The Death and Life of Drama

by Lance Lee

  These are broad considerations but must be entertained to understand the role of drama at such times. Writing with urgent meaning is not an artificial importation into screenwriting and drama, weighing it with extraneous, unwanted concerns; on the contrary, stories that grapple with the central issues of the age are what drama is for. Avoid such undertakings altogether and the resultant work is not even entertainment but trivia. Trivia can indeed entertain but is soon forgotten; it has nothing to contribute to our needs.

  Hence the emotional immediacy of drama. That emotionality recalls us from our conscious cerebral confusions to the experience of a true self being found through the hero’s journey, the creative play of the screenplay or drama, however that “experience” or story may vary script to script, and however little writers need know this is what they are doing as they work out their stories. But, as we have seen, this is certainly one of the central achievements of the hero, realized on the level with which that story grapples with experience. It is as true of Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest or Paul Vitti in Analyze This as for Schindler in Schindler’s List or Michael in The Godfather.

  Hence, too, the importance of identification touched on earlier in “The Nature of the Hero’s Journey.” Identification is as easy to talk about and as hard to understand in a “me vs. not me” universe as psychoanalytic discussions involving projection, introjection, and splitting that often become mind-boggling exercises in jargon in the psychoanalytic literature. What can all these terms mean beyond a parade of aspects of the self, for in a “me vs. not me” universe others in themselves are unknowable; we are left finally only with our own mental operations, as exemplified in the work of Klein. In such a view we cannot actually be another through identification, actually stand in another’s shoes, nor can there actually be a union of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses outside a solipsistic reference: the self must actually always be lonely.

  The difficulty of explaining actual experience through this approach has been apparent for a long time. Common sense has intervened for the most part and ignored these difficulties. Explaining shared experience is the issue at the heart of the struggle of psychoanalysis with itself, compounded with its nervousness over the reality of the imagination. Freud, we saw, begins and ends his great journey with the realization that both mental trauma and its cure can proceed from acts of the imagination, in the latter case justified by the curative efficacy of the imaginative act through a “construction” that lays bare the roots of the initial (imagined) trauma. If we are to some extent in a hall of mirrors, that merely reflects (no pun intended) a feature of our self-reflective human nature. Without realizing it, Freud guided analysis into the path of the late radical empiricism found in William James, where the truth is something we make and judge as truthful to the degree it is efficacious.

  These assorted difficulties do not disappear in a “me–us–not me” universe, but they do begin to become susceptible to explanation. If part of us is inherently social, if part of who we are is a shared experience of other(s), then the need to use the language of introjection/projection or identification begins to evaporate. We are already an “us” in such a frame of reference, our “I” already a “thou.” Facts do not alter age to age, only how we choose to approach and evaluate them. Admittedly, to see and act on this perception of an “I/thou” quality of the self would require a cultural earthquake. One can only hope that is the one we are heading toward.

  Drama, without its practitioners being philosophers but almost their opposites, exists precisely in a “me–us–not me” universe. We can leave it to philosophers to wrestle over the implications of such a reality; as a matter of experience it is a commonplace. Moreover, this blending of “me” and “not me” is renewed every time we attend a drama and go through the various “forms” of identification with a heroine or hero. Drama’s primitive, emotional appeal pushes reflection aside; its experience renews and exemplifies our bonds with one another. It brings our self once more to the simultaneous sense of self/other that characterized our unconscious relationship to reality far down the evolutionary ladder and characterizes us as a child; renewing this experience in the adult mind is at once, at its deepest, exhilarating and oceanic in nature. Nietzsche’s “Original Mother” and “metaphysical solace” come to mind, and Aristotle’s “tragic wonder.”

  Drama, if you will, by its questioning and through its action, returns us to the fullness of our “self” when the existing civilization around us has lost the ability to sweep up that self in a broadly accepted sense of relationship to the immediate, the other, and the eternal.

