The Understructure of Writing for Film and Television

by Ben Brady

  HELMER

  You’re insane! You’ve no right! I forbid you!

  NORA

  From here on, there’s no use forbidding me anything. I’ll take with me whatever is mine. I don’t want a thing from you, either now or later.

  HELMER

  What kind of madness is this?

  NORA

  Tomorrow I’m going home—I mean, home where I came from. It’ll be easier up there to find something to do.

  HELMER

  Oh, you blind, incompetent child!

  NORA

  I must learn to be competent, Torvald.

  HELMER

  Abandon your home, your husband, your children! And you’re not even thinking what people will say.

  NORA

  I can’t be concerned about that. I only know how essential this is.

  HELMER

  Oh, it’s outrageous. So you’ll run out like this on your most sacred vows.

  NORA

  What do you think are my most sacred vows?

  HELMER

  And I have to tell you that! Aren’t they your duties to your husband and children?

  NORA

  I have other duties equally sacred.

  HELMER

  That isn’t true. What duties are they?

  NORA

  Duties to myself.

  HELMER

  Before all else, you’re a wife and a mother.

  NORA

  I don’t believe in that anymore. I believe that, before all else, I’m a human being, no less than you—or anyway, I ought to try and become one. I know the majority thinks you’re right, Torvald, and plenty of books agree with you, too. But I can’t go on believing what the majority says, or what’s written in books. I have to think over these things myself and try to understand them.

  HELMER

  Why can’t you understand your place in your own home? On a point like that, isn’t there one everlasting guide you can turn to? Where’s your religion?

  NORA

  Oh, Torvald, I’m really not sure what religion is.

  HELMER

  What—?

  NORA

  I only know what the minister said when I was confirmed. He told me religion was this thing and that. When I get clear and away by myself, I’ll go into that problem too. I’ll see if what the minister said was right, or, in any case, if it’s right for me.

  HELMER

  A young woman your age shouldn’t talk like that. If religion can’t move you, I can try to rouse your conscience. You do have some moral feeling? Or tell me—has that gone too?

  NORA

  It’s not easy to answer that, Torvald. I simply don’t know. I’m all confused about these things. I just know I see them so differently from you. I find out, for one thing, that the law’s not at all what I’d thought—but I can’t get it through my head that the law is fair. A woman hasn’t a right to protect her dying father or save her husband’s life! I can’t believe that.

  HELMER

  You talk like a child. You don’t know anything of the world you live in.

  NORA

  No, I don’t. But now I’ll begin to learn for myself. I’ll try to discover who’s right, the world or I.

  HELMER

  Nora, you’re sick; you’ve got a fever. I almost think you’re out of your head.

  NORA

  I’ve never felt more clearheaded and sure in my life.

  HELMER

  And—clearheaded and sure—you’re leaving your husband and children?

  CLOSE-UP: NORA

  NORA

  Yes.

  BACK TO SHOT

  HELMER

  Then there’s only one possible reason.

  NORA

  What?

  HELMER

  You no longer love me.

  ON HELMER

  NORA, VO

  No, that’s exactly it.

  HELMER

  Nora! You can’t be serious!

  BACK TO TWO SHOT

  NORA

  Oh, this is so hard, Torvald—you’ve been so kind to me always. Ḃut I can’t help it. I don’t love you anymore.

  HELMER

  (struggling for composure)

  Are you also clearheaded and sure about that?

  NORA

  Yes, completely. That’s why I can’t go on staying here.

  HELMER

  Can you tell me what I did to lose your love?

  NORA

  Yes, I can tell you. It was this evening when the miraculous thing didn’t come—then I knew you weren’t the man I’d imagined.

  HELMER

  Be more explicit; I don’t follow you.

  NORA

  I’ve waited now so patiently eight long years—for, my Lord, I know miracles don’t come every day. Then this crisis broke over me, and such a certainty filled me: now the miraculous event would occur. While Krogstad’s letter was lying out there, I never for an instant dreamed that you could give in to his terms. I was so utterly sure you’d say to him: go on, tell your tale to the whole wide world. And when he’d done that—

  HELMER

  Yes, what then? When I’d delivered my own wife into shame and disgrace—!

