by Lance Lee
Thus we suffer through our need to atone for error, through our need to find the divine, and through the very nature of our need to live in a civilized manner, as well as from the inherent suffering built into human nature, with its impossible demands on reality and experience, for example, that “true love” should last forever. A hero who doesn’t suffer would not be human to us. This takes us beyond the “testing” in the Middle, typically spoken of as trying the protagonist’s resolve made at the end of the Beginning, as in the way Julie in Blue is systematically challenged in her effort to be uninvolved with life. It goes far beyond the testing inflicted on one lover by another, or a father on a daughter’s suitor in a romance or romantic comedy. Suffering in heroes is inevitable because it results from testing, and testing is just a technical word for the destructive aspect of creativity in its attempt to destroy protagonists or their resolve in order to establish their reality. The responses and the accompanying alterations heroes go through in self and resolution are generated in reaction to that testing in the face of our inherent need to believe we rest in reality and truth.
Consider simple examples. Luke in Star Wars suffers because his uncle keeps delaying his leaving the farm: he is thwarted, frustrated, and compliant. When urged to take up the his true path as a Jedi knight by Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke declines: there are chores to do at the farm; he’s not free. When he returns to the farm there is the shock of his dead relations, whose death frees him to join Obi-Wan Kenobi and causes him additional suffering. He continues to suffer even while doing great deeds, most so when he thinks Darth Vader has killed Obi-Wan Kenobi, and later again as he sees his comrades destroyed in the attack on the Death Star. It is a constant thread in his experience.
Yet when he triumphs in the end he, for that time, overcomes suffering.
Or think of Paul in Analyze This, suffering because he cannot beat and kill, instead experiencing anxiety attacks rooted in a long-delayed coming to terms with his role in his father’s death; or of Charlie in Roxanne, who suffers for his nose, as did his template, Cyrano, in Cyrano de Bergerac, and who helps give Roxanne to another man out of a sense of his own inadequacy. In the End, however, Paul and Charlie both triumph over suffering, the latter by “getting the girl,” Paul by successfully exiting from the mob and cleansing himself of guilt over his father’s death. Cyrano in Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac moves down the path of romantic tragedy until the climax makes all clear and transforms Roxanne from a state of ignorance to truth.
Michael in The Godfather takes our understanding of suffering to another level. He is in error standing aside from the family: no sooner does he change than McCluskey hits him so severely he needs bandaging and even in Sicily shows a continuing bruising. It is a sign of suffering as outwardly telling as Ahab’s ivory leg in Moby Dick, if on a smaller scale than that individual’s engagement with the cosmos. Nor is Michael done suffering: he loses Apollonia in his false New Beginning, in part because he has not yet atoned enough. That biblical, Old Testament sense of proportion in dramatic writing is relentless in its drive to ensure that our heroes’ suffering is proportionate to their error. Sonny has died: Michael must pay a life.
When we reach Terry in On the Waterfront, we see suffering as a constant thread from the beginning. He suffers over Joey’s death, from love, from divided loyalties, from the sting of Edie’s criticism, and then after he confesses to her, from her rejection. He suffers because his brother is murdered, and then because he is ostracized after testifying. Even Jimmy, one of the Golden Warriors, rejects him and kills all his pigeons, calling him one too. He suffers climactically as Friendly’s thugs beat him so savagely he can’t tell whether or not he is on his feet. No longshoreman comes to his aid: one remarks that Terry is one of Friendly’s gang. Terry’s atonement makes it possible for the longshoremen to follow him because he—just as importantly, at that moment—survives. So we can add a final and necessary path to suffering: the creative effort to make real by the failure of destructiveness toward the hero and his transformations. By the same token, Terry’s walk leading the longshoremen to work is exhilarating: bruised and swaying, he has moved past Johnny Friendly’s power and overcome suffering.
In the case of tragedy, suffering overwhelms protagonists but dies with them as the story moves to others. When the destructive side of creativity prevails, time resumes for someone else than the hero. In drama, we saw, we always end in affirmation for someone. This is the same destructive/creative testing that, when it results in a sense of destructiveness for its own sake without any creative final effect, drives us into a recoil from the heavy.
Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries by the End wants to change and atone. He wants to do something to help his son’s marriage. His transformation through suffering is redemptive in our eyes; fortuitously, the power of Eros is such for Evald that he is driven to admit he cannot do without Marianne, and a film that seemed to look at the corruptible side of human experience with a religious intensity of expression ends on a positive note.
Suffering, in short, must burn out the erroneous part of the hero’s character. That erroneous side must be seen to be what has not survived. The action through identification binds us with him and makes clear this element of his journey; consequently we accept his transformation and we experience it transiently as our own. Schindler’s career in Schindler’s List offers a final insight into the necessity of suffering. Those around Schindler suffer, whether Helen as Amon’s maid or the many inmates in the camp in general and those Amon specifically torments or kills. Amon himself suffers, unable to carry through on his feelings for Helen except by beating her. Individuals Schindler saves often suffer first with Amon; finally Schindler himself suffers, first through losing his workforce as Amon wipes out the ghetto, then later, if briefly, when jailed for kissing a Jewish girl. But right up to the climax Schindler’s suffering is implied, at best, and if overt, minor in emotional expression and consequence compared to the other major characters’. He seems instead a character of infinite resilience and resource, whether amorally putting his business together or later, moved by conscience, saving as many Jews as he can. He is not even rattled in Auschwitz as he buys the freedom of “his” women and children, even facing down a guard who wants to keep the children as he turns a girl’s hand outward to display the softness needed, Schindler claims, to test shell casings for their smoothness.
Thus Schindler’s breakdown as Stern and the Jews give him the ring in the climax is dramatically necessary if he is not to seem a kind of demigod we can watch with awe but not, finally, take as one of ourselves. As the inscription “Who saves one life, saves the world” is explained to Schindler, he at last completely breaks down, sobbing how he could and should have done more. He reproaches himself for keeping his gold Nazi party pin, his fancy car, and for his living so well on the money he made from the war, even though by now he has spent all of it for the sake of “his” Jews, bribing officials so they suffer no consequences from producing artillery shells that do not explode. Those reproaches strike home to our hearts, for who among us has not had similar feelings? That breakdown speaks to the essence of our experience as flawed human beings, to our unexpressed if powerfully felt suffering and guilt. That breakdown speaks to our depth of regret that we have failed ourselves and so failed the trust and need of those most dear and dependent on us. It speaks beyond our sense of failing our potential to falling too far short of “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” that most impossible of injunctions and most moving expression of the creative urge toward universal love.
Suffering creates us human, and is the price we pay for our humanity. Suffering is the path to personal wholeness in the triumphant End in drama, to communal in the tragic; suffering is the road to the divine for the ultimate dramatic hero or heroine who, like Schindler, is finally a religious protagonist. They who survive their suffering or through their suffering make possible the renewal of the world around him are heroes, and because they are the ones we identify with, t
he path they take through suffering brings to our experience a sense of completion and fullness.
We cry we could have done more in Schindler’s List; we stagger to our feet and lead the men in On the Waterfront; we annihilate our enemies in The Godfather, and kill the murderers in High Noon. We come to terms with our misunderstood life in Wild Strawberries, and effect a last minute change. We struggle to understand what has happened in Rashômon, and explore our variety in husband, wife and thief, and end with hope as the woodcutter takes the child at the story’s end. We weep on the bed in Analyze This because we can no longer be evil. We rediscover our past at the end of The Importance of Being Earnest and, perhaps, lie about our name, in order to bring about a happy ending and a return to normalcy.
Now we can understand fully what it means to say that dramatic writing always ends with an affirmation of Eros and always overthrows Thanatos, even in film noir where the endings are so morally ambiguous. Morally volitional continuance, social and personal, is not just a matter of morality: it is the deepest expression of Eros.
Destruction as Thanatos is the nemesis of life and drama, of love in the broadest sense, however often it may prevail in life.
