by Lance Lee
A most curious facet of this process for Freud is how the development of civilized order echoes individual psychological or libidinal development. Order and cleanliness can be derived from the anal stage, while inhibiting instinct echoes the sublimation of libido into other pursuits, like creativity. We lose savage satisfaction to gain civilized life, but the more civilized, the more instinct is regulated, the more fundamentally unhappy we must feel.
Such paradoxes have only started. Freud describes how Eros founds civilization by binding one to another and forming the family. Yet Freud imagines the “first family” was founded on the murder of a governing male patriarch who monopolized the women, by his sons. After their action, the sons instituted a taboo against incest to maintain the community and to deny themselves what they had sought, from guilt over their action. The result of this primitive psychohistorical drama was the creation of the rule of law, beginning with the first law: the law against incest. But although sexual love drove men into families, necessity into communities, “aim inhibited love,” i.e., sublimated libido or desire is necessary to develop a love for all, or at least all those of a given community.7 Eros may lead to civilization, but civilization in turn acts against Eros’ direct expression in the name of cementing a broader community, inhibiting the family’s preeminence and repressing unvarnished sexuality. The frozen, life-hating world Bess finds herself a member of in Breaking the Waves is a salutary reminder of just how inhibiting our rules can become.
But why should civilization treat Eros in this way? Or, where could the commandment “Love thy neighbor as thyself” have come from, when it is so extraordinarily untrue of human nature to do so? It is the commandment most conspicuously absent from Schindler’s List at the beginning. Because, Freud answers, we are far more profoundly destructive/aggressive than we are erotic.8 Eros inhibited or sublimated into broader forms of engagement attempts to counteract that aggressive, destructive nature. But that destructiveness is inherent and its expression is pleasurable. Law may inhibit its grosser expressions, but only love can establish a communal barrier. Man is Homo homini lupus, a wolf to his fellow men.9 Our unhappiness with civilization has therefore a second and profounder root: we not only inhibit Eros but our destructiveness as well. That aggressiveness/destructiveness is Thanatos, a destructive instinct toward death.
Freud admits it is hard to accept this dualism, especially since Thanatos always seems alloyed with Eros in its expression. Modern psychoanalysis is of a divided mind on this subject, as we will see when we take up D. W. Winnicott. Yet the opposition of love and death, Eros vs. Thanatos, certainly rings with immediate resonance in our experience, viewed historically. Freud points out there are biological parallels to this opposition of love and death, processes of building up vs. tearing down or decay. Difficult as it is to accept, he holds that Thanatos, our destructive death instinct, is part of our nature.
Thanatos manifests itself outwardly as aggressiveness: inwardly it appears as self-destructiveness. This death instinct is the greatest opponent to civilization, which embodies the contest of Eros vs. Thanatos “for life of the human species.”10 But now he points out the rub: Eros is unequal to the task.
How is our destructiveness to be controlled? By guilt. Guilt is civilization’s all-important tool. Freud has a complicated exposition of guilt: suffice it to say guilt arises from both external causes—from what we do, as well as from what we wish and fear. This is complex, as internally guilt arises from, in Freud’s primal fantasy, our ancestral slaying of the actual dangerous patriarchal ur-father and, later in our development, through a series of introjections, as of a vengeful father figure into the superego. Additionally, there are the repressions of our own aggressive urges we fear to release outwardly, like those embodied by our Oedipal hostility to our father.
Taken into ourselves through identification, the “ur” or actual vengeful father of infancy falls into the superego and takes control of our own aggressiveness, turning it against ourselves, for even if our aggression toward others is expressed only in private fantasy, nothing is hidden from the superego, or conscience, nor does it draw differences between “actual” deeds and “imagined.” The more aggression we feel and repress, the guiltier we feel, so that we confront the paradox of saints hounded by their conscience who have lived faultless lives. All their aggression has been repressed and so fallen into their superego and turned against themselves, which they experience as a profound sense of guilt. An additional factor gives a snowball effect to guilt: the stronger conscience becomes, the more it represses the aggressive instinct on its own account, deepening our sense of guilt. Clinically that can result in the paradoxical need of an analyst to help a patient lighten the burden of conscience.
Following from this is the desire of the superego, of conscience, to seek punishment in reality, whether for imagined or actual deeds. Terry, for example, in On the Waterfront must suffer both for acting against Johnny Friendly, a father figure, and earlier for acting against himself by taking the dive, i.e., repressing his own aggression which could have let him win the fight. He must expiate through suffering to be free of the consequences of his behavior, which gives the deep, psychic underpinning to the beating Terry takes in the End from Johnny Friendly and his thugs. Primitive man, on the contrary, faced with failure, punishes his fetishes, not himself: civilization leads us into these dilemmas.
Ultimately the internal/external derivations of guilt are irrelevant for Freud: we feel guilt from aggression whether rooted in actions in the outside world or actions we imagine within ourselves, for the sad truth is that those nearest us whom we hate—actual or imagined, separate or part of ourselves—we also love. Ambivalence is another word for human nature. The objection that we are not always conscious of feeling guilty has no merit: guilt exists continuously in our unconscious and consciously appears as anxiety, a sense of malaise, or the need for punishment.
