I suppose the form itself of The Last Yankee is as astringently direct and uncluttered as it is because these people are supremely the prey of the culture, if only because it is never far from the center of their minds—the latest film or TV show, the economy’s ups and downs, and above all the endless advertising-encouraged self-comparisons with others who are more or less successful than they. This ritualistic preoccupation is at the play’s dramatic core and, I felt, ought not be unclear or misted over, for it is from its grip they must be freed if they are ever to be free at all. Hence, the repeated references to ambition, to success and failure, to wealth and poverty, to economic survival, to the kind of car one drives and the suit one wears. In a word, the play could not be amorphously “realistic” if it was to reflect the obsessiveness of the characters in life. So if The Last Yankee is realism, it is of this kind resulting from an intense selectivity, which in turn is derived from the way these people live and feel.
But obviously, to make such a strictly thematic play demands intense condensation and the syncopating of idea and feeling and language. More than one actor in my plays has told me that it is surprisingly difficult to memorize the dialogue. It sounds like real, almost like reported talk, when in fact it is intensely composed, compressed, “angled” into an inevitability that seems natural but isn’t. For it is always necessary to employ the artificial in order to arrive at the real. So that the question I bring to a play is not whether its form and style are new or old, experimental or traditional, but first, whether it brings news, something truly felt by its author, something thought through to its conclusion and its significance; and second, whether its form is beautiful, or wasteful, whether it is aberrant for aberrancy’s sake, full of surprises that discover little, and so on.
Something called Realism can land us further from common reality than the most fantastic caprice. But in the end, if stylization in theater needs justification—and it does, of course—it is not in its novelty but in its enhancement of discovery of how life works in our time. How a thing is said is therefore only as important as what it is saying. The proof is the deep pile of experimental plays of two, three, five, ten years ago, which can be appreciated now only by the scholar-specialist, a pile, incidentally, no smaller than the one for so many realistic plays of the same era. So finding the truth is no easier now when we are totally free to use any stylistic means at hand than it was a century or half a century ago when a play had to be “real” to even be read, and had to make sense to sensible people.
Call it a question of personal taste rather than principle, but I think that in theater work there is an optimum balance between two kinds of approaches. One is the traditional attempt to fill characters with acknowledged emotion, “as in life.” The other is, in effect, to evacuate emotion from characters and merely refer to it rather than acting it out. Brecht, for one, tried to do this and failed, excepting in his most agitprop and forgettable plays. Actually, the strict containment not of emotion but of emotionalism is the hallmark of the Greek tragic plays, of Molière and Racine and the Japanese No plays, while Shakespeare, it seems to me, is the balance, the fusion of idea and feeling. In short, it is by no means the abstracting of emotion I dislike; on the contrary, it is the lack of it and the substitution for it of fashionably alienated ironies.
As I am not a critic and would not do anything to make any writer’s life harder, I will desist from naming names, but there has been a plethora of plays in recent years whose claim to modernity is based on indicated rather than felt emotion, on the assumption, I suppose, that this sec quality intellectualizes a work and saves it from the banality associated with writing aimed at the audience’s belly rather than at its head. The devil to be avoided is, of course, sentimentality—emotion unearned. But emotion can be earned, of course. Yet a play that is not camp and moves people is in danger of dismissal. (Unless it appears in old films, which we allow ourselves to be moved by if at the same instant we can protect our modernity by feeling superior to their time-bound naïveté.) But if the pun can be pardoned, man lives not by head alone, and the balance between the two modes, one aimed at the mind and one at the flesh, as it were, is what will interpret life more fully, rather than headline it with conceptualizations that too often simply clump about on the stilts of dry irony that time and the shifts of cultural politics will make thoroughly disposable. After all, at least part of the aim of a modern play must be to show what life now feels like.
Ultimately every assault on the human mystery falls back to the ground, changing little, but the flight of the arrow continues claiming our attention over more time when its direction is toward the castle rather than the wayward air.
On Screenwriting and Language: Introduction to Everybody Wins
1990
A funny thing happens to screenplays on the way to the screen. It isn’t simply that they get changed, subtly or otherwise, from their earlier incarnations, but that they become brittle. This is only true for the writer, of course. He misses the lines that were merely shadings of meaning and would probably hold things up in a movie, which, after all, has to move. But in the final version of Everybody Wins, compared to earlier drafts, surprisingly little of the basic material was altered, although I agreed to cut a few scenes and revise the ending. In general, what I think happened—and this is probably usual in moviemaking—is that suggestion through words became rather more blatant indication through images.
I hasten to add that this is not a gripe, if only because it is, in my view, a generic quality of the form. A description in words tends to inflate, expand, and inflame the imagination, so that in the end the thing or person described is amplified into a larger-than-life figment. But something photographed is lifted out of the imagination and becomes simply what it really is, or less. It is montage, rather than the actual photograph itself, that gives the impression of an imaginary world larger than life. Words, unable to imitate reality, must in their nature serve it up in metaphoric guise, but film gives us the appearance of reality directly.