  The happy ending reflects exactly that renewal, even on the trivial romantic level of “true love.” Aestheticians and critics disparage the happy ending, but it is there in response to our own existential craving and need in times of stress. On profounder levels we see the possibility of the community ensured, as in the typical end of a western; the true self reaffirmed in its fullness, as in On the Waterfront and Blue; or a world-redeeming marriage attained, as in Schindler’s List. Even the tragic ending brings us to a New Beginning. Thus is Eros always triumphant and Thanatos always the loser in drama.

  This is the full meaning driven home by a contemporary film like Ran. But Ran is interesting in another light. We may be flies in Lear, sentiments echoed in Ran, but we are not the gods’ playthings in our time, as we seem at times to be in Shakespeare’s. In Ran we are instead told it is the gods who weep because they can’t save us from ourselves. This has a curious echo in Campbell’s belief the modern age is one in which the old myths and gods are dead and man is reduced to himself. That is the burden of the exchange over Saburo and Ichimonji’s bodies in Ran. The gods cannot do more than weep, for if something else is to happen, we must create it. The very popularity of action-adventure heroes like James Bond and Indiana Jones resides in this “coming out of ourselves” need; they always find the answer, even if on the reduced level offered by such films. But what is important in drama is not so much the given story, as long as properly worked out, but the underlying pattern it manifests, which is always the complete hero journey.

  Thus, at the end, when we identify with the hero it may well be an act of the imagination, but the imagination exhibits itself in the area of experience, of playing, of creativity, the area that predominates in our lives, the area where you and I are already mingled, the area of culture. We are far less apart from one another than we are accustomed to think, however we struggle to say that scientifically, i.e., materialistically. The journey the hero undertakes to the true solution and New Beginning through The Heroic Deed is, then, through identification of our own, because it is already our struggle in our experience unless we have undergone a spiritual death, unless we are the mother in Blue in the cave of her room watching images of life on television, incapable of recognizing her daughter or, any longer, being part of the creative flow of life.

  It is in this sense, finally, that the metaphor of drama in which it claims to be reality is true: the screenplay, the drama, is reality, not an imitation; it is our search, however entertaining or chilling along the way, and our final goal. Good writing has always exemplified this hunger of the heart to be true, to live with truth, in love, in reality, in hope.

  Appendix: A Case Study

  Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander

  FANNY and Alexander is Bergman’s farewell to film and contains his final views on human nature and the dramatic, cinematic art. It gives a very specific fleshing to the fundamental story pattern through the stages of the dramatic hero’s journey as imagined in Alexander and Emilie’s story: Arresting Life, Complying with the False, Awakening, Confused Growth—and the Pursuit of Error, Failure of the False Solution, The Discovery of the True Solution, The Heroic Deed, Suffering, and The New Life. Talking about these elements abstractly is a convenience, a set of buoys to mark the creative channel of a given outing, but not a formula; only the imagination of a dramatist can provide the material for a s
creenplay. But the imaginative breadth of Fanny and Alexander gives us a good opportunity to see in detail how the elements discussed earlier work.

  The Past

  Arresting Life

  Alexander is a child hero under the care of his mother, Emilie, and his story is inextricably woven with hers. Nonetheless, even a child hero plays a crucial role, as Campbell points out is typical in the traditional hero myth. That certainly proves decisively true of Alexander in the climax.

  Both he and Emilie share the same compromised past, if differently. Emilie yearns for something truer than her life in the theatre among the affluent, material Ekdahls. Yet she has complied with her role as lead actress, wife, and Ekdahl. Alexander’s relationship to reality is infused with fantasy and insufficiently in touch with the truth. He fails to realize how unhappy his mother is, despite the frequent acuity of childhood perception with regard to a parent’s emotional state and his own great sensitivity. Thus he is as compliant with the false as his mother and a cause of her own continuing falseness. Alexander’s dependency is important here, for to see his mother’s unhappiness must make him sense his childhood floats on quicksand and see/feel the necessity of corrective action that is for now entirely beyond him.

