by Lance Lee
Quantum physics is even more radical, and closer to Hume than to Kant. Probability replaces cause and effect in the quantum world: electrons can’t be placed for sure in a given space and time. Reality is indeterminate, an idea of Heisenberg’s that some have erected into a way of looking at all reality. Certainly in any drama some characters think they have a handle on the nature of the truth—i.e., of their experience—at any given moment, only to discover as the conflict arises and changes them that their certainty was misplaced. Before the hero’s triumph, time and reality are up for grabs.
Even odder, in quantum physics space can be envisioned as not empty but filled with ghost particles flashing in and out of experience. Theoretically, there is nothing to prevent such a minute piece of space from suddenly experiencing a cascade into a large act of creation. In drama, characters discover the space and time they occupy are full of elements they hadn’t guessed or had forgotten or misunderstood: ghost particles, if you will, of past actions and conflicts, temporally and story bound. The inciting event in drama forces these ghosts into the light, where they have a critical impact on the action.11
This brings us to an essential characteristic of time in drama, for in drama conflict reaches an end, by which we mean the issues that are raised in a dramatic story are resolved one way or another. Even if that resolution is ambiguous, we feel that ambiguity is the end to a given story. The time which seemed unsettled—not past, not set, but available for reexperiencing and rethinking—has indeed been rethought and reexperienced and reached resolution, whether of Hamlet dying and Fortinbras taking over in Hamlet, or Verbal in The Usual Suspects being revealed finally as the devil incarnate, or Terry leading the longshoremen to work after the overthrow of Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront.
Moreover, at the end we see the dramatic action as a whole, and one that is wholly understood. There is a good reason why Tarkovsky called his book on film Sculpting in Time.12 We “sculpt” or structure the story in our fluid, attending minds as audience through the fundamental story pattern as realized uniquely in each screenplay.
That pattern is worth reviewing briefly here for future use. It is not a formula for a dramatist to use, but rather an observation that dramatic stories fall into five parts. First is the past, everything of the characters’ lives before the actual beginning of the action. Usually that past, at the Beginning, is assumed to be past by ourselves and the characters, in the sense of being a set time. But that time is found through the immediate action to be far from set, for in this past reside long-simmering problems awaiting their chance to emerge and finally be dealt with. Characters may be in ignorance of these problems, or may know of them but have dealt with them in some wrong, inconclusive way which continues to condition their present lives. This ignorance or false solution of past problems, however, is the root of the modus vivendi a writer establishes at the start of an action.
Think of Terry in On the Waterfront who at the start calls out his friend Joey, not expecting Johnny Friendly’s thugs will actually kill him. Although Terry feels guilt over the outcome, he is fobbed off by Johnny Friendly with a cushy job and money. Terry is living a lie, and we discover that lie is rooted in the past when he took a dive in a critical fight he could have won so Johnny Friendly and Terry’s brother, Charley, and their friends could make some money. He has not been the same since but, far from rebelling, has simply accepted the compromising milieu he is in, as he does again with Joey’s death.
Acts 1–3—the Beginning, Middle, and End—are the second, third, and fourth parts of the fundamental story pattern. Terry first shows the false modus vivendi he is caught in, then falls in love with Edie in Act 1 even as she pleads with him to help her find Joey’s murderer, not realizing Terry’s role in her brother’s death. When Terry equivocates and tells her a man should simply look out for himself and the hell with others, she turns on him in a rage and calls him a bum. If he wants Edie, he must begin to acknowledge and sort out his conscience, which he has buried for years. But he can’t demand a place, a mental space, for his conscience without acting against Johnny Friendly, who was the cause of his fall. Terry is torn but flattens one of Friendly’s thugs as Father Barry delivers his great peroration in the ship’s hold over the rebellious Dugan’s body. Then he defies Friendly by taking Edie and all she represents into his arms after being told to forget her. In doing so, Terry reveals he has decided to stand up for himself.
This is typical of Beginnings, or Act 1s: the hero discovers his modus vivendi amounts to a living lie when he is confronted with an urgent, present problem whose solution demands abandoning that lie, which is the false, continuing solution of his past problems. In On the Waterfront that is Edie’s plea coupled with Terry falling in love with her. Typically, at the end of the Beginning the hero or heroine chooses or stumbles into a line of action he or she thinks will help resolve the dual problem—in On the Waterfront, when Terry embraces Edie, we understand they will now act together.
Act 2, or the Middle, is the history of that action chosen or fallen into at the end of Act 1. In Terry’s case, his demand to sort out his conscience puts him on the side of Father Barry and Edie, involving him in accumulating conflict with Johnny Friendly and his brother, Charley, who, in the famous scene where Terry laments he could have been someone, even a contender, lets him go and so is killed himself. Terry discovers he can’t sort his conscience out however he might like: Friendly won’t let him. The Middle ends, then, with the crisis—referred to as the crisis henceforward—which is the failure of that effort begun at the end of the first act.
