by Lance Lee
These issues are part of the warp and woof of every story a screenwriter/dramatist develops, however lightly or seriously. They are daily commonplaces with individuals in all walks of life who issue their criticism and call for change, always inevitably causing turmoil, whether whistle-blowers of corporate malfeasance or social reformers or prophets. With each call those affected suddenly face the possibility that those whom we trusted cannot be trusted, social habits that seemed fixed are malleable, and beliefs that claimed immutability are time-bound, evanescent, and replaceable. We have and will shed oceans of blood in the name of what we believe, believe threatened, or believe others should believe.
Even the counterview concerning reality, so well expressed by thinkers like Aristotle, that our experience is real never goes all the way to saying: it is exactly what it seems. Experience for such thinkers is, instead, shaped by formative forces that may be immanent in it yet which require reflection to find or, in modern science, hypothesis followed by testing to confirm or reject. There is always in fact an asterisk to experience* the moment we seek to explain and understand ourselves. As we saw from Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Winnicott, experience* comes to consciousness on the basis of a good many shaping physiological and mental structures, including accumulated responses to formative experiences* in infancy and youth. We stand in a constant creative relationship to our experience* even in the dullest of lives where opinion and lifestyle appear ready-made. Governing opinions and lifestyles are simply the congealed responses of others to experience* we call tradition.
Drama cannot avoid so fundamental a part of our lives or so deep a root of conflict. In fact, dramatic structure re-creates and attempts to move forward from exactly this conflicted experience of awakening to the deceptiveness of experience, whether serious or comedic.
In so doing, the immediate action of drama collides headlong with the “past” with very curious results. The past, we think, as we saw in earlier chapters, is what has happened but is finished: its time is set, its conflicts are over. The truth is radically different. The past holds everything that is received and that we have done: our unthought-through relations with others and ourselves; tradition; and all that has created our superego/conscience, meaning the culturally shaded values we have integrated into our senses of self and social reality. It is so much a part of our lives, which we experience* deceptively in a constant now, that we forget the past is in fact the reality we live in, interact with, and bring our responses to and from. The past is what governs us. That whose time is truly set is on the order of Greek or Roman or medieval history, though, if we look closely, we are startled to see how much of those are still in fact active in our lives. If we go back to the first protohuman who discovered the use of fire, or earlier to the first who stood altruistically beside another in danger, even to the first who looked in a pool of water and thought, I am, we find the past is not over. It is the experience in which we are constantly physically and mentally mutating. The present is the mutational, transitory moment of such experience.
This is not how we usually think or the characters whom we create. They believe, as we do, the past is past and they are living in their immediate now. Time, we saw, has this quality of nowness in our experience. Screenwriters give lip service to the “past” by working out what they call the backstory, but that is always a small part of the treatment they develop whose emphasis is on the immediate, structured action. The backstory is rarely worked out in any detail. It is sufficient, for example, to say of Hamlet that Hamlet’s father is dead; his assassin uncle, king; his mother newly married to his uncle; and Hamlet grieving. Only when we try to grapple with the nature of that grieving under the pressure of a demand or event that involves rethinking the past—in Hamlet’s case the Ghost’s request for vengeance—does the importance of past events come into view: we see how Hamlet continues to react now as he did then.
Terry in On the Waterfront shows the same characteristics. Hamlet can’t act because of his insight into the pointlessness of life sparked by the impact of his father’s death; Terry takes another moral dive as he lets Johnny Friendly buy him off after Joey’s murder. The present action in the Beginning repeats the continuing past. The only thing new, or “present,” is the variation of the repetition.
Schindler in Schindler’s List makes this point very apparent when explaining his success in Krakow to his wife. What was missing in his life of previous failure wasn’t some essential capacity: it was war. Circumstances have changed but not him—what he was and continues to be now thrives because of special circumstances. Only when circumstances lead him to act mercifully, at first without thought, then deliberately, do we move into something new in him, something not already in his past.
Thus, when we establish character and conflict in the Beginning of the fundamental story pattern, including the milieu of the action, the nature of its reality, and the problem(s) generating the forward motion of the story with their cause-and-effect nature, handled in a more or less necessary and probable way as defined by the story’s reality, we dramatize a shared illusion: our and our characters’ belief that what we see is present, while the past is past. That is the false modus vivendi of the hero at the start of the action, and it exactly echoes our own condition in life. We may never come to terms with that unless forced to live dramatically, while dramatic characters have no choice in doing so. What ensues in the Beginning is an action that bares this illusion and the necessity for moving past it. That action betrays the fact our now consists of reliving the past.
This is always a revelation for ourselves and our characters. This situation also shows in what sense character and situation are dumb in essence at the start: the initial action can only reveal the nature of its past-bound reality in which change is illusory. This is so even in the case of characters who know something important is problematic in their past, classically like Oedipus in Oedipus Rex, who governs his life by flight from the prophecy he will murder his father and marry his mother, or contemporaneously in a character like Sonja in the Australian film Lantana, who craves passion and has sought therapy before the action starts. In a film like Wild Strawberries, old Isak Borg must come to terms with his entire life as he realizes neither he nor it is what he thought.