  What we see, then, as the action begins is what Arresting Life means as a stage of the hero’s journey: in Fanny and Alexander that means continuing in a pattern that demands a false relation to self and reality on the part of both Alexander and Emilie in terms defined by the affluent, theatrical Ekdahl lifestyle.

  The Beginning—Act 1

  Complying with the False

  Emilie is part of the traditional Christmas performance presented by the Ekdahls, while at home Alexander drifts through the house and imagines a statue changes position. Reality is at once staged by the adults and imagined as fluid by Alexander, albeit conventionally on Emilie’s part and in accord with childhood fantasy on Alexander’s. His father, Oscar, is aware that the life of the theatre—for we are in a hall of mirrors in Fanny and Alexander—is a sheltered world. He says as much to the assembled company.

  OSCAR

  … My only talent, if you can call it talent in my case, is that I love this little world inside the thick walls of this playhouse. And I’m fond of the people who work in this little world. Outside is the big world, and sometimes the little world succeeds for a moment in reflecting the big world, so we understand it better. Or it is perhaps that we give the people who come here the chance of forgetting for a while…. (italics mine)1

  These are not novel sentiments concerning the dramatic art but prepare the ground for Bergman’s later views. Crucially, they identify the theatre as the little world. Nonetheless, the Elizabethan mirror is given its modern turn here: what the theatre reflects of the “big world” is its “form and pressure,” for our playing in the theatre has the effect that we understand reality better, which opens the door to the modern concern with what the “self” is and can grasp.

  At home, a luxurious Christmas festival is staged with Alexander and Emilie as full participants, climaxed for Alexander by his unhappiness with the pretty housemaid, Maj, who won’t let him cuddle up in bed with her; Gustav Adolf will be visiting her instead. For consolation he puts on a magic lantern show for his sister after they are supposed to have gone to bed. His father Oscar’s interruption only strengthens Alexander’s stream of fantasy in response to frustration, as Oscar invents a story giving a chair a fabulous and amusing descent.

  Later, when the festivities wind down and Helena and her old lover Isak talk, we begin to suspect how much is seething under the lavish Ekdahl surface. Helena laments that Emilie’s relation with Oscar is sexless. The film doesn’t explain Emilie’s children, but the published version makes clear they were variously fathered with Oscar’s quiet acquiescence and undiminished paternal feelings for “his” children. Oscar and Emilie are arrested in this pattern.

  Similarly, his brother Carl and long-suffering wife, Lydia, are caught in another arrested repetition of behavior, a masochistic marriage and continual running-up of debt for which they repeatedly ask Helena’s help. Gustav Adolf is a merry satyr with girls like Maj, equably tolerated by his wife, Alma, as his flirtations do not diminish their satisfaction with one another, disconcerting as this may be to their daughter, Petra. The Ekdahls’ is not an amoral but lax, self-indulgent lifestyle whose motto might be Carpe diem.2

  Awakening

  Alexander takes part in a production of Hamlet and sees Oscar have a stroke in rehearsal. At home Oscar does not rally; Alexander is horrified when he is summoned to his deathbed and breaks away, although his father tries to be reassuring. “Reality” could not come crashing in on Alexander any more viscerally. The shock to Emilie is as great. In a memorable scene after Oscar’s death, Alexander is drawn from his room by strange screams filling the house; they are Emilie’s as she paces back and forth, repeatedly letting loose a raw, inchoate scream as much rage and frustration as grief. She has a lot suddenly to cope with: the lie of her life, as she has seen it, and now the loss of security, as represented by Oscar and the Ekdahls, for death cannot be ignored. Change, we know, is terrifying in itself; now for Emilie there is no reason any longer to defer finding her way to a truer life and undoing her sense of a lying past, even though that means tearing up everything she knows. No wonder she screams!

