The Death and Life of Drama

by Lance Lee

  Finally, in Act 3, Tomas takes on some weight of being. He won’t retract his views in the article on Oedipus published in Act 1. Consequently he loses his position as a doctor and ends up cleaning windows. But he continues to have sexual escapades, the perfume from which Tereza can smell in his hair. She sinks into a depressing affair herself, then wonders if she has been exploited by a state agent and begs Tomas to leave Prague again, now for the country. They take up farming. Now, finally, their relationship thrives, if only because all temptations have at last been removed for Tomas. When they die in an accident after a moment of romantic happiness, we are done.

  Nonetheless, it is hard to feel any sense of dramatic closure: the accident ends the story like a deus ex machina.

  Not only does the film feel slow, time feels congested. Running time is presumed to carry one dramatic time, but the lack of a sense of closure to any of the stories in Unbearable Lightness leads to a sense of several left in limbo, with no New Beginning. Moreover the ending, so accidental in nature (no pun intended) deliberately undercuts our sense of the cause-and-effect development of the conflict(s) and our demand, ever deeper with ambitious writing, that events in such a causal sequence appear necessary and probable to us.

  These are demands of drama, not of life; arguing from life to excuse dramatic faults is commonplace but entirely misses the point. A film is a construct, entirely symbolic: in the usual hour and a half to two hours of running time, everything in a story must bear on creating that sense of lives in conflict in a clear space-time continuum where their conflict is coherently developed and dealt with definitively. That is what we mean by dramatic action, and of the fourth part of the fundamental story pattern being the End. Not simply a ceasing, but a resolving. Cause-and-effect writing makes us feel that one action leads to another; necessary and probable make those actions feel likely and inevitable; our emotional response to those actions through the characters’ suitable emotions makes us feel those actions are real; and by identifying with the characters, we feel their dilemmas and resolutions are our own.

  Contrast Unbearable Lightness with Carl Foreman’s High Noon. Amy and Will Kane are happily getting married in the Beginning when news arrives Frank Miller is out of jail and coming back to town. Nonetheless, Will is sent off with Amy to start a new life: the town will survive for a day, the mayor assures them, before a new marshal arrives. They leave, only to have Will turn back on the prairie over Amy’s protests: Miller is coming for vengeance against him, and Will doesn’t want to be tracked down on the prairie; besides, going back is the right thing to do. But Amy makes it clear she won’t stand by him.

  Swiftly we see the result of his return, for Will has a clear agenda: he wants help in dealing with Miller and his cronies. Amy, however, abandons him and waits for her train in the hotel lobby. Harvey, his deputy, won’t help unless Will supports his becoming marshal. The judge is leaving, rather than face Miller, whom a verbal flashback lets us hear vowing vengeance. This is just a “dirty little village of nowhere,” the judge tells Will.

  Harvey provokes Helen—Will’s former mistress and, before him, Miller’s—into dismissing him: there’s more to being a man than having broad shoulders, she informs Harvey after they argue over Will. But Helen too is selling out: she intends to leave rather than face Miller and won’t offer assistance to Will.

  There are several stories here, as in Unbearable Lightness, but the subplots are subsumed into the main action and bear directly on the issue of helping Will.

  Amy discovers through the hotel clerk there is a lot of dislike for Will; sure, he cleaned the town up, but business was better with Miller around. Will discovers much the same: those in the saloon he goes to for help refuse to become deputies. His friend Sam tells his wife to lie when he sees Will coming; he won’t help either. He’s “not in.” When Will turns to the townsfolk in church, the initial enthusiasm of some is throttled by the mayor, who argues the inexpediency of having blood on the streets for the respectable image of the town. Let Miller have his way, there will be a replacement for Will shortly. Will is abandoned by them too.

