The Death and Life of Drama

by Lance Lee

  Fullness

  The experience of a film as full, then, can bear a paradoxical complexity of storytelling elements, for when the overall unity of story purpose along with the usual unity of conflict is maintained, a film is felt to be clear and cohesive.

  In Rear Window there are multiple subplots concerning the neighbors on view beyond Jeff’s apartment: the newlyweds, the woman they characterize as “Miss Lonelyheart,” the musician, the young dancer, and so on. All have their own story, but all bear on Jeff and Lisa’s story, whether ironically through the newlyweds or the dancer fighting off the wolves, or directly, as with the salesman’s ill wife Jeff decides is murdered and whom Lisa’s courage in investigating goes a long way in convincing Jeff that she is the right woman for him.

  Rashômon is equally revealing. Five stories are linked: the ongoing story of those temporarily trapped at the ruined temple during a storm, Tajomaru’s story, the wife’s story, the husband’s story through a medium, and the woodcutter’s story. Tajomaru portrays himself as daring and resourceful, taking what he wants and toying with the husband in their duel before killing him. In the wife’s story, she sees the contempt in her husband’s eyes for her after she has been raped and kills him herself, consumed by guilt and shame, although she implies his death happens as she falls forward with the knife, fainting, as much as to say she is blinded by passion and represses memory. But in the “husband’s” story the wife wants to leave with Tajomaru, who is shocked by her request for him kill her husband. He rejects her and asks the husband instead what he should do. The wife flees and Tajomaru frees the husband, who kills himself because of his dishonor. The woodcutter recounts a version in which the husband, freed after his wife’s rape, won’t fight for her, while Tajomaru has lost interest. The wife taunts them by saying a woman can only love a real man, implicitly neither of them. Stung by her contempt, both men now fight at once fearfully and fiercely. Finally, at the ruined temple, they wrestle with their inability to add these stories up until the priest’s belief in humanity is steadied when the woodcutter takes the abandoned baby found at the temple for his own, in a concluding act of compassion.

  Each story is convincing, yet none is definitive. The potential for a sense of complexity is great; instead, we end with a sense of fullness. Each story transpires within the same context of the men at the temple trying to understand what happened, and each story is a candidate to be the story of the same event. We are not left with incoherence or the sense of multiple stories in dramatic time trying to occupy one running time when none proves final, but the sense that however far we go in our attempt to understand ourselves and our actions, we finally reach the point of acknowledging the ultimate unknowability of the truth and one another. It would be a perfect embodiment of the perils of our root Kantian view of the world if it were not for the fact that the audience is put in the position of entirely knowing a film.3

  That uncertainty in Rashômon may be disconcerting, and certainly complicates our reflections on character, motivation, and behavior, but Rashômon’s end has a transcendent quality, like the climax of The Usual Suspects. Neither ends irresolute and complex.

  This leads to another key ingredient of the experience of fullness touched on earlier: the sense that the fundamental story pattern is fulfilled, that past and present problems are resolved even if that resolution involves a sense of ambivalence or ambiguity in the nature of reality, however defined by a given film. A New Beginning becomes possible and the time of the film’s action becomes “set,” as we saw thinking through issues of time, as a future opens free of the preceding conflicts. In Rashômon, just as in the wholly different Fanny and Alexander, we end with infants who symbolize a future filled with possibility in the hands of adults, implicitly in Rashômon, explicitly in Fanny and Alexander. In the latter, Gustav Adolf wonders if little Aurora or Victoria may not turn out to be a world redeemer.

  As these examples also highlight, fullness in drama involves an engagement with issues of Eros and Thanatos, which indicates a real engagement with ambivalent human nature. Fullness is irrelevant to the sense of triviality a film generates even if otherwise successful, as with some of the sequels looked at earlier that turn into entertainments.

  Typing, Volition, and Fullness

  When we meet Edie in On the Waterfront at Joey’s death, she is all fire and purpose. She reproaches Father Barry for hiding in the church, energizing him to become more directly involved with the longshoremen. She won’t accept cautions from her father, Pop, appearing at the church meeting Father Barry calls. She does not immediately lose her head and heart over Terry when he saves her from Johnny Friendly’s thugs as they break up the meeting: she’s half-attracted, half-offended by him. She stays to find Joey’s killer, although her father wants her to go back to the church school upstate. She won’t play deaf and dumb even within the family, as Pop does. When she does fall for Terry, she challenges Terry’s false modus vivendi with himself and Johnny Friendly by asking for his help in finding her brother’s killer and insisting on a generous approach to life.

  Edie, then, is anything but a type: she is full of volition and acts from the dictates of her conscience. But she reverts to a type after Terry confesses to Father Barry and her, breaks into her apartment, sweeps her off her feet and makes her admit she loves him. Thereafter she is just a woman in love afraid for her man’s survival and wants to flee the scene of danger even if that means abandoning her attempt to get justice for Joey. Eros in Freud’s sense has overwhelmed her: she is not concerned with issues of “civilization” like cleaning up the docks but wants instead the perpetuation of the loving pair “Terry-Edie.”