  Confused Growth—and the Pursuit of Error

  Oscar’s death is the inciting event and forces out Emilie’s unhappiness and ultimately forces Alexander to deal with the nature and power of the imagination. Later Emilie reveals the nature of her unhappiness to Helena, after she marries Edvard Vergerus:

  EMILIE

  … I was so thirsty—it sounds dramatic and overstrung, Helena, I know, but I can’t find any other word—I thirsted for the truth. I felt I had been living a lie.3

  The “lie” is the complaisant, life-loving lavish, material/theatrical life of the Ekdahls she felt was illusory and untruthful long before the beginning of the action. Emilie tells Bishop Vergerus:

  EMILIE

  … My life has been empty and superficial, thoughtless and comfortable. I have always longed for the life you live.4

  She imagines his life to be the opposite of the Ekdahls’, embodying the truth. Thus clear oppositions are developed for the Ekdahls vs. Bishop Vergerus: false vs. true, unreal vs. real, impure vs. pure, imaginary vs. actual.

  Yet until Oscar’s death Emilie persists in Complying with the False, however great her unhappiness. Her compliance has been simultaneously the condition for maintaining the illusion Alexander persists in, that life is known and comfortable and the imagination may be used without penalty. Alexander’s persistence in imagination touches on creativity itself as a response to experience, and it is precisely on that level Edvard will try later to break his spirit. Emilie and Alexander, then, remain caught in their false modus vivendi until the Awakening, while the Ekdahls’ initial modus vivendi is dependent on Emilie’s continuing compliance with the false too.

  But decisive change is foreshadowed both by Emilie’s screams and when we see her with Bishop Vergerus at Oscar’s funeral as Alexander curses under his breath. Awakening shades into Confused Growth—and the Pursuit of Error. Emilie, we discover, pursues a relationship with Bishop Vergerus that will prove profoundly wrong; while through Alexander the magic of the imagination merges with the affluent, realistic surface of the Ekdahls as he sees Oscar reappear at once corporeal, ghostly, and silent. Time’s passage is elided: in short order Alexander finds himself confronted by Edvard, on his mother’s behest, because he has told a story he was sold to a traveling circus. Step by step, a man hardly more than a stranger sanctimoniously browbeats Alexander, with his mother’s encouragement, into apologizing for this “lie.” The curious thing here is that Alexander begins in the wrong: he shouldn’t have lied, even though the imagination is its own consolation and stories create existential spaces in which we can live. But the sight of an older man manipulating a child i
nto compliance with his desires in such a fashion is revolting. Its effect is clear: “Emilie embraces the rigid Alexander and draws him down into her lap. He sits there like a puppet that has lost its strings.”5

  Then, deepening her new error, Emilie announces they will soon be one family. Alexander’s adjustment to his father’s loss must now collide with Edvard’s insistence on factual truth and his intrusion into the Ekdahl realm as the new “father” authority. Alexander’s reaction is to the point:

  ALEXANDER

  (Quietly to himself) Piss-pot, fuck-pot, shit-pot, sick-pot, cock-pot, cunt-pot, arse-pot, fart-pot …6

  It doesn’t help that the ghostly Oscar witnesses this sorry charade; he is as impotent as ever. The inevitable false steps after the jolt of Awakening now reach a decisive turn, in this case by the heroine on whom the child hero is dependent.

  Act 1, then, through the hero and here the heroine’s Confused Growth—and the Pursuit of Error, brings us to the point where they decide on or are driven into a course of action they think will solve their problems. Emilie’s marriage to Edvard represents that turn in Fanny and Alexander, a turn as loaded with moral values as Edie and Terry’s in On the Waterfront. But larger issues are involved in Fanny and Alexander: the nature of reality and the truth, and the use of the imagination. All are given a particular spin by Emilie’s choice of the bishop as the representative of truth, purity, and reality.