Thwarting the expression of aggression has a very dissimilar effect to thwarting Eros: thwarted aggression gives rise to guilt, while thwarted Eros leads to neurosis. Thus Eros vs. civilization is manageable, but Thanatos vs. civilization must simply be fought.
The final step in Freud’s analysis points out the peculiar similarity between the cultural superego and the individual: they are “always interlocked.”11 How this interlocking happens, or where the cultural superego is, are left unspecified. Where in a dualistic worldview of “me” vs. “not me,” “I” and “the thing in itself,” is culture? If this is left blank, at least Freud can now explain the injunction “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
We must try to love one another no matter how contrary to human nature that is, precisely because of the depth of our destructiveness, or we will turn on one another in a destructive frenzy of which the past hundred years has given so many examples.
The Descent into the Heavy
Does the sense of heavy, then, result from the sense of the destructive instinct, or Thanatos, coming to predominate in a story?
Can screenwriting issues and dramatic writing generally be so rooted in our essential natures?
Could it be otherwise?
Do we see Bess descend in Breaking the Waves into a freeing of Thanatos toward herself? Is it possible to see her behavior as anything else than this when she deliberately insists on being taken back to the ship where she will be fatally brutalized? Freud spoke of the paradoxical alloy of destructiveness with Eros: she knows the men on that ship will indulge in sexual sadism. They destroy her.
When a story begins to make us feel a protagonist is falling into a self-destructive pattern, when we begin to feel that self-destructiveness for its own sake has taken over, even if motivated, even if causally justifiable, even if necessary and probable in a story—even if!—we recoil with an all too human intensity from an immersion into something we both fear and dread in ourselves. We have long been civilized: primitive humanity is very far from us, though not as far as we wish when we recall the savagery of the twentie
th century or watch the Holocaust through the prism of Schindler’s List. But the death instinct becomes overt in Breaking the Waves.
This descent into destructiveness of self or other for its own sake, into a death that is experienced as pointless, overwhelms any point a story can make. That is why the End of Breaking the Waves finds it exceedingly difficult to recover from Bess’s descent. Even though Bess is out to save her husband and has found what she is good for and challenges the dead Apollonian order of the kirk, even though her goal is high, we cannot recover from that brush with the heavy, that whiff of self-destructive action we feel is expressed for its own sake.
Schindler’s List, on the other hand, despite subject matter and Götterdämmerung scenes, is couched within an experience of constantly growing character, deepening acts of salvation, and defiance by Schindler of the aggressive, destructive behavior all around him. That defiance, and its ultimate success, is what so exhilarates us at the end. Moreover, we have the sense that we can wake up from Schindler’s List if we wish: everything about Breaking the Waves is designed to take us by the neck and force us to go step by step with Bess. It has the unshakeable power of nightmare. Schindler encounters pain and destructiveness of a higher power than that with Bess in its grip, actually, but he struggles to contain it within his own small world.
Hamlet, Schindler’s List, On the Waterfront, King Lear, Ran all thrust us past death into a New Beginning, a new community, whether of Fortinbras because Hamlet’s line finally fails, or of the saved Jews who now number in the thousands, whom we see at the end of Schindler’s List, or of a reformed future where guilt has been expunged and a fresh start made possible, as in On the Waterfront, or in Ran and King Lear, as with Hamlet, of a future where seemingly successful lines are destroyed and new lines now take over not subject to the same destructive frenzies. Breaking the Waves nods in this direction with its unconvincing end, but Bess goes too far into willed self-destruction, into the freeing of Thanatos, even if—and quintessentially Freudian—she does so in the name of love.
What is most interesting in this encounter with the heavy, however, is something that goes beyond Freud. In his realm the enjoyment of the uninhibited expression of instinct is a paramount pleasure, but in the imagined world of film and drama the uninhibited expression of destructiveness when we sense it is expressed for its own sake, even though that seems the quintessential expression of the instinct, provokes a profound recoil in our hearts, even though we are offered the chance to live that instinctive release vicariously through the protagonist without direct consequence. Perhaps if we gave unhindered expression to our own destructiveness directly we would enjoy it, as Freud and our own experience of self-righteous anger suggest, but when that uninhibited expression is made an object of creative contemplation, as in a play or screenplay or other work of art, we turn against it.
There is more to ourselves and civilization, then, than Freud credits. Our self-understanding is, after all, a work in progress. There is something within us of which civilization is the creative realization, and we recoil from the expression of its undoing with a visceral sense of betrayal every bit as instinctive as destructiveness. That is where our experience of the heavy finally roots.
CHAPTER 3
Moral Substance and Ambiguity
Morality and Screenplays?
THE Hollywood tradition is confused and uncomfortable with the subjects of morality and intellect in film. But it is fair to ask what morality has to do with screenwriting: films and plays are primarily public entertainments. We can go to church if we want reflections on morality. “I,” a typical screenwriter, might say, “Just want to make money.” She or he can’t protect a script from producers and directors like a stage dramatist can; many hands may be involved in a film’s writing, not all credited. Additional production pressures and the need to repay investment and turn a profit make it hard to see how moral issues can be handled coherently in such an “art” form. “Leave it to the Europeans, leave it to the ‘art film’—spare me” is easy to imagine our typical American screenwriter saying.