If a telephone is photographed, isolated on a table, and the camera is left running, it becomes more and more what it is—a telephone in all its detail. Andy Warhol let the camera run on the Empire State Building for maybe an hour or more. I left before the “end” of this picture, so I’m not sure how long it lasted, but in the twenty minutes I watched, it never to my mind rose to metaphor, simply remaining what it was—the Empire State Building.
Things go differently on a stage. Set a phone on a table under a light and raise the curtain, and in complete silence, after a few minutes, something will accrete around it. Questions and anticipations will begin to emanate from it; we will begin to imagine meanings in its isolation—in a word, the phone becomes an incipient metaphor. Possibly because we cannot see its detail as sharply as on film or because it is surrounded by a much greater space, it begins to animate, to take on suggestive possibilities, very nearly a kind of self-consciousness. Something of the same is true of words as opposed to images. The word is not and can’t be any more than suggestive of an idea or sensation; it is nothing in itself.
There is always too much dialogue. And it’s true, there is, for one thing because dialogue cannot be seen. The contradiction, I suppose, is that movies—most of them, anyway—require a writer’s sense of form while inherently rejecting his word-love. And so the writer, accustomed to forming sentences on which all his effects rely, ends up with something truncated and not quite his own on paper; with luck, however, it is paradoxically more his own on the screen. For it turns out—if he is lucky with director and actors—that the meaning of his lost lines is actually visible in pictures. I think that the quality of the final work is rougher and cruder, more brutally telegraphic, than when it was action described in words. But again, the word made flesh may be more and suggest less. It is a very mysterious business, and by no means a simple question of better or worse, but of differences of aesthetic feeling, of timbre and tissue, that
always accompany differences of form. One need only recall the innumerable fine novels that simply could not be made to work on the screen because the quality of their language was removed; their story-essence vanished when their language was discarded.
Among “real” writers—novelists, playwrights, poets—screenwriting, when it is not regarded as a cousin of engineering, is seen as an art on a par with clothing design; the product has no life of its own until it is occupied by the wearer. I am afraid that this, at least in my view, is truer than one would wish, but it is necessary to add that there have been many more significant films over the past 25 years than plays or, proportionately, even novels. Nevertheless, screenplays, especially the good ones that work, tend by the nature of the art to be self-effacing, vanishing, as it were, into the total impression of the film, this in contrast to the play, which in the Western tradition has been assimilated to literature as a respectable form apart from performance (something that was not yet the case as late as Elizabethan times, when playscripts were tossed to managers and actors without reaching print). Except among technicians, the screenplay has little or no existence unless filmed, and the few exceptions, like Pinter’s unproduced work for the screen, are precisely that—isolated examples that illuminate the rule.
The screenplay is the first element in a collaborative art, but only an element for all that, and not, like a stage play, a thing in itself. It is a sort of libretto for camera, its energies moving outward to serve the other elements in the film and to organize them for a common purpose. The forces in and around the stage play, in contrast, move in the opposite direction, for it is the play that is to be served—by director, actors, designer, costumer. An opera libretto is likewise content not to be noticed by the public, even as the singers and conductor know that it is their vital support, without which the music would fail to fly out to the audience’s ear.
The screenplay may do many things, but one thing it must do, and that is give meaning to the pictures. In this sense it is equivalent to the words in a cartoon balloon or the titles sometimes given photographs or paintings. These may orient us as to the time and place a photo was shot or a picture painted, but there can’t be many photos or paintings made memorable by their labels and dates. Indeed, the vitality of a screenplay, indispensable as it is to the finished film, springs from the life-giving structure by which the order of the images—the film’s most affecting element—is organized.
The very invisibility of the screenplay accounts for the screenwriter’s anonymity before the audience and most critics. To be sure, he alone was there when the pages were blank, it was his godlike hand that gave form to dust, but his occasional smart or touching line of dialogue notwithstanding, it isn’t really words that people come to hear or long remember; it is actors and their mannerisms, their noses and hair and tones of voice, that really matter to them. And ironically, the more authority the actor has in performing his role, the further from sight the screenwriter recedes; in effect, the actor has eaten him. Indeed, when this happens, the movie is successful, since the actor seems to have originated his lines.
Except for the money, when there is any, screenwriting is a rather thankless profession compared with other forms of writing. The film medium belongs essentially to the director, its attraction for the public will always be the actor, and there will never be a way around that. There cannot be a Eugene O’Neill of the movies. Every element and person in the enterprise exists to serve the director’s central purpose, which is to make the actors seem believable.