  Thus Act 2 starts with the question in our minds, which is the question in Will’s: what can he do? He goes for advice and help to his predecessor, Martin, but Martin too advises him to leave, and points out justly that with arthritic hands he would be a liability in a gunfight. Helen and Amy meet, for Amy mistakenly thinks Will is still involved with her: she saw him in Act 1 go to see Helen, not realizing he was simply warning her to leave. Helen can’t understand Amy not being supportive, and Amy explains finally that she lost a father and brother to violence, is a Quaker, and cannot face the prospect of violence again. This would be a credibility problem for her relationship to Will except for the fact he was giving up a life of violence as they married.

  Harvey is taunted in the saloon, leaves, and assaults Will in the stable to force him to leave, his guilty conscience pathetically evident. He loses, and the one recruit Will had made abandons him when he discovers there are no others. Only a boy is willing to help, and Will won’t let him. The omnipresent clock nears high noon, when Miller’s train is due in. Will licks down the flap of the envelope with his will, pulls himself together, and steps outside into the blazing light as Helen and Amy drive past on their way to the train station. Will is left alone in the street to face his fate. The question “What can he do?” asked at the end of Act 1 is answered with “He will do this alone.” It is his duty, it is right, and it is necessary.

  The Act 3 shoot-out follows, with Amy’s last-minute intervention as she shoots one of Miller’s cronies in the back, then scratches and breaks away from Miller, who has seized her, so Will can kill him. In a famous scene as the boy brings their buggy and the townspeople swarm into the street, Will shakes his hand, helps Amy up, eyes the townspeople with contempt, tosses his star in the dust, and drives off.

  Clearly we are dealing with a much tighter structure than in Unbearable Lightness. As clearly the problems generating conflict are carried through: we do not enter alternate stories with alternate problems. I say this because an episodic plot, like that of Raiders of the Lost Ark, can flow just as swiftly as one as tightly integrated as High Noon’s, so long as we feel the necessary and causally interrelated drive of the story’s segments, however stylistically or structurally varied. Time handled in this causal, consequential way moves swiftly: time handled acausally, or in a framework that feels multistoried, feels slow.

  Rashômon, for example, has one story in it; the difficulty is deciding which one is the true version, until finally we reach the conclusion all are partly true, partly contradictory, and we can never finally be sure which, for the truth is beyond us, the key point of the film. The Usual Suspects has one story in it also, Verbal under pressure of the interrogation recalling in flashback his involvement with Keaton and Keyser Söze. At the End we realize we have indeed watched one story, but that it is a different one than we thought. That perception comes with a shock of insight, dazzling and conclusive. A film like The Godfather provides a straight, linear story, like High Noon, while The Godfather 2 is equally effective, even though there are two stories. But they play off each other ironically, as we watch Don Vito’s rise and Michael’s struggle with Roth: they do not try to occupy the same linear story time, although they inhabit the same linear running time of our attending as an audience. Sleepless in Seattle is a good example of one story with two story lines that slowly converge, ironically playing off a third, the evoked world of the earlier film An Affair to Remember.

  It is the handling of time in the story that is crucial: our time sense is sufficiently fluid to encompass enormous variety so long as the stories in story time do not overtly conflict in dramatic and running time. That means we experience one plot, however many subplots may supplement it.

  Yet although this may be true, it does not take us far enough.

  There is a limit to what we will tolerate that is rooted in our makeup, and of which the feeling o
f slowness in storytelling gives us a glimpse. For screenplay and dramatic structure are not abstractions, not a series of arbitrary rules, but are rooted in the structure of our minds.

  Each screenplay, each drama, as we saw, creates an expectation in the Beginning of how it works, when it takes place, where its action is, who is involved, and in what direction they must go to solve their problems in the Middle. We expect to go there with the characters, in the reality defined by the screenplay, and for that journey to finish: we cannot defy this expectation without creating a sense of failure. Certainly, we can be surprised by the originality of a story, by writers’ insights into human nature, or by the direction they develop their themes, but they must remain consistent with the story world created in the Beginning: that world cannot become some other world and mix different stories without a causal relation. If we feel multiple stories within a screenplay are disparate we rebel, because that defies our ability to comprehend: hence the insistence on consistency, which is fundamental and applies to the entire enterprise of a screenplay, not just to characterization.

