The Death and Life of Drama

by Lance Lee

  The Dionysian is that destructive force that is also creative, as we will encounter later in the contemporary psychoanalytic thinking of the seminal D. W. Winnicott.6 The Dionysian man or woman is a reveler carried away by the god’s approach (Dionysos), or more generally, someone swept out of a narrow sense of self by passion into a sense of self at once communal and celebratory. The divisions of the mind into ego, superego, and id vanish: a Dionysian is transported into a state of oneness with nature, like Agave in The Bacchae, with the results we have seen. Bess in her rawness has a Dionysian force; she virtually becomes grief itself, and has to be called back into herself and some vestige of Apollonian self-control by Jan before he can leave her to go to work after their initial marital idyll. A Dionysian looks mad to an Apollonian; an Apollonian looks pale and far from life to a Dionysian.

  When some Apollonian structure—whether a social or an individual psychic construct—stultifies, a Dionysian release sweeps away the dead wood and by doing so makes possible new growth, like the fires that sweep through forests that leave ruin in their wake yet split open seeds for new growth that cannot otherwise open. The Dionysian drive, then, has a paradoxical nature, at once unquestionably destructive yet potentially creative in consequence.

  Greek tragedy fuses these forces together for Nietzsche. The chorus, under the Dionysian influence of music, which echoes the Schopenhauerian will in its endless movement and direct impact on emotion, envisages the action of the play as a way of making manifest some of the meaning of the music. That envisaging is seen by the audience through its identification with the visionary chorus. What is envisioned are the Apollonian, specific scenes with discrete characters and conflict that make up the dramatic action. But tragedy sweeps away the visionary heroine or hero, thus emphasizing the continuation of the life of the surviving community and world, for the chorus endures. Only the waking dream of the action passes away. Oedipus in Oedipus Rex goes into exile, his wife/mother Jocasta dead, but the Theban citizens can now rejoice in their prospects even as they lament Oedipus’s fate, for he was the source of the plague afflicting them, which ends with his departure. This cleansing and renewal, as experienced by the audience through the chorus, is felt as joyous and is characteristic of the Dionysian experience; it offers an explanation of the source of the tragic wonder Aristotle noted in tragedy’s effect on the audience. The survival of the chorus while the individual is swept away brings us into a state of oneness with something enduring beyond destruction’s powers.

  There is no dualism, then, for Nietzsche in the crowning moment of the tragic climax, but the ultimate experience of a knowing transport made possible by the union of the Apollonian as it tries to express the Dionysian. Such an experience defies the typical limitations of Western thought and language to verbalize without first splitting the experience into different conceptual categories, then claiming those categories reflect different realities, “me” vs. “not me,” for example. Nietzsche is on his own crusade, in his own way, early and late, to undo Descartes and Kant. Implicit in his way of speaking of the union of Apollonian and Dionysian is the view that dualism is an illusionary way of speaking of one reality.

  The debt owed to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche by the cooked and the raw is apparent and acknowledged. But the cooked and the raw are neither as sweeping as Nietzsche’s terms nor loaded with as philosophical a weight, however their blending in our films echoes the blending of Apollonian and Dionysian, if seen here as techniques for the effective handling of emotion in screenwriting. That would seem a ridiculous narrowing only if we forget that the matter of effective screenwriting and dramatic writing generally is not media or film studies or other screenplays but the stuff of human nature in conflict. The underlying presumptions of how we view ourselves—the argument that our culture is having with itself—are by that measure necessarily built into our dramas and characters, society and selves, equally.

  A second antecedent for the cooked, one also explored by Nietzsche as a precursor to the Apollonian, is the concept of the naïve. By that he means a displacement of emotion into an image or effect. He is eager to get past that to the Apollonian, but the naïve is a fruitful idea in itself, going back to the early German idealists and the work of the German dramatic critic Lessing.7 Certain stories of Chaucer, for example, are thoroughly naïve, using sophisticated deflections of emotion into images and effects at key moments, most clearly so in the ending of The Miller’s Tale.8 The naïve handling of emotion is, in other words, a recurrent feature of storytelling.

  The cooked, however, has none of the implications built into a word like “naïve”: naïveté, lack of sophistication, simple. It is anything but, just as the raw need hardly be celebratory in a Dionysian way. Our history has taught us that the Apollonian in the social realm can become pure repression as dictatorship hardens and forces its removal from without or collapses from within, while the Dionysian in the form of a mass movement and hysteria can lead to the Holocaust. The cooked and the raw are free of these terrible implications, if not the heavy. What is salient, however, is the realization that either technique taken to an extreme transforms its opposite into a corrective force that as audience we expect to appear in the action out of our fundamental expectation as human beings, profoundly moral at root, that extremes of any kind must be redressed and, in the nature of things, will be, even if by their opposite.