Act 3 sees, finally, a climactic resolution, referred to as the climax henceforward. For Terry it means the discovery that testifying against Johnny Friendly in court wasn’t sufficient to unseat him, or make his own life or Edie’s safe, but that he has to confront Friendly directly. He does so in a head-to-head confrontation that first involves arguing over the nature of the past and what to make of it, and then in a direct fight with Friendly that Terry is winning until Friendly’s thugs overwhelm him. Even then Terry still wins: he has Father Barry help him to his feet when told Johnny Friendly is laying bets he won’t get up, just like he didn’t get up when he took the dive that first compromised him years ago. Now he leads the longshoremen to work, breaking Johnny Friendly’s power. Past and present have come together and been resolved. Time is set.
The fifth part of the fundamental story pattern follows from here: the New Beginning. It is the future we glimpse but don’t enter unless in a sequel, usually to the story’s cost and that of our patience. In the New Beginning the audience through the hero experiences the possibility of a new, unconflicted life freed from the past. If we lack that sense of a New Beginning, inevitably we feel a story has not ended: there is a structural problem with Act 3 that leaves us unsatisfied and critical. The New Beginning, being free of the past, represents a true now—moreover, one we often see in terms of “they lived happily ever after.”
Clearly the hero’s role is at times carried out by a woman, as with Julie in Blue or Emilie in Fanny and Alexander, with famous examples as far back as Sophocles’ Antigone. Our colloquial use of “hero” and “heroine” should not obscure, however, the technically different nature and function of the hero, as defined for the dramatic hero in Chapter 10, and the heroine, which is explored in many works here. Edie in On the Waterfront is a typical heroine. A burden of writing analytically about drama is this blur between the technical meaning and the looser colloquial meaning of its terms in common use, unlike the technical terms in the physical sciences. Usually what is meant is perfectly clear in context.
Moreover, as I reflect on the fundamental story pattern, we can distinguish between three ever-present time frames a dramatic action entails, with whatever additional times may be involved within the action: story time, the overall time involved in the entire story, past and present; dramatic time, the time involved in the actual dramatic story filmed; and running time, with its sense of causal p
ropulsion. These are three very different times and can be used creatively by writers, as when Shakespeare sets dramatic time spinning against running time as Hamlet and Ophelia exchange words over how much time has passed since his father’s death in Hamlet. We saw that the upshot of that exchange is to drive home how different is Hamlet’s experience of time from that of others around him. Even more tellingly it bares the nature of action for Hamlet, namely, that action is an illusion. That should have made us feel the play was slow; instead, it exposes the active scenes we have lived through with Hamlet as similarly illusive, setting dramatic time spinning against running time in us. Thus we can experience Hamlet’s relation to reality, as well as the others’ more conventional relations, including, up to that moment, our own as audience. Time and experience are tellingly linked.
Slow vs. Swift
Now we can deal with what makes a screenplay feel slow or swift. Carrière and Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Foreman’s High Noon will help here.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Unbearable Lightness henceforward) is admired by some, while others find it slow. High Noon is regarded as a taut classic, a western that casts a critical light on the conformity and McCarthyism of the early 1950s as its hero finally stands alone for what is right despite the expedient behavior of those around him. Some, rather than finding it swift, cannot relate to it because they dislike westerns.
Film is a public art, and these kinds of reactions are equally valid: there is not some academic evaluation that has the right to override our individual emotional response to a given film. I say this so that if you fall into the admiring camp for Unbearable Lightness or the critical camp for High Noon you may apply what is offered here as an explanation of their slowness or swiftness to other films that have those qualities for you.
Tomas in Unbearable Lightness is a highly specialized and respected doctor, as well as a lover who will never stay the night. Any attractive woman will do, and many respond to him with avidity. Sabina has the wit to make no demands on him: she can play with him. Tereza, on the other hand, is an earnest young woman who follows Tomas back to Prague, makes impassioned love with him, and stays. There is a quality in Tomas that allows him to float: being is light for him. It is as if David Hume is his creator, not Milan Kundera. He’s not an exploiter: life presents itself to him as a constant invitation to light-hearted pleasure, however intense a sexual encounter may be. In passing we see this is the period in Czechoslovakia that would collapse in 1968 as the USSR crushed Dubcek’s attempt to develop a communism with a “human face.” That plays merely as background through Act 1.
Tomas is nonplussed and enchanted by Tereza’s naïve, earnest approach to life. He asks Sabina to help her, as Tereza is interested in photography and Sabina is an artist. Sabina makes the point to Tereza that she will not let herself get too attached to anyone, although she and Tomas continue their affair even after Tereza has moved into Tomas’s apartment. Tension builds between Tereza and Tomas: she begins to have revealing dreams, like the one in which she tells Tomas, after her thrashing wakes them both, that she dreamed he made her watch him make love to Sabina.
The outside world intervenes only slightly in the war of music between party hacks and the young set at a dance hall. More important is that Tomas cannot keep his eyes off Tereza when she dances with another. Once they are home, he admits that upset him but won’t call it jealousy, as Tereza teases him. But he cannot resist her plea to get married.