9. The New Life
What have heroes achieved, then, at the end of a screenplay and drama more widely? If they are action-adventure protagonists, they have proven their puissance; if more serious dramatic characters, they have achieved ego integration and wholeness; if comic heroes, they have achieved ego integration and wholeness and a redemption from the absurdity of life. The past is finally past, while the present opens as a nowness that is not an illusion. Schindler has led his flock to survival and himself to redemption; the circumstances that called forth his heroism are now past, and he and the others can move on to a genuine New Beginning also.
The New Life in the New Beginning, then, is another dramatic paradox: it is, simply, the true beginning. Until this point, action has repeated the past or challenged that repetition without final outcome; now these issues are settled. An interesting failure of a film like Proof of Life shows the price a film pays if the past is not adequately summoned into the immediate action and resolved along with the immediate conflict. A sense of loss and alienation is evoked for the Terry of that film, but his past has not been pulled into the action and explored and resolved. Consequently, the film feels that something is missing and is unsatisfactory. The relationship between husband and wife is evoked and resolved, although it too is problematic, for reasons having to do with credibility. Peter and Alice must change in relation to each other in each other’s absence, even as Alice clearly falls for Terry, who is not so much heroic as impervious to Eros. Credibility suffers accordingly. The New Life for Alice and Peter does not convince; there is no New Life for Terry, no evocation and conciliation in the present with his past. Such an outcome cannot succeed in drama, whether substantively or commercially.
Thus the New Beginning with its New Life, which is always personal, can only be experienced if the old, failed beginning of the continuing past is fully evoked and dispelled. The movement of drama evokes the deepest of human dreams, that we can have a second chance to do what we ought. The personal, moral substance of the New Beginning is clear. That is why in Ran Kurosawa shows both Ayabe and particularly Fujimaki in a positive light at the start: they will be the true inheritors of the New Beginning.
I have stated the spiritual nature of drama strongly. But we are entitled to ask if this spiritual nature is an accident of the films reviewed here or simply of our particular times. Is it intrinsic to drama? Do we stand in profound error every time we evaluate or write a screenplay, or screenplay manual, or take a critical or aesthetic position that does not acknowledge this spiritual burden of drama? For it appears Campbell’s belief that the modern task to return a sense of the spiritual to our lives and of brotherhood to our atomistic selves is exemplified by the nature of the dramatic hero’s journey. It appears the true nature of dramatic action is from the unconscious to conscious, amoral to moral, destructive to creative, forgetful to remembering, divided to whole, absurdity to normalcy (comedy), and the deathtowardness of life (serious drama) to the possibility of a fresh, redeemed start where Eros triumphs over all that would divide, maim, debase, and murder the heart.
PART V
The Death and Life of Drama
CHAPTER 11
The Death and Life of Drama
DRAMA disappeared in the West from the early Roman Empire until its revival in the medieval church. Both births of drama in the West show it growing from religious practice. Drama’s first great flowering in fifth-century Athens died when the religious impulse moved elsewhere in society, although a new form of comedy arose in the fourth century in Menander that influenced the Roman Plautus and Terence, and through them Shakespeare and ourselves. Menander took a great deal of inspiration from Euripides, the last great Greek tragedian, who also influenced Seneca, Nero’s tutor. None of Seneca’s plays were performed in his lifetime; they are the first “closet” dramas in history, although they too reach across the ages and influence us by being the model of tragedy for Shakespeare and the Elizabethans.
What we must recognize here is that drama can become so irrelevant it can literally disappear. The answer writers give to my hypothetical question about abolishing the dramatic enterprise in all its forms—namely, that if we did that enterprise would begin all over again—is disproved by history. Any earlier statement in these essays to the contrary must be amended in this light. There is indeed something in us drama impacts in its great moments, but those moments are transitory and we can be led down other cultural paths where drama cannot follow. A screenwriter who doesn’t want to experience a “death of drama,” even on the minor scale of his own efforts, needs to come to grips with what it is that gives drama its relevance and necessity.
