by Lance Lee
The selfish solution may persevere in life but must always fail in drama: the hero, when he acts truly, acts for us.
5. Failure of the False Solution
The failure of the selfish solution is only part of the story. Any solution that does not finally depend on the protagonist’s own resources must also fail. This is what comes clear in the crisis—not just the failure of Confused Growth and the Pursuit of Error the hero embarks on at the end of the Beginning. What fails is an effort that in any way relies on others and yet at the same time isn’t equally for others.
It’s another paradox.
Terry leans on Father Barry and Edie in On the Waterfront, but what he discovers, as he survives the attempt to run him down and then in the End that testifying as Father Barry urges doesn’t work either, is that his solution cannot be private or come from someone else.
Julie in Blue sees her effort to stand apart from life exploded in the crisis, and must face the reality that she must find a fresh solution in engagement with the others involved with her.
Schindler in Schindler’s List has all the money he could possibly want as he learns in the crisis that the Jews are to be killed. But by pursuing both gain and saving Jews, his conscience has grown to the point this success is a failure. He realizes this as he wanders in his apartment and looks at his money. His solution has been selfish up to this point, and he could go as a success in his original terms and let his acts of mercy end up as transitory illusions. But he cannot do so.
The crisis reveals something else beyond the selfishness and erroneousness of the attempted solution to conflict. The path pursued fails because it cannot undo the past. Schindler won’t be a success in his eyes if he leaves with his money. Terry won’t act other than the way he has been as a bum, an animal, if he simply shoots Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront. Julie in Blue won’t solve the problems of her grief over her loss, or the misuse of her talent, or the misplacement of love with her husband rooted in the past, by trying to stand apart.
A curious thing happens with reference to dumb and smart character development through these last two phases of the hero’s journey. Dumb characters are not affected at the moment of failure or by the preceding pursuit of error in the sense the pattern of their growth remains the same. The crisis may force a further revelation of character depth, as with Hamlet in Hamlet, or of capacity if an action-adventure hero, but though his situation may be critical such a protagonist’s growth remains dumb. This is not true of smart characters. The pursuit of error and the moment of failure—actual or merely evoked as a possibility in the emotional nadir at the end of Act 2—bring the very question of such characters’ success in transforming themselves into question. Smart characters have their essential drive in the story challenged. If smart characters fail, ultimately, then the entire transformative effort of their growth is wiped out in that failure, with all the implications of that for themselves and for all the others whose fate is dependent on them.
Imagine, if Terry fails in On the Waterfront he must flee with Edie or be killed. There will be no change for the community, and Friendly will remain in control on the docks. Terry’s essay in living by conscience will be reduced to a daydream. Whether Terry flees or is killed in this exercise of the imagination, he leaves Johnny Friendly in possession of the story.
This would be a tragedy or, worse, a mishandling of storytelling descending from the raw into the heavy.
6. The Discovery of the True Solution
The true solution is for everyone, not just the hero. It may be immediately apparent, as when Shane in Shane must confront Ryker and Wilson, or Munny in Unforgiven confronts Slim and Little Bill. Or it may take a further stripping, as with Terry who futilely testifies against Friendly in On the Waterfront before he finally confronts his nemesis directly, as with Leon who makes a final misstep with Nick before finally seeing the truth.
Schindler has his money and negotiates the saving list with Amon, who is sure Schindler stands to gain, even though he can’t figure out how in Schindler’s List. Nonetheless, Schindler must still save the women and children from Auschwitz and survive the guards in his new factory.
Michael is in exile in The Godfather in the crisis ensuing on Sonny’s death; he is brought back as the new don. But he must wait and proves capable of waiting, knowing the moment of reckoning must come, if not its date. That it must be against Barzini and his cohorts is knowledge he gains from the old don on his return.
Julie in Blue, after she gets over her shock that she cannot withdraw, realizes she must pursue a different course altogether, one of engagement. She begins by searching out her husband’s mistress, whom she discovers is carrying his child.
Paul in Analyze This realizes he can’t act as a thug any longer and must find a way to protect himself and his family, so he can withdraw from his criminal life. Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest prevents Cecily and Algy from marrying if he cannot; nonetheless, that act points the drama in the right direction, in that a solution must be found for all. The providential discovery of Miss Prism by Aunt Augusta and Miss Prism’s story lead toward the general solution needed.
The crisis, then, represents not just an abstract failure of the line of action embarked at the end of the Beginning: it is the moment the selfishness of the protagonist’s attempt becomes clear, i.e., when the personal, moral inadequacy of her or his solution becomes clear. Even in action-adventure films this moral element appears, if not directly flowing from the hero or heroine: Indiana has not been able to keep the Ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark yet cannot leave it in the hands of the Nazis: that is an obvious immorality he must rectify.