  NORA

  When he’d done that, I was so utterly sure that you’d step forward, take the blame on yourself and say: I am the guilty one.

  HELMER

  Nora—!

  NORA

  You’re thinking I’d never accept such a sacrifice from you? No, of course not. But what good would my protests be against you? That was the miracle I was waiting for, in terror and hope. And to stave that off, I would have taken my own life.

  HELMER

  I’d gladly work for you day and night, Nora—and take on pain and deprivation. But there’s no one who gives up honor for love.

  CLOSE-UP: NORA

  NORA

  Millions of women have done just that.

  BACK TO SHOT

  HELMER

  Oh, you think and talk like a silly child.

  NORA

  Perhaps. But you neither think nor talk like the man I could join myself to. When your big fright was over—and it wasn’t from any threat against me, only for what might damage you—when all the danger was past, for you it was just as if nothing had happened. I was exactly the same, your little lark, your doll, that you’d have to handle with double care now that I’d turned out so brittle and frail.

  [She] gets up.

  NORA (CONT’D)

  Torvald—in that instant it dawned on

  (MORE)

  NORA (CONT’D)

  me that for eight years I’ve been living here with a stranger, and that I’d even conceived three children—oh, I can’t stand the thought of it! I could tear myself to bits.

  HELMER

  (heavily)

  I see. There’s a gulf that’s opened between us—that’s clear. Oh, but Nora, can’t we bridge it somehow?

  NORA

  The way I am now, I’m no wife for you.

  HELMER

  I have the strength to make myself over.

  NORA

  Maybe—if your doll gets taken away.

  HELMER

  But to part! To part from you! No, Nora, no—I can’t imagine it.

  [As she LEAVES THE SHOT.]

  NORA

  . . . All the more reason why it has to be.

  ON HELMER

  [A moment passes.] She REENTERS [THE SHOT] with her coat and a small overnight bag, which she puts on a chair by the table.

  TWO SHOT: NORA AND HELMER

  HELMER

  Nora, Nora, not now! Wait till tomorrow.

  NORA

  I can’t spend the night in a strange man’s room.

  HELMER

  But couldn’t we live here like brother and sister—

  NORA

  You know very well how long that would last.

  (throws her shawl about her)

  Good-bye, Torvald. I won’t look in
on the children. I know they’re in better hands than mine. The way I am now, I’m no use to them.

  HELMER

  But someday, Nora—someday—?

  NORA

  How can I tell? I haven’t the least idea what’ll become of me.

  HELMER

  But you’re my wife, now and wherever you go.

  NORA

  Listen, Torvald—I’ve heard that when a wife deserts her husband’s house just as I’m doing, then the law frees him from all responsibility. In any case, I’m freeing you from being responsible. Don’t feel yourself bound, any more than I will. There has to be absolute freedom for us both. Here, take your ring back. Give me mine.

  HELMER

  That too?

  NORA

  That too.

  HELMER

  There it is.

  NORA

  Good. Well, now it’s all over. I’m putting the keys here. The maids know all about keeping up the house—better than I do. Tomorrow, after I’ve left town, Kristine will stop by to pack up everything that’s mine from home. I’d like those things shipped up to me.

  HELMER

  Over! All over! Nora, won’t you ever think about me?

  NORA

  I’m sure I’ll think of you often, and about the children and the house here.

  HELMER

  May I write you?

  NORA

  No—never. You’re not to do that.

  HELMER

  Oh, but let me send you—

  NORA

  Nothing. Nothing.

  HELMER

  Or help you if you need it.

  NORA

  No. I accept nothing from strangers.

  HELMER

  Nora, can I never be more than a stranger to you?

  NORA

  (picking up the overnight bag)

  Ah, Torvald—it would take the greatest miracle of all—

  HELMER

  Tell me the greatest miracle!