  It’s an interesting story development, entirely believable and revealing. Typing works against fullness by narrowing characterization and volition in character. On the Waterfront would be in danger from Edie’s narrowing if Father Barry did not take over her role of awakening and guiding Terry until he becomes fully volitional with the assertion of his conscience and breaks his earlier typing as a bum. Edie can revert to a type and still enrich the action, but now by upping the difficulties Terry faces.

  Bud in L.A. Confidential is heavily typed as one of the boys in the Beginning. He may thrash an abusive husband but refuses to speak against his fellow officers after the Christmas brawl he participates in at the police station. Dudley protects him and recruits him for his muscle.

  Then Bud falls for Lynn, a call girl echo of Veronica Lake. She reciprocates and encourages his unease over the Night Owl case. She insists he’s smart and should pursue his investigation, challenging and energizing him as Edie does Terry in On the Waterfront. Bud begins a course of action that ultimately allies him with the initially hostile Exley, even after Dudley arranges for Bud to find pictures of Exley and Lynn together. Despite his rage over Lynn, Bud chooses to listen to Exley’s exposure of Dudley and join forces with him. Bud has become a moral agent, gaining volition as he leaves typing behind, asserting control of himself. When he and Exley triumph, however morally ambiguously, we are pleased and experience the film as full.

  Thus drama imitates a pattern of living we almost never encounter, some rare part of our lives with a discernible shape organized around some clear purpose in response to some problem we wrestle with in a state of crisis, suffer through, and resolve so that we can put that part of our lives behind us and move on. Drama does not imitate what we usually mean by reality at all, but, as Aristotle carefully says,4 an action, which is a highly unique, rarely encountered moment of reality in which conflict is joined and resolved in a defining and illuminating manner. Typing prevents the exploration of self/character in conflicted moments of life and drama that we need to reach a resolution of conflict. In life and drama we or a character must find fresh resources to resolve conflict definitively: we must grow. Types do not grow.

  Endings

  So far I have looked at the End of a screenplay within terms of the fundamental story pattern as that moment in a dramatic story when
its action is resolved and we see, without entering it, a New Beginning free of old concerns. I have looked at the sense of fullness we gain through successful storytelling and emphasized the relation of the structural need for the New Beginning to the experience of an action in reality that a screenplay “imitates” or embodies, that root hunger in ourselves for the sense our lives add up and are meaningful as we surmount conflict and the past. An ending needn’t be clear, I said, in the sense that it can involve ambiguity and ambivalence, but it must be an ending. Earlier I reviewed the lack of transcendence in the heavy, and of how that sense of transcendence is part of what we include in a sense of the New Beginning. More is involved.

  Happy romantic endings are the simplest examples of this structural completion. The hero gets the heroine, or the heroine the hero, whether in a romantic comedy, farces like Analyze This or Married to the Mob, or serious dramas like On the Waterfront. The failure to “get the girl” in Witness forces a critical evaluation in us of the societies that make their union impossible, because such an ending gives a resolution that paradoxically defies our sense of resolution. In Blue Julie ends up with Olivier, reaffirming a commitment to life and creativity and confirming our own sense of her transcendence of her family’s death. In these cases, the idea is that the heroine and hero will live happily ever after, conflict free. Time, in a certain sense, is imagined as over because it will always contain the same experience. This is a dream, of course, but one we like to dream and, contrary to conventional critical reactions, anything but superficial. Suffering and life go hand in hand, as Freud so effortlessly shows in Civilization and Its Discontents, something we understand very well through our own experience, one from which we seek repeated redemption.

  However, when we deal with substantive films like Ran, Rashômon, or Schindler’s List, the New Beginning is not a simple “happily ever after.” Ambiguity and ambivalence enter: evil can even triumph as in The Usual Suspects, or the truth escape us as in Rashômon. Exley may be exonerated in L.A. Confidential, but Bud is left to join another police force. Though he “gets the girl,” she has been a hooker. The past may be defeated yet linger enough to warn about the future, as Johnny Friendly does in On the Waterfront. A killer turned too human to kill may be allowed to escape, like Nikita in La Femme Nikita; a hero may even die, as in Ran or Hamlet; and the future may belong to former enemies.

  In all cases life goes on, and not just as a popular dream. There is a transparent triumph of Eros in the obviously happy, romantic ending, but Eros triumphs equally through more substantial and even tragic endings. Screenwriting structure culminates through climax and resolution in that sense of a fresh start in which a personal—or personal and communal, or in the case of tragedy, only communal—continuance is ensured. There is no illusion here that time will be a continuous flow of the same experience: instead, it implies the ability of the hero/heroine or community to develop creatively, free of past mistakes, typing, and error. Life is affirmed, and the power of destructiveness, even to the extreme of Thanatos, is ended. Hamlet may die in Hamlet, but not before Laertes, so gullible, Gertrude, so culpable, and Claudius, so murderous, are killed too, as Fortinbras discovers as he takes over to initiate a new day. Ichimonji and Saburo may die in Ran, but Fujimaki and Ayabe lay claim to the future. Something is felt to be ongoing and indestructible at the end of a successful screenplay, something that we experience as our own through identification with the heroine/hero, something which is at least pleasurable and in its more memorable instances exhilarating. Those more memorable instances verge toward tragedy yet are characteristic of films whose heroes succeed, too, as with Julie in Blue or Schindler in Schindler’s List.