The Discovery of the True Solution thus leads directly into
7. The Heroic Deed
Terry in On the Waterfront at last directly confronts Johnny Friendly on the docks before the longshoremen over the past. The Campbellian holdfast in dramatic terms is the person who wishes to preserve the past unchanged that the characters were living at the Beginning who do not realize the delusiveness of their lives or that their nowness is only a repetition of past behavior. That is for the hero to make clear.
How creative Terry becomes when he finally confronts Johnny Friendly too! He speaks simply and eloquently but briefly with Charley in the taxi earlier; now he orates with increasing gusto before the fascinated longshoremen. He’s glad now about testifying against Friendly. That wasn’t ratting, as Friendly claims; he was ratting in the past when he sold himself out for Friendly, who sold out or killed anyone who didn’t obey him. Friendly is the ratter, the betrayer. Friendly is reduced to challenging Terry to a physical fight, which gives Terry the chance to relive the past and bring it to a new conclusion. Beaten but successful, Terry leads the men to work.
The Heroic Deed asserts the true self for action-adventure heroes and in more substantive drama allows them to find their true self. This assertion and/or finding of the true self restores creativity and endows that quality on their immediate community.
Terry, through the play of drama, has restored his moral agency and thereby his ability to respond freshly to experience. In doing so, he restores the creative flow of experience for everyone, and by doing so, their individual and social health. In the hero myth the hero causes a return of the cosmic creativity; here a purely human return is established in terms of experience and psyche. The full self is found in playing, as Winnicott argues: the fullness of the self is what is restored for the triumphant hero or heroine, even if it takes a dark turn in Michael in The Godfather or Munny in Unforgiven or arouses our anger through the hero’s limitation in Witness.
When Leon in Lantana breaks down and weeps, he at last overturns his numbness; now, because he can be creative again, he can meet others’ needs, specifically Sonja’s.
In Ran we see the positive solution for all take effect just before Saburo and Ichimonji die. The Heroic Deed here isn’t facing down Johnny Friendly but Ichimonji’s ability now to recognize Saburo as the true hero and su
ccessor, as the don does Michael in The Godfather. Lady Kaede is right to oppose this conjunction: if successful, it can only lead ultimately to a triumphant Saburo validated by the old hero and the perpetuation of the family success of Ichimonji and his heirs. By striking at them through Jiro, she dooms all connected with Ichimonji’s family/clan; with the old and the new hero dead these fail and Lady Kaede triumphs in her vengeance, even in her moment of death. That moves the story into her possession and that of the subjugated allies, who now take their vengeance and resume what has been proven to be their rightful place.
Noteworthily, success in The Heroic Deed confirms a smart character’s development as well as possession of the story. The success of a smart character, as we saw, transforms the social condition of his or her community. Story transformation embodies social transformation. That is our experience too through our identification with the hero as audience. His community stands in vicariously for our own, and the sensation we live through of a polity cleansed so that a New Beginning opens out we transiently and symbolically experience in the same manner. It is understandable now, parenthetically, why a breakdown in the will to believe is so fatal to drama. Our being forced to reflect on what otherwise happens as a matter of course through the story destroys a drama’s ability to take us on any journey at all.
This transformation of social reality is central to the communal experience of drama in film and on stage. Even the TV audience, if solitary or no larger than a family unit, is multiplied into a group event through the numbers watching, although a group experience can only be implied by statistics. But drama in film and on stage is a journey undertaken within and ultimately for a renewed community.
What then is the hero’s journey to this point?
The hero moves from a state of compliance with the false involving fact/truth or self or all three, a state he is comfortable enough with to override his guilt, one where change is more of a threat than going on compromised, whatever his ambivalence may be. He conspires with his own diminishment. His experience of this false modus vivendi as immediate and present in the Beginning, which we experience the same way through him, is an illusion. The truth is heroes are caught in a self-perpetuating, repetitive past. A key problem enters that begins a necessary process of Awakening that makes the falseness of the present in personal and factual terms increasingly apparent. The hero is confused and unsure what to do but finally chooses or stumbles into a line of action to solve his problem(s), aware that he has been living a lie that includes a truncated version of himself. Any step forward involves resistance from anyone whose life his actions challenge and change, especially the antagonist who is trying to preserve things as they are to maintain his grip on the story. That antagonist supports the false modus vivendi in which the creative flow of experience is stopped for it serves the antagonist’s hold on power. Heroes are always the proponents of Awakening for all.
But the solution the hero pursues is also in error and fails, or at the least needs the tremendous refocusing provided by the crisis. All too often that solution is private and selfish up to the crisis. Selfishness in drama is a prescription to failure for him, for what might have worked initially for the heroine Complying with the False will no longer in the crisis and the End. His solution must work for all involved with him. Yet despite the pursuit of error he has grown in the process, incrementally recovering volition, which means his ability to act from conscience as a moral agent. The hero craves to act in truth with himself and strives to shed his false self. That final shedding takes place through the heroic act, which restores the fullness of self and the healthy creative response to reality both for heroes and their community, recognized as such by all in the climax. That act overturns the grip of their opponent on the story. Heroes are the lens through which we focus our own growth to fullness as creative and morally responsible members of a cleansed community.