What, then, should we make of On the Waterfront, or The Godfather, or Unforgiven, or Chinatown, or L.A. Confidential, or High Noon, all American films and regarded among our most outstanding? What about Rashômon, or Breaking the Waves, or Fanny and Alexander, or the many outstanding films from other film traditions all deeply immersed in moral questions? Something quite simple, I think: if ambivalence is, speaking broadly, another term for human nature, then there is a consequent division of experience into a sense of good and bad, however the contents of those terms vary across cultures. Any story intending to deal with characters reflecting us in any meaningful way inevitably must deal with this inherent aspect of ourselves. Perhaps what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom has little to do with walking upright or possessing our brain, but in being a moral animal.
If we can’t escape morality, then a film about our lives cannot escape having something to do with moral substance. Is that simply a fact of life and art we can ignore, like the alphabet our words are composed in? Must we only determine our story convincingly and let its moral element take care of itself by association with the success of the protagonist in the resolution of a particular conflict? What succeeds is “good” and fails is “bad”? The rest we can leave by default to public taste and approval or rejection? Or does the considered use of moral substance and ambiguity make a screenplay more commercial? Can moral substance alone do, without moral ambiguity? Am I talking of moral substance and ambiguity in relation to character, or to situation?
Clear-cut good vs. bad contests are endemic in screenwriting. The villains in the Lethal Weapon series are simply bad. Jason in the Friday the 13th films may be entertaining, but he is evil. Those opponents of the heroes we meet in Van Damme or Seagal stories or in Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films are also bad, pure and simple. Their lack of ambiguity does not compromise the success of the writing. James Bond’s foes are wholly bad organizations, men and women, yet the films are no less effective for their being so unambiguous. We even have fun with some of the extremes to which the evil caricatures are taken, because evil can be entertaining. Richard in Richard III is fascinating. Tony is a successful character in the baroquely overdone Scarface.
We take pleasure in what happens to bad characters because they deserve it, as well as in this case pleasure in the vicarious release of instinct. However these characters rampage through a film, they get their due in the End as good and right are vindicated. So we do not recoil from these characters’ destructiveness as we do with Bess in Breaking the Waves. Evil is not, in itself, heavy.
In contrast, we know the characters Van Damme and Seagal play are presented as morally good in their films whatever a given character’s background may be at first glance, as is Dirty Harry’s character despite his violence. That is in response to bad men and condemned by superiors who can’t tell the difference between good and evil or attach the right urgency to confronting it. These are easy films to relate to, whether to dislike for reasons of political correctness or enjoy for their black-and-white simplification of experience. Morality, in other words, is inseparable from their appeal in the guise of the triumph of the hero.
But consider Besson’s The Professional. It’s very clear Stansfield is a villain without any redeeming quality, if richly drawn. But what are we to make of Léon, a professional killer who discovers love through Mathilda and ends by killing Stansfield? Wilson, the gunslinger in Shane, is simply bad—but Shane is a gunslinger who discovers he can’t avoid his nature by becoming a farmer, even though killing Wilson is a good deed. Barzini in The Godfather is simply a conniving, dangerous enemy to the Corleones, but the Corleones are mobsters running a corrupt empire, while Michael must give up the hope of a life free from crime in order to stand by his father and family. He becomes the ultimate mobster, the godfather himself. Darth Vader in Star Wars appears as the quintessence of evil, but we discover he is Luke’s fathe
r, and it is Darth who finally destroys the wholly evil emperor two films later to save Luke, redeeming himself. Bishop Vergerus is a hypocrite and sadist in Fanny and Alexander, but also a man scarred by tragedy and desperate over his inability to change himself. Breaking the Waves shows Bess prostituting herself out of love, while the heroine in Rashômon is an outraged wife, a spurned woman, and willing conquest. Michael Sr. in Road to Perdition is a dreaded hit man out to avenge his murdered wife and son. All of these films may be no more or less entertaining or commercial than those with less ambiguous shadings of morality, but undoubtedly they earn a deeper involvement and a higher estimation on our part because of their greater moral substance that shades into moral ambiguity.
High Noon lets us bring more clarity into this issue. Marshal Kane pursues good regardless of cost, almost losing his life and wife. He is moral and duty bound. There may be an element of expediency that stems from his knowledge he can’t run from Miller on the prairie and stands a better chance against him in town, but that is overwhelmed by the moral sense of obligation he brings to his task and his continuing even after he realizes he is on his own.
Will Kane has great moral substance, then, if not much ambiguity. He would be a monster of morality if the action didn’t show him wrestling with fear and a growing certainty of death. He won’t support Harvey as marshal after him because he believes him inadequate, even though he is desperate for help, but is willing to let him have his former mistress, Helen. That’s their business. Amy, if she won’t support him, must be let go so his duty can be carried out.