  A River Runs Through It gives moving expression to this inevitable dynamism in the scene where Paul lands an immense trout despite being momentarily swept away by the rapids. His older brother, Norm, reflects as Paul stands before him and his father that Paul has reached a state of perfection through his art as an angler, and that if anything is sure in this world, such a state cannot last. So he is not surprised to receive the call to see his brother’s dead body one morning soon after. Paul has been beaten to death for gambling debts. The fact that every bone in Paul’s right hand is broken is no consolation to Norm or to his father, who keeps pressing Norm for more details. Finally Norm wonders if they ever really knew Paul, to which his father replies they knew one thing for sure: that he was “beautiful.”9

  Nothing, as Freud sees in Civilization and Its Discontents, is harder to explain than beauty as a necessary feature of civilization. Beauty speaks to our desire for perfection, yet nothing motivates our destructive, contrary urge more powerfully and tragically to tear it down than beauty itself.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Smart and the Dumb

  Just as there are two fundamental approaches to handling character emotion with strong implications for story development, there are two fundamental approaches to handling character growth: the smart and the dumb. Neither term is pejorative or flattering: the smart and dumb handling of growth are equally effective and common in dramatic writing. Both also have implications for story development. A review of the old distinction between flat and round characters and their implication for typing will orient us.

  Flat and Round

  These terms usually have a literary reference and traditionally sum up the appearance and behavior defining a character. We give fresh life to these terms whenever, in building a character for use in a screenplay, we decide the character’s age, appearance, drive(s), ethnicity; clothe him or her and decide on economic status, job, and perhaps dreams; and sort out the love life, decide whether the character is emotional or rational, and so on, as well as whatever the problem is the character will face in the immediate action, along with the problem from the past that haunts him or her.

  We don’t spend much time on insignificant characters. It’s enough for a general to be a general in Schindler’s List: it’s enough for the agents photographing license plates at the start of The Godfather to be nameless and no more than “suits” in action. By the same token, Tessio and Clemenza fill out their roles in Don Vito’s family as the film develops but hardly add any new behaviors or details ranging from clothing to desire; only at the end with his betrayal does Tessio go toward a deeper s
hading or rounding out.

  They are, in this sense, flat characters. The relation of flat characters to typing is clear: a Jewish or Italian mother-in-law is immediately recognizable as a type, and as long as suitable in appearance and behavior to her type is accepted by us without a second thought. Flat characters then, superficially described, left undeveloped or hardly developed in the story, have little potential for change and internal growth or, crucially, for volition. They are not needed in this way: instead, they populate the protagonist’s world as essential elements of the milieu in which she or he moves.

  A round character bulks more largely in our imagination because the action shows him or her to possess a variety a flat character cannot. This can be done swiftly, as with Don Vito’s enforcer par excellence, Luca, at the wedding as The Godfather starts. His large and powerful appearance suits him. But, curiously, he’s not lurking in the shadows or standing with others, inherently threatening; instead, he sits by himself and awkwardly rehearses a speech as he waits to see Don Vito. He is at once characterized as unable to speak well, a cliché, and as someone showing an unexpected vulnerability. That impression is carried through when he sees Don Vito and gives his halting speech conveying his devotion.

  Later we see Luca prepare himself in his bare room to see the Tattaglias after the don asks him to gather information by pretending he wishes to leave the Corleones. Luca agreed without question: all he possesses in this world is his commitment to the don. He is not the bumbler he was at the wedding as he walks into the Tattaglias’ bar, but almost suave as he carries out his charade, and full of menace, for he is not overawed by these men. When he hesitates, however, to accept their offer, his hand is nailed to the bar with a knife and he is vividly strangled. Brief though these appearances may be, Luca is a rounded character and more interesting by far than a faceless, clichéd presence who kills effortlessly. But none of these appearances add up to character growth: the action just shows what Luca is.

  Johnny is another rounded character seen briefly in The Godfather, a Frank Sinatra knockoff who makes girls scream and appears the master of his fate in public, yet who weeps in private with the don over his inability to get a big part in a film, causing Don Vito to slap him and tell him to be a man. We hardly see him again, and then as the “star” who of course agrees to help Michael.

  We can change films and think of some of the characters in A Beautiful Mind. Nash’s “assistants” at MIT, former Princeton classmates, were just companion brilliant students at Princeton. They are consistently more conventional than Nash, followers, not leaders. Nash, not they, laments being included with others on a Fortune magazine cover before he strides into class in a T-shirt. They are flat characters, hardly better developed than the students in Nash’s classroom, with the exception of the young woman he will marry. The typing is clear, and the way in which a few representative details achieve that result as well.

  Rosen, the psychiatrist, is another matter. He doesn’t grow or change in the film: important as he is, he is also secondary, always the psychiatrist, always a man with one goal, to do in terms of current practice what is necessary to make Nash well. We see him in different settings, however, primarily at the clinic but also in the Nash home after Nash’s appalling electric shock treatment. He endures Nash’s irrational outbursts, guides his treatment, and interacts with and counsels his wife: he is well rounded.