For the problem with this continuing “past” that drama makes its characters aware of is that, continue though experience may in the present moment, experience is “frozen” in the sense that the characters—and ourselves through them—have lost or surrendered volition. They, and ourselves through them, are under the control of others or of previous responses to conflict we merely continue in fresh guises. The heart of the problem is this: the creative flow of our lives has stopped.
That is the weight of the past that dramatic action strives to lift.
High Noon
Usually a film ends with “boy gets girl” or the reverse in a “happily ever after”: High Noon starts off that way with Will and Amy’s marriage. It is an inventive beginning: they and the townspeople are expecting the “happily ever after” to ensue as Will embarks on married life and gives up being the town’s enforcer. It is like putting the New Beginning of the fundamental story pattern first.
The unlikelihood of that succeeding, once stated, leaps off the page. Yet at first even the news of Miller’s imminent return is no more than a passing cloud for the married couple: not until Will has had time to think does he realize he can’t go and that the New Beginning must be deferred. When he turns back we understand immediately two elements are going to be subjected to testing: Amy’s love for Will and his convictions about the townspeople.
This is Winnicottian, i.e., the action attempts to destroy their love and his convictions to establish their reality, which is their survival quality. But, returning to the Beginning, Will and ourselves as audience realize several other things as he turns back. The past that seemed set is not. That was an illusion. Amy’s love is in question, meaning their modus vivendi is revealed as f
alse. That falseness expands as Will discovers the unreliability of the townspeople: everything Will does he has done before, whether turn to the judge, try to raise deputies, or expect Harvey to stand by him. None of this is shown finally to have survival value.
Now Kane realizes the past and so the present are not what they seem, which means reality is not what it seems. This comes as a bitter surprise to him because of the moral values he ascribed to those around him, which he discovers are false. The illusion he lived in is apparent, and the extent to which he had surrendered volition; since Miller’s imprisonment Kane has behaved habitually in this false modus vivendi. That discovery isolates his exercise of volition now and subjects it to a harsh examination, for it engenders profound conflict with those around him who do not wish to see themselves through Kane’s eyes, most obviously when Harvey physically tries to force him to leave town from his own guilt. Change provokes conflict; dramatic conflict enforces change.
Now the usefulness of misplacing the New Beginning is apparent. It couldn’t yet happen: the past wasn’t “past.” For when drama ends conflict in the New Beginning, it does something that does not happen in our lives; we saw what a profound mutational sequence of experience we are in fact caught up in. Time is “set” only by convention in our experience, but not in fact: we always live to some extent in illusion, but illusion ends in drama. Moreover, the fresh start achieved in drama and so hungered for in life can’t just be private. The initial New Beginning in High Noon was for Will and Amy and, in effect, selfish. The town was hoping to go on as it had, unaffected by their departure. That, of course, was the illusion of the townspeople.
But once Will and Amy kill Miller and his friends, a true New Beginning can ensue. It is a New Beginning for everyone, because the past, embodied by Miller, is indeed past. That is what his death signifies. How to evaluate Amy’s love and the townspeople is now seen truly too; all have been subjected to a destructive assault and what has survived is crystal clear. Leaving town is now definitive: the town and all it stands for is not a place for a true, awakened hero and heroine to live, literally or metaphorically. The hero is a hero by virtue of finding the solution for everyone involved in his story’s dilemmas, however bitter a pill to swallow that may be for other characters in that story.
Lantana
We begin with what we will discover is Val’s body waiting for discovery in the brush. We move back in time.
Leon is a detective having an affair while incapable of dancing with feeling with his wife, Sonja. He is savage in a police break-in, behavior that has become rote we discover through his partner. Sonja is seeing Val in therapy, where she bares her hunger for passion. Val, in a public speech occasioned by the publication of her book on her murdered daughter, speaks of her confusion of what to feel and believe when struck by tragedy. So we understand there are two troubled marriages on hand, Leon and Sonja’s with a loss of passion, and John and Val’s marred by a daughter’s murder. If Leon can’t respond to Sonja as she wants, John can’t grieve as Val does, and certainly not publicly. Leon suffers from sudden breathlessness and pain, like Paul Vitti in Analyze This; that also interrupts his making love with his mistress. Val and John have given up lovemaking and cannot carry through on one occasion when they try. When Leon’s mistress, Jane, tells him she thinks there should be more between them, Leon tells her he still loves his wife to end the affair, which was only another passionless activity for Leon.
This is all immediately active, as drama must be to gain and hold our attention and move the action forward. But what is shown are lives in stasis. John and Valerie are trapped in grief, suffering from the burden of the dead daughter, as frozen in response to life as Hamlet in Hamlet by the death of his father. The death of a child is the death of the future. Yet to continue living this way is anguishing. John retreats from Val’s emotions in proportion to her breaking down from the pressure of loss. Sonja and Leon repeatedly display the stasis of their failed marriage: Sonja may want passion, but Leon feels “numb.”