  Thus many things may indeed be possible at once within our experience, but we cannot deal with multiple story experiences at once; Hamlet cannot also be Much Ado about Nothing, Unbearable Lightness, and High Noon: a screenplay can’t even be a mix in itself, a political drama one moment, a personal, romantic drama another. Why?

  Because such a way of handling a story moves past our a priori structuring of the conscious mind, which is linear, into the realm of the ineffable unconscious where many and one, near and far, past and future live together. To the knowing mind the many and the one must always be at odds: the many not brought into the one and resolved is experienced as a mess. Time then fractures and grows slow. Running time necessarily requires the experience of one story transpiring in dramatic time: a jumbled story line in dramatic time jumbles our attending in running time, and then time stretches out and we squirm in our seats. The mind, then, may have many senses of time, conscious and unconscious, but it is the burden of the successful screenwriter and dramatist to reconcile these within the conscious flow of the action with its strict structural demands.

  In sum, a screenplay with disjointed stories gives us trouble telling what bears on what story; too many in the same space cancel one another, so that finally we feel nothing happens—as if, paradoxically, we have watched a film with too little action. Moreover, such action is felt to be endless. In a successful screenplay we feel our experience is unified, including our sense of the time we are in with the characters, because of the success of the protagonists, who impose their own experience with its meanings on all others and whose success wins the future. Amy and Will in High Noon can go off into their New Beginning at the End: their old lives are conclusively finished—all their meanings laid bare, their conflicts over, their past truly behind them—with a now of infinite possibility, because all is new opening before them.

  We crave that experience in our imperfect lives, and for a time a successful story makes it ours.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Heavy as Opposed to …

  The Heavy vs. the Exhilarating

  CALLING a film heavy is not a compliment: heavy means something emotionally unpleasant, a downer of an experience. We feel too that such an experience offends against the writer’s art. What in the handling of the inherent conflict of a screenplay that naturally provokes strong emotions in characters and audience makes a story feel heavy, as opposed to weighty or substantial, one worth the emotional effort demanded?

  Typically, John Book in Witness thinks he’s in control of his fate at the start of the story, that his life belongs to himself and his time is present, now, and also his own. In his case he is unaware of his false modus vivendi, which is characteristic of heroes and heroines’ relation to reality in the Beginning and which we share with them. The murder Samuel witnesses is just another investigation to him: he has suspects to show immediately to the boy and is emotionally comfortable holding Rachel and her son until the murderer is caught.

  But the growing difficulty of the case and the unusualness of Samuel and Rachel’s Amish behavior starts to throw Book out of his conventional, habitual behavior and emotional comfort with his reality. He is shocked but excited when Samuel identifies the killer as a decorated police officer, because he thinks he now understands what happened to a lost drug seizure in the past. He rushes to his “friend” Captain Schaeffer to explain his suspicion of a connection between McFee, the killer police officer, and the lost drugs. Book still thinks he is in control and that his sense of time as his own and now are the true state of affairs. But Schaeffer arranges for McFee to try and kill Book, once he is sure Book has told no one else of his suspicions.

  Now Book’s eyes are open: he is not in control; reality is altogether different from what he thought he understood so well, and time, far from belonging to him, is at once fused with the past and about to run out. He flees, emotionally distraught and physically wounded, with Rachel and Samuel, both to save them and buy time to regain control of events.