  NORA

  You and I both would have to transform ourselves to the point that—Oh, Torvald, I’ve stopped believing in miracles.

  HELMER

  But I’ll believe. Tell me! Transform ourselves to the point that—?

  NORA

  That our living together could be a true marriage.

  [Nora LEAVES THE SHOT as] she goes out down the hall. Helmer sinks down on a chair by the door, face buried in his hands.

  ON HELMER

  HELMER

  Nora! Nora!

  (MORE)

  Looking about and rising.

  HELMER (CONT’D)

  Empty. She’s gone.

  (a sudden hope leaps in him)

  The greatest miracle—?

  [OFF] the sound of a DOOR SLAMMING shut.

  FADE OUT11

  Ibsen caused a sensation with this scene when it was first performed in 1879. No characters had ever spoken before with such candor about their roles in marriage. No heroine had ever seemed so real or taken such action. Ibsen was vilified. His critics sensed an enemy, correctly: Ibsen wanted absolute freedom and purity with a total purge of existing life. If civilization could be likened to Noah’s ark, then “with pleasure I will torpedo the Ark!” he wrote. He was called “an egotist and a bungler,” “consistently dirty,” and “ugly, nasty, discordant.” His admirers were characterized as “lovers of prurience and dabblers in impropriety who are eager to gratify their illicit tastes under the pretence of art.” According to one critic, “The unwomanly woman, the unsexed females . . . men and women alike—know that they are doing not only a nasty but an illegal thing.” Much of this was written after the production of Ghosts, which dealt with syphilis: the same sort of response greeted all his realistic plays about social problems. Kramer vs. Kramer received many Oscars: Ibsen’s Nora prepared the way.

  Nora’s departure is far more powerful than Joanna’s in Kramer vs. Kramer. Nora’s actions make no play on sentiment: she does not clutch a child in a final farewell. Instead, she tells Torvald to say good-bye to the children. Nora knows she has to leave, as does Joanna, but Joanna has no idea where she is going. Torvald knows where Nora is going and is refused any chance to write or help her. She leaves as Torvald contemplates self-transformation, but not before Nora invites a confrontation and gives Torvald a chance to martial every argument he can. His responses reveal both his shallowness and the shallowness of their relationship, immediate proof that they are indeed strangers. This lets Ibsen dramatize how little such arguments can mean until a woman is a true individual, fully realized as a human being in her own right.

  Ibsen handles this thematic content artfully. He structures it in a series of reverses from the moment Nora declares her intent to leave, placing it within the context of the immediate confrontation between Nora and Torvald. First comes Nora’s rejection of Torvald’s traditional authority over her, and then follow her need to stand alone, her unwillingness to give in to what others might think, her more sacred duty to herself, her need to rethink what religion is, and her self-acknowledged ignorance of the world. Each reverse begins with Torvald sure he has raised a compelling reason to keep Nora from leaving: each ends as Nora proves the opposite is true. After Torvald forces her to reveal her ultimate disappointment at how he failed her during the blackmail attempt, his last thematic effort to hold her by claiming that men don’t give up their honor is crushed by Nora’s famous reply: “Millions of women have done just that.”

  This brings us to several important points about handling thematic material. First, thematic material, handled properly, is never immediately at stake in a scene, only ultimately. Every argument Torvald brings up is motivated by his immediate desire to stop Nora; every response by Nora is motivated by her immediate desire to leave. Nora’s or Torvald’s ideas matter only as they are relevant to immediate conflict. Ibsen doesn’t cast his characters aside and have a character called “The Author” step on stage and deliver his points. A dramatist must embed his thematic material in an immediate personal conflict.