This may be why the most persuasive film acting is as close to wordless as possible. For a long time the idea that Gary Cooper might be an actor was thought a joke, and the same for Clark Gable, John Wayne, and their numerous heroic-type contemporaries who were “merely” personalities rather than actors. A Spencer Tracy, on the other hand, was certainly an actor because he could speak so well. This mistaken judgment was historically determined by the fact that movies were originally offshoots of the stage, and stage acting was something for which these heroes were indeed unfit. Their way of speaking was either silly and boyish as in Wayne’s case, whiny, as with Gable too much of the time, or monotonous, as with Cooper. But the point, which was missed because it was so new, was that all these heroes could show attitudes and feelings—usually simple and fundamental ones like anger or sexual desire, indignation or aggression—much better with their mouths shut than open. And even “show” is too strong a word—it is more accurate to say that they were eminently attributable actors. The mute human, like an animal, keeps all his possibilities intact, gives us nothing to make us doubt his reality while any speech is bound to narrow his plausibility dangerously. Thus, there is a peculiar pressure on words in film to contribute to silent communication rather than monopolizing communication as words do on the stage. Words must above all be utilizable, each one as unadorned a story-mover as possible. The director’s first instinct when faced with a multi-sentence speech is to pick it apart with a question for each word: “Why do we need this?” Needless to say, confronted with such a question, no Shakespeare play would last more than an hour.
When an actor talks, he is more vulnerable to disbelief than when he is simply standing there. The very purpose of words in movies is to justify the silences that are the picture’s main business. It is silence that creates an infinity of potential meaning that words can only diminish. This, I think, is also why very good prose writers do not usually prosper as screenwriters. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, and a long line of eminent others discovered that their brightest stylistic inventions were precisely what movies reject like excrescences. Language tends to get in the way of the images, and the brighter the language, the more it draws attention to itself, the more it interferes.
The real poetry of a film lies first in its structure of meaning, distinctly a function of the screenplay, and second in the expressiveness of its images, which are realized by the director but have their root, if not more than that, in the writer’s work. Language, nevertheless, cannot be more than a servant to the images in the final impression.
Inevitably, especially if one is not accustomed to writing films, the question arises as to exactly why words are in such rivalry with the image as to be nearly self-indulgences. Even the wordy films that come to mind—Huston’s The Dead, Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (a brilliantly and eminently written film by the late I. A. L. Diamond in collaboration with Wilder)—endure in memory not primarily for their lines but for the snap and marksmanship of their visual moods, their portraits of actors and settings, the things they have let us see, and the image-driven story. In the final analysis, dialogue exists at all in film in order to justify images and bridge them to sustain continuity. Dialogue is the musculature of the gestalt, the combination of images whose interactions create meaning. Altogether unlike the novel and even the play, film simply will not stand for writing that is basically commentary, however illuminating or beautiful or telling it may be. The closest one may safely verge on such adornment is in verbal wit, providing it is not convoluted, as it may be on the stage, but pithy and quickly understood. Otherwise, adornment and commentary are left to the director and his cinematographer, who indeed may elaborate through pleasurable explorations of things seen—locales, flesh, fingernails, eyes, all the wonders of the visible that film adores.
The reason or reasons for this image supremacy seem obvious: it is film’s replication of dreams, or more precisely, of our relationship to dreams. The film scene, even the apparently legato one, is always secretly in a hurry, much like its unacknowledged matrix, the dream scene, which flashes up in the sleeper and dies away in a matter of seconds. Dreams (if the reader’s are anything like mine) are almost never verbal. Sometimes a single emblematic word, or perhaps two, may emerge in a dream scene as a clue (most likely ambiguous) to its intent, but everyone knows the dream in which people are avidly talking, with no words coming from their m
ouths, thus creating the image of talk rather than talk itself. We all know, too, the dream in which we are shouting a warning or a plea to others, with no sound issuing forth. Yet we know the meaning of what was being said or shouted. The meaning, in short, stems from the situation and not from the words we are trying to say about it. The dreamer is essentially deaf, and this suggests that film’s origins, like those of dream, reach back to archaic stages of our evolution, to a period antedating our capacity to understand language, when we communicated in the primitive sign language of infancy. Long before he can understand words, the infant is obviously moved by what he sees, made frightened or happy or curious or anxious by purely visual stimuli. After a mere few months of life he has all the mental capacities required to direct movies or to paint pictures—everything, that is, except a grasp of the coherency of theme that brings relevance and meaning to what he is so pleasurably staring at.
For coherency’s sake words—whether spoken or printed on the screen—are indeed necessary, however brief and minimal they may be, and this needs a screenwriter, someone capable of using words efficiently in order to make some sense of pleasure, or, to put it differently, in order to provide a social justification of sensuousness. But coherency in film remains distinctly secondary in importance to the enticing infantile riddle of sheer image itself.
The primitiveness of the image-story, growing as it does primarily from our very earliest months of life, tends to thin out the filmed tale in comparison to the word-driven one. This is admittedly debatable and may be a purely personal reaction brought on by too many years in the theater, but it seems to me the brain needn’t work hard before a film; it can coast along in neutral. And perhaps this absence of effort simply makes one’s appreciation that much shallower, for dreaming and movie watching are essentially passive activities, something happening to us, rather than an active and willful participation in another’s imaginary world, as is the case with reading or even watching stage plays built on words instead of pictures.
Collected Essays Page 23