  Terry, we saw in On the Waterfront, is also leading a life based on false assumptions. Time doesn’t belong to him and hasn’t since he took the dive in the past. But even the narrow space left for him to operate in as one of Johnny Friendly’s favored few is undercut when Friendly’s thugs kill Joey. Terry’s guilt is easily assuaged, as we saw, although that guilt makes him give Joey’s father a marker to allow him to work the next day. Unlike Book, Terry has conspired in the surrender of his time and of his life being his own, yet in the end both live in as deep an illusion concerning themselves. It is Edie’s plea for help that starkly forces out the price of Terry’s surrender and its intolerable nature.

  To undo his crippling acquiescence to Johnny Friendly, Terry must reclaim his life as his own, meaning, to live by his own conscience: make his own decisions and dispose of his time as he chooses, now. That means he must defy Johnny Friendly and his brother, and finally undo the mistake he made in his past to solve the present conflict.

  These are strong conflicts and engender powerful emotions. If we judge such emotions are warranted by their circumstances, and generated through a cause-and-effect development of action that is largely necessary and probable, then we accept them, however painful they may be, without pejoratively calling them heavy. If we do not feel such emotions are merited, however, at best they feel melodramatic, in excess of what is justified, at worst overwrought and in danger of becoming ludicrous or seeming improbable, so that we dismiss them and the screenplay. The heavy then takes us into new territory: emotion we reject although it is neither melodramatic, ludicrous, nor improbable.

  Dwelling a moment on the standard of “necessary and probable,” let us see a little further into the problem. That standard is difficult for writers. Many actions can be caused in a drama, but unless they are central for the development and resolution of the major conflict, or at least minimally necessary for character development, we experience them as irrelevant and at best feel they make a story drag, as we saw in Unbearable Lightness where different stories with different “necessary and probable” actions succeed one another. Worse, a plot and group of characters can be coherently constructed and developed yet fail because too much is improbable in nature. Certainly, we accept underlying improbable premises for stories, like an action long ago in another galaxy, as in Star Wars. But within a given premise we instinctively demand the action and characters be necessary and probable, if we are to continue to believe in them.

  Stories like Witness or On the Waterfront, let alone Hamlet or Schindler’s List, are judged without any allowances for the unnecessary or improbable: the more ambitious the writing, the more it claims to deal with our true reality, the deeper demand we make on it in these respects.

  Thus we come to the paradox of a film experienced as heavy, for that quality can arise even where we don’t question the causality, necessity, or probability of an action or the appropriateness of a ch
aracter’s emotions. There can be intense, warranted action and emotion that yet feels heavy in a way successful dramas like those just mentioned do not, even in the case of Schindler’s List. It is hard to imagine anything more likely to feel heavy than the Holocaust, yet Schindler’s List is moving and, at the End, exhilarating.

  In sum, the heavy way of handling story and emotion is deliberately intense, deliberately raw, one that throws feeling in our face in a realistic style that is dramatically justified, necessary, probable, and causal. Emotion handled this way is not meant to be distanced. It is not experienced as melodramatic, because earned. Yet it is one we reject.

  Breaking the Waves goes far enough down this emotional path to reveal the source of the heavy feeling in a story, especially if we contrast it with Schindler’s List.

  Bess in Breaking the Waves wears every emotion on her sleeve. She has been in emotional straits in the past but now is getting married to Jan, an offshore oil rig worker in Scotland. The elders of her deeply fundamentalist community are concerned but can’t stop the marriage, even when she responds, “Their music” to their question of what she likes about the “outsiders.” The elders are so puritanical they have removed the church bell from the steeple and mercilessly consign the dead to hell at their burial if they judge them to have strayed in life from the elders’ narrow commandments.

  Bess, however, is an innocent, ignorant and a virgin: she entrances Jan. She is so eager for life she has intercourse with Jan in the bathroom at the reception, unwilling to wait for a more suitable time. An idyll of marital bliss follows that is felt with an Edenic purity on Bess’s part. “You’d give anything to anyone,” her late brother’s wife tells her, which includes Bess thanking Jan one night for the sexual pleasure he brings her, at once amusing and touching him.