  Two of Nash’s figments are well rounded too. Charles we see as a roommate and friend, someone Nash continues to see off and on at MIT; he is in Rosen’s office and witnesses Nash’s humiliation, and later tries to deflect Nash from his decision to ignore his figments. Charles does not grow, and change is confined to showing different parts of what he is from the start, as is also true of Parcher. Parcher is always threatening, seductive at first, frightening later as Nash tries to emancipate himself from him also. The girl, however, is always the same, and flat.

  One of the things we remark as characteristic of distinguished writing is the prevalence of round over flat characters, characters who are tellingly detailed and freshly imagined, even if they have little or no growth. One of the secrets of Shakespeare’s appeal is this richness of characterization in high and low characters, so that even a Borachio in Much Ado about Nothing surprises us, after he is captured, as he confesses and shows regret. Lucas and Kasdan in The Return of the Jedi show this rounding very simply with the trainer of the monster Luke kills in Jabba’s dungeon. The moment moves out of the cliché of the heroic encounter when the monster’s trainer approaches the beast’s body and weeps, giving the moment an unexpected and deeper emotional resonance. Rounding characters makes the action they are involved in matter more to us.

  But Borachio brings out a key element of a round character: unlike one that is flat, a round character gives the sense of a potential for will. He or she is not a mere type, an automaton of writing always predictable. Tessio makes this clear at the end of The Godfather. Up to that moment he has been essentially flat, even as one of the don’s key henchmen, but he is the one ready to betray Michael to Barzini in the End, and who is surprised and taken away for execution by Michael’s men instead. We can’t say he has grown in the sense of changed: it’s still Tessio, still doing what he considers “business,” who simply makes a bad decision. Yet by his action he becomes rounded, and in his case that rounding specifically involves a heretofore flat character suddenly displaying volition. But neither flat nor even the most developed round characters change in the sense of growing beyond and transforming our initial sense of them. That is the province of the smart and the dumb.

  Hamlet and the Dumb

  Change, meaning growth, is a constant in major characters and plot handling. That doesn’t mean a character has to change into something new by the End: he may change continually in response to a story’s challenges without becoming someone new, remaining a major character who has simply grown. Serial writing in television displays this feature: a series is a hit because of the situations it puts particular characters into that have caught our interest, not because those characters are transformed by the action. But series run into problems and fade because we become too familiar with the main characters while the initial inventiveness of the episodes inevitably falls off. They begin to seem merely rounded, become predictable, and end as types.

  This kind of nontransformative but revelatory character growth is true also of much of our writing in film and drama more widely. It is the dumb way of handling character development in which growth shows as a continual deepening or revelation of a given character’s nature and abilities without a commensurate transformation in kind. The single greatest character in dramatic literature is a good example of just this kind of development: Hamlet.

  The point can be easily seen if we reflect on the extent to which Ted in Kramer vs. Kramer is transformed by the end of the film, or Nash in A Beautiful Mind: Hamlet stands in stark contrast, remarkably consistent throughout the story.

  The young Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy largely gets it right.

  … Dionysiac man might be said to resemble Hamlet: both have looked deeply into the true nature of things, they have understood and are now loath to act. They realize that no action of theirs can work any change in the eternal condition of things, and they regard the imputation as ludicrous or debasing that they should set right the time which is out of joint. Understanding kills action, for in order to act we require the veil of illusion; such is Hamlet’s doctrine, not to be confused with the cheap wisdom of John-a-Dreams, who through too much reflection, as it were a surplus of possibilities, never arrives at action.

  and

  The truth once seen, man is aware everywhere of the ghastly absurdity of existence … nausea invades him.1

  Hamlet is caught up in grief before the start of the action, so much so he is chided by Gertrude and Claudius: they’ve moved on into marriage and governance. Hamlet can say nothing except that his grief is real, not a matter of convenience: he is not tr
ying to set himself apart artificially. Left to himself, he mocks Claudius and reproaches his mother for remarrying so soon, but in the first of his famous soliloquies also berates himself, “Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt.”2

  If he literally melted he would be dead. This desire, with much of the rest of the soliloquy, betrays his revulsion against life. We know what has caused this revulsion: not so much the death of his father, as touched on earlier, but the encounter with death that event involved. Since then, Hamlet gives us to understand with painful clarity, life has looked like a pointless show, like, in Nietzsche’s words, a “ghastly absurdity.”

  That is immediately driven home by his meeting with his father’s ghost, who demands Hamlet exact vengeance on Claudius for killing him. Hamlet vows to do so, but does he rush off to do his father’s bidding? No: instead he laments, “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite/that ever I was born to set it right.”3 Why “cursed spite” if his volition has not been stunted by his insight through death’s impact of life’s pointlessness? From such a perspective, action is madness and those demanding it, mad.