  A cumulative sense emerges from dramatic actions we go through of healings. The unresolved past is brought into the present and, along with present problems, resolved. Protagonists that were split, which is what typing means in psychological terms, are made whole as they regain their ability to act as moral agents. What was unconscious, unknown, and denied has been brought to consciousness, been realized, and by being accepted, overcome. What was separated, most obviously when dealing with male and female aspects of ourselves as in romantic comedy, or good and bad or smart and dumb sides of our selves like Bud and Exley initially in L.A. Confidential, is made whole. The oldest of human splits is undone for a happy moment in the New Beginning, that between our living blindly in nature, entirely typed by instinct and role, and taking the fatal step into humanity by becoming conscious of ourselves and thereby volitional agents. We find that step entirely admirable, of course, but such a step separates us from the broad, unconscious realms of nature, from, in Nietzschean terms, the primal mother.5

  These paragraphs are written very broadly. The usual screenwriting and media studies have a plethora of narrow, self-reflective concerns, as if so great an art exists and roots in a hall of mirrors that reflect only what those involved in its immediate production or criticism say about one another. They are media studies versions of the Platonic cave. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves of the relation of story structure to human experience and imagination and, inevitably in any great art, to our deepest hungers and our most irreconcilable conflicts. Fullness as an experience lies in the direction of embodying these, while the same elements that structurally impede effective storytelling also impede our gaining an adequate sense of the range of our own possibilities. That is what the New Beginning at the end of a story is meant to make us sense, not an Eden we have been excluded from, but one we are journeying toward.

  PART II

  The Cooked and the Row

  CHAPTER 5

  The Cooked and the Raw

  The action of an effective screenplay is immediate and emotional: we reflect on the larger meanings of the action when a film is over because of our emotional involvement with characters for whom we have been made to care. But there is a fundamental, common cleavage in how a writer chooses to handle a character’s emotion. The cooked refers to emotion experienced through some element of formalization, the raw to its direct, unvarnished expression. Both styles communicate emotion with equal effectiveness, but each leads to noticeably dissimilar styles in handling characterization.

  Cooked Emotion

  A cooked handling of emotion always involves a restraint, a distancing, and/or an element of stylization.

  Look at the climactic confrontation between Michael Sr. and John Rooney in Road to Perdition. It is night and raining, as it was the first time in the film when Michael went out with his tommy gun. Rooney is surrounded by bodyguards as he goes to his car as Michael starts shooting. We see the flashes of his gun, flashes from the men’s guns as they fall, see and hear the rain falling, and see Rooney standing motionless with his back to Michael, but we hear no firing.

  Rooney turns to face Michael after the others are dead. “I’m glad it’s you,” he says to Michael. We see them both: then Michael starts shooting. Now we hear the gun, but see only Michael: Rooney is out of the shot, his reaction to the bullets hitting him unseen, all focus on Michael’s face.

  It’s very powerful. First, expectation is defied by the absence of the sound of firing, so that we watch yet another killing sequence with a startled freshness and uniqueness. Then we are forced to concentrate on Michael’s grief as he shoots Rooney. The inevitable urge toward stylization involved in the use of the cooked is very apparent yet here lets the writer, David Self, communicate emotion with an original force, for the cooked isolates a key emotion from the flood of incident and makes it stand out in sudden, intense relief.

  A similar use of the cooked is seen earlier in the film as Michael and Rooney’s son, Connor, confront Finn. They have been sent to talk to Finn, not shoot him, but Connor shoots Finn when he begins revealing information about Connor. We watch the ensuing shoot-out through the eyes of Michael Jr. peering in. We hear the firing without seeing men killed, watching instead a stream of shell casings rain on the floor. Then one of the bloodied men falls dead facing Michael Jr
., making him recoil. The distancing and stylization again are clear, the use of the visual effect of the bloody face and Michael Jr.’s recoil standing in for a conventionally direct handling of the action.

  Road to Perdition shows this use of visual effects in the cooked handling of emotion well: Like Water for Chocolate shows the use of substituting an emotional effect for emotion instead of its direct expression.

  Tita and Pedro are desperately in love in Like Water for Chocolate, but Tita as the youngest daughter is doomed to care for her mother, Elena, as long as she lives. Elena refuses Pedro’s marriage proposal for Tita but accepts one he offers for her daughter Rosaura. Pedro explains to Tita that this way he will always be able to be close to Tita, but she is not consoled: she isn’t the one getting married, and she has no intention of betraying her sister, while Elena is vigilant against such a possibility.

  Cooking is Tita’s specialty, aiding and aided by their ancient cook, Nacha. Tita and Nacha prepare the wedding cake as the wedding day approaches. A few of Tita’s tears fall into the cake’s batter. She does not weep floods of tears, but then emotion is not hidden at all in the cooked style, just handled differently. We do not see Rosaura and Pedro’s marriage ceremony, only the reception afterward at the house as the cake with Tita’s grief is served.