We are certainly in one of the more protracted dramatic renewals on record, which begins in the late nineteenth century with the development of naturalism in response to the industrial revolution. Ibsen used naturalism to his own ends, and the writing conventions he created set much of the norm for what we take for granted in screenwriting today. With the advent of sound in film, which some lamented as the death of pure cinema, the dramatic impulse has gradually shifted from an increasingly moribund stage to film, reflected in the steadily growing stature of the screenwriters even in Hollywood, where their screen credit now lags just behind the director’s. That too must change. We can refer to “Branagh’s” Much Ado about Nothing because we know already it is Shakespeare’s, but imagine if Henry V or Hamlet were new film scripts and Shakespeare was not given primary credit on screen but the director—the absurdity is obvious. There must first be the work before production can exist.
Let us begin with the first great birth of drama, rather than ourselves, in examining whether or not a spiritual burden is inherent and necessary to drama.
Prometheus in Athens, Gladiator in Rome
Tragedy is an Athenian achievement that was envied and admired throughout Greece, but it barely existed in the mid-sixth century BCE. Fifty years later, in 499 BCE, Aeschylus competed in the contests, or agons, between playwrights in the spring Greater Dionysia: we are looking, then, at a formidably fast development.
Everything happened at the same formidable speed in Athens from about this time. There had been some preliminary development toward tragedy starting about 600 BCE as Arion dressed men in goatskins to create a chorus of satyrs, the nature beings who celebrate the god Dionysus. Dionysus’s worship was recent in Greece at that date, marked by mass, often lewd and riotous communal celebrations. Nietzsche derives his Dionysian impulse from this god whose worship passionately sweeps away the norms of behavior. Celebrants continued rowdy; women celebrants, maenads, flouted convention orgiastically in their ecstasies and sometimes turned lethal, as dramatized by Euripides in The Bacchae. Arion’s action transformed this communal, celebratory worship into a performance by a special chorus of celebrants now atten
ded by members of the larger community as spectators. The new celebratory choral songs were called dithyrambs, and competitions were now held to choose the best. From its beginning, then, tragedy develops as an Apollonian, form-giving effort to contain an actively oceanic impulse to dissolve all traditional social bonds in the name of religious transport to a god of resurrection.
Thespis wrote the first plays by creating the first actor, a man who stood out from the chorus to answer its questions. This actor used a mask, so could assume many roles: in fact, Thespis is said to have taken his show on the road, creating the first traveling theatre company on record. Nothing survives of his plays, although he received the first known prize for a tragic competition in 534 BCE: a goat. This theatrical development coincided with a burst of vigor after the long doldrums in Greece generally. Trade was stirring, and the populace: Athens took the lead in colonizing Ionia, today’s Turkish coast. Other colonies were established widely too: Greece was again engaged with the larger world after the harsh impact of the Dorian invasions that swept away the Homeric world. In Athens the kings were overthrown by mid-sixth century and a dictatorship established by Peisistratus and his sons: it was Peisistratus who introduced the worship of Dionysus into Athens and associated the performance of tragedies with its spring festival, actively backing figures like Thespis and reinforcing the spiritual significance of this new form of drama. The interweaving of profound social and political reform, economic activity, entertainment, and religion is striking.
In fifty years, by 510 BCE, the dictators were gone, as Cleisthenes introduced a series of reforms that established direct democracy by adult male Athenians in the Assembly. It was something genuinely new in history, an experiment in self-responsibility that fascinated Greece and soon divided its city-states, some emulating Athens and others emulating more conservative models like Thebes or Athen’s ultimate nemesis, Sparta. At the same time Greece was under increasing pressure from the Persian Empire, the greatest then ever known in the world, which conquered Ionia and was roused to anger against Greece when Athens actively aided an Ionian revolt the same year we first hear of Aeschylus. Aeschylus at his death requested that fighting at Marathon be mentioned on his gravestone, not that he was a tragedian. All the great tragedians were Athenian citizens, rulers of the city in the Assembly, and hoplites, meaning heavily armored soldiers; Sophocles was a general. A man like Socrates took his place in the fighting line. These Athenian men possessed a unity of life alien to us: an artistic career was not separated from a general involvement in society and being equally a politician and soldier.