither excessive nor inadequate. Believable motivation in this sense is simply contingent on the ability of a writer to make his characters respond to any immediate challenge in a way that makes good emotional sense to those of us in the audience. Then we will feel with them, and that fellow-feeling will create a sense of a shared reality.
This lets us emphasize a second aspect. If the dramatic obstacle to your protagonist always appeared in one way or if his first act was decisive, there would never be a need to talk about motivation except in its first appearance. But your protagonist finds himself in an on-going struggle, so his initial motivation is constantly challenged and redefined. That conflict tests a protagonist’s motivation, makes him find more options as any one act fails to resolve the conflict, and puts him in different situations in which existing motivation appears in a new light.
This brings us to two more aspects. Look again at the simple scene from The Godfather in which Bonasera seeks vengeance for his daughter’s beating. The Godfather reminds Bonasera how he has tried to fit into conventional society and creates the crisis by telling Bonasera, in effect, to sleep in the bed he has made. At that point Bonasera reveals what no one had known up to that point, namely, that he wants help so badly, his motivation for help is so strong, he will agree to anything the Godfather asks. He will even permanently compromise himself, although he certainly had no intention of doing so at the start of the scene! Because of what happened in the past he is so upset that he changes his life. First, motivation leads your protagonist to change in order to get his way, and, second, at that immediate moment of change, the past is revealed as crucial.
Revelation, motivation, and the past always culminate together.
This might have seemed complex at the beginning of this book: here, perhaps, you realize with something of a creator’s thrill how the immediate pattern of reverses naturally leads a writer to such moments of crisis and climax within a scene or scene by scene within a screenplay, with its attendant complications, as a natural outgrowth of the characters’ urge to end conflict by overcoming their obstacles. But at the actual moment of crisis, no matter how well prepared for, the writer is left alone with a challenge for climactic insight and action. This is as it should be and what all the careful establishment of character and conflict and their development is meant to lead to.
Now a brief word on sustaining motivation. This is an old topic: inevitably, you sustained motivation in your last assignment as you paid attention to developing character and conflict from your initial premise for your scene through your pattern of reverses and whatever additional complications you introduced. Your protagonist, like Bonasera or like Alexander in Fanny and Alexander, faces multiple reverses. His motivation may go through as many changes as Alexander’s, from a desire to lie to cover his tracks to an intention to never ask forgiveness. Like Ben in The Graduate, your protagonist may be maneuvered into demanding the opposite of what he began the scene wanting if the antagonist can manipulate his motivation artfully enough. That, too, reveals a great deal about your character. Your protagonist begins to discover what kind of a person he is and what he can or can’t do as each change or modification of his motivation in response to the developing conflict reveals something more. In other words, the multiple action-reaction structure of a scene provides the basis for sustaining and developing motivation that is inseparable from establishing and developing character and conflict.
From now on ask yourself simple, direct questions about motivation as you work on your scenes.
1. What does your protagonist want to do immediately? Why does he want to do that?
2. As you develop that desire, what does it show about your protagonist?
3. Is he reacting with emotional appropriateness to the situation?
4. What does he discover about himself?
5. How powerfully does the past appear as a motivating force?
6. How do these elements of immediate motivation, past motivation, discovery, and revelation combine and culminate at the moment of crisis, and what is your character’s response to that, the climax?
A Council of War from The Godfather
As the following scene starts, the sons of Don Corleone wrestle with the problem of vengeance while Don Corleone lies in the hospital, critically wounded by an assassination attempt. Sonny, the Godfather’s heir apparent, has already begun to strike back at the other Mafia families. Michael has joined the war council, though he sits in silence, not expected to make a contribution. His face is bandaged because of a blow he had taken from Captain McCluskey, a corrupt policeman, when Michael single-handedly saved the stricken Don’s life at the hospital after all his guards mysteriously disappeared. Moved by his father’s condition at the hospital, Michael has promised to stay with him now. Sollozzo and the Turk are the same man; he is the Mafia head whom the Corleones believe is responsible for the assassination attempt. Hagen is Sonny’s and Michael’s brother, adopted as a child by Don Corleone, and now a councilor and a counselor for the family. Some Corleone henchmen are also at the table, including Tessio and Clemenza.
FADE IN:
INT. DON CORLEONE’S OFFICE (WINTER 1945) (EST) DAY
[A war council is in progress, including Sonny, Hagen, henchmen Clemenza and Tessio, and other close retainers.] Sonny is excited and exuberant.
SONNY
I’ve got a hundred button men on the streets twenty four hours a day. If Sollozzo shows one hair on his ass he’s dead.
He SEES Michael, and holds his
bandaged face in his hand, kiddingly.
SONNY (CONT’D)
Mikey, you look beautiful.
MICHAEL
Cut it out.
SONNY
The Turk wants to talk! The nerve of that son-of-a-bitch! After he craps out last night he wants to meet.
HAGEN
Was there a definite proposal?
SONNY
Sure, he wants us to send Mike to meet him to hear his proposition. The promise is the deal will be so good we can’t refuse.
HAGEN
What about the Tattaglias? What will they do about Bruno?
SONNY
Part of the deal: Bruno cancels out what they did to my father.
HAGEN
We should hear what they have to say.
SONNY
No, no Consiglere. Not this time. No more meetings, no more discussions, no more Sollozzo tricks. Give them one message: I WANT SOLLOZZO. If not, it’s all out war. We go to the mattresses and we put all the button men out on the street.
HAGEN
The other families won’t sit still for all out war.
SONNY
Then THEY hand me Sollozzo.
HAGEN
Come ON Sonny, your father wouldn’t want to hear this. This is not a personal thing, this is Business.
SONNY
And when they shoot my father . . .
HAGEN
Yes, even the shooting of your father was business, not personal . . .
SONNY
No, no, no more advice how to patch it up, Tom. You just help me win, understand?
Hagen bows his head: he is deeply concerned.
HAGEN
I found out about this Captain Mc-Cluskey who broke Mike’s jaw. He’s definitely on Sollozzo’s payroll, and for big money. McCluskey’s agreed to be the Turk’s bodyguard. What you have to understand is that while Sollozzo is guarded like this, he’s invulnerable. Nobody has ever gunned