  Second, nothing that Nora or Torvald says represents Ibsen’s theme by itself: theme emerges from the outcome of immediate, personal conflict. That outcome represents a dramatist’s point of view. Imagine how we would consider the thematic material Ibsen raises if Torvald persuades Nora to stay. The closest Ibsen lets Nora come to stating the theme is in her disillusioned hope for the kind of transformation that would make for a true marriage. Ibsen leaves us to sum up what has happened in the scene to figure out what a true marriage would mean. Clearly, it would involve both their personal transformation and the transformation of a society from one capable of using religion, mores, or the home as excuses for repression to one that valued self-realization.

  Last, the dramatist must succeed in arousing our empathy and sympathy for the characters, or the meaning of their struggle will not matter to us. Throughout A Doll House Ibsen lets us watch Torvald treat Nora as his doll in a kindly but stifling way and Nora accept that role to please him while slowly letting us see the other side to her character that emerges so sharply at the climax.

  Why, then, does this scene leave us uneasy? Part of the reason is structural. There is no crisis for Nora, the protagonist, only for Torvald, who moves from certainty to sadness and confusion and then, moved by love after all, to thoughts of changing himself. Nora moves from certainty to certainty. Another part of the reason is motivational. Is it credible that a wife who has been a doll, if one with a secret, could suddenly stand up with the iron displayed by Nora? That has a shock effect, but does anyone living in hope, as Nora has, think through the remorseless alternatives she reaches with such ease?

  Unfortunately, it is also Ibsen’s partial mishandling of characterization and conflict that makes us uneasy. Where is Nora’s immediate struggle? Where is the discovery a character needs to go through to piece together a sense of direction? Even Nora’s lack of sentimentality is suspicious: could someone who has lived a life that was itself a cliché of sentimentalit
y emerge, suddenly, completely free of that? Despite the scene’s artfulness, there is too strong a sense of the author’s direct hand in Nora. She is dangerously close to being that supposed character, “The Author,” despite the immediacy of her conflict.

  Even Ibsen’s artfulness is a problem. It is refreshing to see two characters settle down to a confrontation with the real issues between them. Human beings are not always inchoate models of confusion. But the pattern of reverses is very schematic—sacred vows, home, religion, moral feeling, ignorance of the world, failure of love. They are natural things to deal with in such a situation, but, oh, how neatly laid out by Ibsen. It has little of the feel of reality between Blanche and Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire.

  Ideas can appear directly in a scene if there is a real excitement about them, a sense of their discovery and delight or terror by characters, with sudden jabs of illumination. Even then, however, the situation between characters must be immediate and what is at stake personal, whether marriage as in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman or the wellbeing of a patient as in Peter Schaffer’s stage and screenplay Equus. The efficacy of psychotherapy is important in Ordinary People, but experienced through the protagonist’s need for help and the presence of a warm professional. All the President’s Men deals with Watergate through the immediate efforts of two reporters who piece together the truth. That sense of discovery is absent from Nora in A Doll House. It is a scene to admire that has faults to avoid.

  Let’s compare it with Joanna’s cross-examination from Kramer vs. Kramer.

  A Courtroom Scene from Kramer vs. Kramer

  Joanna has returned after abandoning Ted and Billy and demanded Billy from Ted. As we saw, he refuses her and storms away. Both get lawyers and find themselves in court involved in a custody battle. In the following scene, Joanna is put on the stand by her lawyer, Gressen, and then cross-examined by Ted’s lawyer, Shaunessy.

  FADE IN:

  INT. COURTROOM (EST) DAY

  ON THE DOOR

  as Ted enters, looks around [PULL BACK.]

  [COURTROOM]

  Mrs. Willewska sits in one of the back rows, wearing her best Easter hat. Ted pauses by her, thanks her for coming.

  Several rows in front of her is Margaret. Ted crosses to her, they talk quietly between themselves for a few moments. Then Ted moves on to a table at the front of the room where John Shaunessy waits.

  ON THE DOORS AT BACK OF COURTROOM

  as they swing open and Joanna, along with her lawyer, A MR.

  GRESSEN, [ENTERS THE SHOT]. THE CAMERA PANS WITH THEM as they walk to the front of the room and take their seats at the table opposite Ted and his lawyer.