How is that so? By the commonplace I have so often previously referred to as identification, whether directly by identification, indirectly through empathy and sympathy, or through revulsion or fascination with evil or repugnant characters. These terms are the same, their apparent difference turning on a moral dimension allied to self-flattery in ourselves so that we say we identify with a hero of whom we approve, empathize or sympathize with one we are less sure of, or are fascinated or repulsed by one of whom we disapprove. Even though we refuse to say we identify with criminal protagonists, they too stand in for us. They too represent a path down which our nature can develop.
Identification is not a private “me” act in a “me vs. not me” reality: it happens in the cultural area, that area “you” and “I” share, where, as Winnicott correctly saw, most of our lives are spent. We are there together in both physical and imaginative interaction. The imagination leaps the barrier between “me” and “not me,” the dualism at the center of the argument we are having with ourselves, in that creative, existential area of cultural experience, Winnicott’s “transitional area,” the area where screenplays and drama occur.
To say such an event is not real because it only occurs in the imagination is like saying a car is not real because it only works on land. Reality is a house with many rooms. Freud and Winnicott spent lifetimes exploring that house and trying to record what they saw as scientists: dramatists spend lifetimes going from room to room and conveying their insights with artistic passion within the demands of dramatic structure.
This act of identification is also a commonplace. Drama has always effected a union between separate psyches through identification. That is what Nietzsche evokes with his union of Apollonian and Dionysian in Greek tragedy. Freud sensed this malleability and potential of psyches to unify with his recognition of the similarity between the private and cultural superego in Civilization and Its Discontents. This unity of different psyches, if we can think beyond dualism, is not a mystery, any more than the slayer being the slain is mysterious in Campbell’s mythological view, or Winnicott’s struggle to show the profoundly creative impact of destruction on objects, meaning fellow humans who survive; that survival creates reality. In fact, the ultimate burden of Winnicott’s third area of experience is that within the “transitional” space, the “me” and “not me” are already inextricably in contact.
Drama, through our identification with the hero, points to the same paradox, the union of the “me” of everyday life with the “not me” of the imaginary career of the dramatic protagonist.
In drama, what survives through the conflict is proven real and right. The resolution of conflict in the End and possibility of a new life glimpsed in the New Beginning depends on the continued effort to destroy the hero and what he or she stands for—on the creative effect of destructiveness, much as we balk at such language. That final reality, achieved through conflict, is what survives such testing, which as we have seen has deep implications for morality, creativity, the self, and the community of the protagonist’s self. The all too human world created by dramatic heroes is made whole through their journey. Because we experience this through an act of the imagination, we require repeated such acts to renew the experience, for experience moves, caught in a space-time continuum that only stops in drama when the “villain” gains or holds the upper hand, for villains stand for some version of the frozen past; in life the flow of experience freezes when neurosis and psychosis overwhelm the self.
But this is not all.
8. Suffering
Heroes who pursue error in the present and complied more or less willingly with error and illusion in the past cannot lead until they atone for their past errors.
Aristotle recognized suffering as an essential ingredient in tragedy that flows naturally from tragic action. We accept suffering as such as a commonplace, whether the suffering of lovers, villains, or heroines and heroes. In Freud’s view, suffering is inherent in human nature and civilization, such that much of how we behave can be understood as varying means by which we try to contain suffering. Yet the more civilized, t
he more we must suffer through the repression of instinctual satisfaction, of Eros and Thanatos, and so the deeper must be our sense of malaise and both unconscious and conscious guilt. Winnicott and modern psychoanalysis do not renounce this view; indeed, the presence of a constant stream of unconscious destructive fantasy with both the guilts and satisfactions it arouses is guaranteed to lend weight to Freud’s traditional view. The very presence of the first transitional object, which Winnicott speaks of existing in a climate of trust and which represents the mother, represents a denial of separation and hence of suffering. The humorous tack taken by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium doesn’t hide the ensuing suffering of the “manwoman” separated by the gods into individual beings with an acute sense of loss and need to rejoin. As a comedic thinker he puts that suffering in a way to make us laugh, without any attempt to deny its presence.
The great religions of the world all speak of the suffering that is our lot, whether because fallen and living in a vale of sorrow, as in Christianity and Judaism, or bound to the corruptible wheel of reincarnation, as in Hinduism, or to deception and illusion, as in Buddhism, or to winning a cessation of suffering in heaven by obeying the Koran, as in Islam. The insights of the great religious figures have been hard won and caused all of them suffering. We have murdered some of them. In our own tradition, a smiling Christ who never mounts the cross seems inconceivable, for the suffering caused by our being caught up in error as to self and reality is the road to the truth; in religion, suffering is the road to the divine. Religious heroes are the ones who can take our suffering on their shoulders and atone for us, and guide us onto the path of righteousness that relieves suffering.