They do so before a priggish Communist official: life isn’t easy, he warns them. They can’t keep a straight face. Marriage, however, does not make Tomas take life more weightily, although he publishes a piece critical of the Communist Party in the guise of an article on Oedipus. Typically, he also has a sexual encounter with a woman in the publisher’s offices: nothing in his life has changed. Tereza is just the woman who is there at night. But his faithlessness is increasingly unendurable to Tereza. She imagines him with other women even when she goes swimming and finally, at the end of Act 1, asks Tomas to take her with him when he makes love with other women. It’s an impossible request, betraying an anguish and an attitude to life incomprehensible to Tomas.
What are they to do?
We don’t find out, although that has been the focus of the action to this critical point. Instead, Act 2 starts with the Soviet repression of Czechoslovakia. The initial shock of the Czechs is powerfully evoked, their peaceful initial response, then their increasing frenzy and violence, emphasized by the film reverting to black and white. Heroically Tereza flings herself into the midst of the event with her camera. She realizes the danger and gives her rolls of film to someone to get them out of the country. Then she is picked up. To her horror she discovers that many of her photos are being used to identify protesters for prosecution. Distraught, she persuades Tomas to leave Czechoslovakia, and they flee to Geneva, where Sabina has already gone.
This is all very interesting but structurally problematic. What was background in Act 1 has become foreground, and the Act 1 foreground of marital tension has disappeared, replaced by repression and flight and, once in Geneva, the attempt to build a new life in an alien setting.
Both are perfectly legitimate subjects for a screenplay, but here there is a disjunction: the story we are involved in and invited to follow in the Beginning is submerged in another in the Middle. One does not follow from the other. Tragically, history may have that effect all too often on our lives, but screenplays shape our experience into cause-and-effect sequences that invite us to expect the action will develop in a particular direction. The effect of this disjunction between the first two acts in Unbearable Lightness is to ask us to start over in the middle of the story. We’re able do that: even a critic of the film like myself finds Tomas and Tereza appealing and their difficulties engrossing. It is just that we must take in a new conflict, with the older not followed through at a critical moment. The inevitable result is a story that feels like it has multiple starts, and that makes the overall film feel slow, however engrossing individual sequences of action may be.
Things do not improve structurally in Geneva. Sabina is already disenchanted with émigré gatherings, with their easy, merely verbal sentiments. She is already involved in an affair with another married man, Franz, who finds her as irresistible as she finds Tomas, though he is as earnest as Tereza. Nothing much has changed in her life except the setting; she, at least, is essentially consistent in handling.
Tereza finds her photos of repression are yesterday’s news: for an assignment, she is reduced to photographing a cactus. Tomas resumes his affair with Sabina. When Franz makes a real commitment to Sabina, she—consistent with what she told Tereza in Act 1 about avoiding real entanglements—abandons him. He arrives, after having told his wife he was leaving her, to find Sabina’s apartment stripped bare.
Sabina does not try to escape her feelings for Tomas or treat him like Franz, although she is prepared to leave him behind when she goes off to America. But then he is never willing to commit to her: more tellingly, she has a far more creative response to her experience than Tereza. Sabina finds ways to land on her feet, to create, to make life workable; Tereza cannot. In a key scene Tereza photographs Sabina; after a time, Sabina turns the tables. The camera in her hands is an invasive, appropriative force, but finally neither woman can penetrate the other, despite the loaded intimacy of the scene. What they stand for is incommensurate.
So Tereza leaves Geneva for repressed Czechoslovakia, explaining in her letter to Tomas how weak she is and how heavy life feels to her. Czechoslovakia is the homeland of the weak. Tomas resists following her, at first idly flirting: Tomas is like Sabina, not so much in his creative response to experience but in his ability to float over the weight of entanglement, except where Tereza is involved. I could say he loves and so follows her, but it is probably more accurate to say he senses her as his missing half, someone who is in an almost literal way indispensable and necessary. He follows her back to the
homeland of the weak.
We are at the film’s crisis, but that crisis is not related to the end of the first act and does not represent a failure of an effort to deal with their marital problems, as the end of that act left them, but is the crisis instead of the second story, that dealing with invasion and flight. There are elements of overlap: it is Tereza’s intensity and inability to deal with the “lightness of being” that drives her home, just as it made her miserable with Tomas, while his continuing flirtations are as intolerable to her in Geneva as in Prague. But their personal problems at the end of Act 1 are still in the same state. We have been involved in a different story in Act 2.
However interesting, the film now feels very long. As we saw when looking at the fundamental story pattern, the direction we expect to follow at the end of Act 1 never materializes in Unbearable Lightness, where an organic line of personal development has been supplanted by an episodic overwhelming of the personal in Act 2. We can’t add this up as one dramatic story, though we can certainly relate to it as a story in a novelistic way. This does not mean we are dealing with a problem caused by using a novel as a springboard: something like half of all screenplays filmed are adaptations—and no more or less successful than original scripts, which run into the same difficulties. The failing of Unbearable Lightness is a structural failure of the imagination, and revealing on that score.