Val’s disappearance brings John and Leon together in Act 2, the Middle. Leon approaches John in the same rote, habitually numb way in which he has been acting so far, believing that, as the husband, John must of course be the murderer. Since we know John is innocent, Leon’s persistence in error becomes the focus of the action. We understand now that Leon has been persisting in error from the first moment of the screenplay; there is nothing present in his action at all. He has no creative response to experience: the weight of the past is stifling him and those dependent on him, just as we so often feel we are in danger of being stifled in our lives and act out or turn to others for help, as Sonja does with Val. Val and John’s relationship while Val is still alive is equally revealing: Eros has been stifled in their lives, and Thanatos is tearing them down.
Thus Leon’s rote behavior is tested in the Middle: if it succeeds, Thanatos triumphs. He lies to John about his own infidelity, shocked by John’s revelation of how guilt and remorse can hold a loveless relationship together, a description perilously close to home for Leon. He is surprised when John isn’t found at a suspect’s home in a homosexual relationship; Leon assumed the man an aggressive patient of Val’s—Patrick—hides “of course” was John, and that Val as a consequence had been the victim of a homosexual plot. Then Leon confesses his affair to Sonja because he has taken one of Val’s tapes and heard Sonja say that being lied to is what she would find unforgivable. Naturally, his admission revolts Sonja because it is so unexpected and lacking in any real feeling. Real, fresh, creative responses to experience are what Leon cannot make. Finally Nick, Jane’s neighbor, is arrested when it is discovered Nick was the one to give Val the ride the night of her disappearance. We see in the crisis that Leon has been on a completely wrong tack.
Does he learn yet? No. He resists. There is still Nick to misjudge. Leon now assumes that Nick is of course the murderer. But the truth comes out irresistibly as Nick tells his story and helps them find Val’s body. He innocently gave Val a ride the night she disappeared. There was no murder. Val, we see in Nick’s flashback, panics as he turns into a shortcut, afraid the same thing is happening to her that happened to her daughter. She throws herself out, runs into the woods and takes a fatal fall. Now the falseness of all Leon’s rote, repetitive behavior is laid bare. No one is guilty. Leon finally listens all the way through the tape taken from Val’s office and hears Sonja say after a very long pause that she still loves him. He breaks down and weeps.
Crying is a form of atonement, and more than anything else that is what Leon needs to do if he is going to be able to live: atone for persistently misusing his volition to affirm illusion. He must admit the profundity of his erroneousness and surrender his habitual reaction to experience.
We see the issue of volition in a new, darker light with Leon. The problem for the heroine or hero goes beyond the loss of volition in the false modus vivendi that characterizes their lives in the Beginning. It is true they have surrendered and lost volition. It is also true they assent to that loss. To admit that assent to falseness is difficult indeed: Schindler must acknowledge evil-doing, Kane finally must thrust fear aside and walk down an empty street to meet his destiny, Terry must suffer Edie’s rebuke that he is a bum.
There is another, revealing way to see Leon and the hero and heroine’s behavior up to the moment they assume responsibility for their volition and past errors. Until Leon weeps he has been in compliance with a frozen version of himself, a false self, just like John and Val, who at least share tragedy as a causative experience. But most lives in the modern industrial and postindustrial elite nations are not rooted in tragedy; most are like Leon and Sonja’s. Time moves imperceptibly for such, so that we hardly know how one day we arrive at such deep dissatisfaction. Leon has not just been in compliance with a false self but aggressively so, fighting to maintain error. Change can only be traumatic.
Val, however, is most revelatory. So powerful is the weight of the past in her case that sh
e is fixated on its one salient feature and conceives her own experience wholly in the light of another’s tragedy. She has surrendered her own life. Her death makes visible the extent of that surrender. Action, in drama, is revelatory as a matter of course.
Wild Strawberries
In the Beginning Isak Borg readily admits he’s “difficult” to get along with. He is a model of self-centeredness, widowed, callow, superficially polite and courteous yet ruthless. He embarks on a journey to receive an award, a symbolic journey quest, if you will, accompanied by his son’s wife, Marianne. On the trip he is assaulted by memories of his childhood home and his young love, Sara, who finds Isak’s cousin Sigfrid so much more interesting in Isak’s flashbacks and eventually marries him. They pick up a young, hip Sara with two companions who both are in love with her, and briefly an older couple enmeshed in a venomous relationship whom Marianne throws out for the “children’s” sake. Isak admits the older couple’s relationship echoes his and his dead wife’s. Sara’s two lovers argue over faith vs. materialism at a lunch stop, and, surprisingly, Isak knows the words to a poem that celebrates God’s love everywhere. Love is in short demand, however. Isak, we now sense, is caught in a false modus vivendi on which his self-esteem is built.
Isak’s memories deepen in the Middle as he relives a scene of his wife’s infidelity and her summation of how cruelly understanding he will be later. Apparently he was. In a memory that turns into a dream, he is taken into a room and examined. He is a doctor, but suddenly cannot understand or do anything. He is incompetent, not a man going to get an award for distinguished service. He has forgotten a person’s first duty: to ask for forgiveness. The presaged awakening at the end of the Beginning has now been made overt.