The Death and Life of Drama

by Lance Lee

  Road to Perdition throws further light on these issues. Michael Sr. is a good father and hit man par excellence who seeks revenge against John Rooney, a boss and father figure/mentor, after Rooney shields his son who killed Michael’s wife and younger son. Everything is morally ambiguous, as in Hamlet, Oedipus Rex, The Godfather, and Chinatown. Yet we don’t experience this as heavy despite its violence. At all times the violence is used for something beyond itself. Michael’s family is attacked because Rooney’s son fears exposure from Michael Jr., whom he can’t kill without removing the rest of the family. As a Corleone might say, there’s nothing personal involved, just business. Michael Sr. refuses to let himself or the situation be typed but insists on his moral volition in the form of revenge, while Rooney protects his son, even though he laments that sons were put on this earth to torment their fathers. When Michael Sr. finally kills Rooney he is grief-stricken, but the way to Rooney’s son is through the father, and Rooney by elevating family over morality sacrifices his authority over Michael as a moral agent. With Rooney dead, Michael executes the son and then is killed by the mob’s hit man at the End. That too is not heavy, if grievous, even as it provokes a telling emotional outburst by Michael Jr. Michael Sr. deserves his death, and that death is perceived as a balancing of the books, not a descent into destructiveness for its own sake.

  La Femme Nikita provides another insight, for it is at once typed and heavy in the Beginning with its initial vile explosion of destructiveness, including Nikita’s murder of a policeman in a drugged haze. But the remainder of the film pulls off something remarkable, for the training to make Nikita a callous assassin for the state paradoxically humanizes her by giving Nikita self-control. Her training returns her volition. The subsequent violence that she encounters as an agent is experienced from her point of view as ever more intolerable until she can no longer bear it, particularly the grim developments that ensue after a “cleaner” is called in. She reacts to these developments with horror, and is climactically allowed to escape by the men who love her.

  Several conclusions are inevitable.

  Moral substance and ambiguity go hand in hand with writing substantive drama. Their absence in a character like Tomas at first in Unbearable Lightness becomes a dramatic issue itself, as Tereza forces us to see, in which the nature and importance of a moral relation to one’s experience is dramatized. The typing of the protagonist in the Beginning must be broken down so that moral volition can be regained. Furthermore, moral issues deepen the conflict and have the effect of filling out a film, so that the time it occupies becomes weighty and demands a kind of involvement from us alien to entertainment. If the consequence of the action is deepened, then our experience takes on the characters’ sense of weight and time: things do not necessarily move slowly—they can seem quite swift, as in Schindler’s List—but we attend them with greater concentration. The way we feel time speed by thoughtlessly and without weight in an effective entertainment disappears from a meaningful film.

  Time loses its lightness without thereby growing slow within a morally significant realm.

  Time turns slow as emotion turns heavy and we long for that descent into pain for its own sake to stop.

  Morality, then, and the sense of the nature of a film’s nowness are inseparable.

  This moves beyond the experience of swiftness vs. slowness in a screenplay depending on the handling of causal sequences in the conflict in a necessary and probable way, as we saw Unbearable Lightness sometimes fails to do, for when more is demanded of us by a story, we make two demands in turn. One is for weight without heaviness or bogging down, and the second is for time to move cumulatively forward rather than stopping for a character who descends into destructiveness for its own sake. When that happens a new typing ensues, just as limiting for the protagonists as their initial typing in the Beginning.

  But What Are We Morally Ambiguous About?

  Hamlet grows ambiguous because he does not act; Munny in Unforgiven becomes ambiguous as we learn of his background but even more tellingly as we root for him to kill in the climax, which he does so well. In Ran a profound misunderstanding of the nature of love leads Ichimonji to disaster; in Road to Perdition Michael launches into righteous vengeance out of outraged love. In Analyze This Ben’s marital happiness is dependent on Paul regaining his ability to aggress: Riggs, in Lethal Weapon, is suicidal from loss, in this respect a bit like Hamlet, though Riggs kills effortlessly.

  Freud observed love and aggression, Eros and Thanatos, are deeply alloyed.

  We, let alone a character, become morally ambiguous when types decay and the ambivalent essence of human nature emerges as we portray our aggression and love simultaneously.

  We like to idealize our nature, which gives the emergence of a contravening truth—in reality and the imagination—the potential to seem heavy: we need all our imaginative tools to avert that feeling in daily and dramatic reality. But once we sense destructiveness indulged in for its own sake, whether directed outward or inward, our experience as well as that of dramatic characters turns intensely unpleasant or heavy. Then we are repulsed because we feel our humanity is debased.

  The most upsetting feature of such behavior is our sense of the loss of volition, even if it is volition, as with Bess in Breaking the Waves, that initially leads a character in this direction. We take the fates of our heroines and heroes personally because of identification. We know there is a difference between making a choice and being driven. We know when violence is involved that so long as volition endures, Eros, the life-giving possibilities of love, has not been overwhelmed by Thanatos. We know that until moral ambiguity descends into the heavy, death does not have us in hand.

  No feeling is worse than sensing that is no longer true.

  Drama is so pervasive and resonates in peak works so profoundly because it is steeped in that life vs. death conflict, manifested on whatever level a writer pursues in a given script.

  Thus, for dramatic success, potentially heavy emotion must be felt in some way to be transcended. Even in tragedy, so ripe a ground for a screenplay or a drama feeling heavy, the decisive differentiation is that such a story end with a sense of elation, with the tragic consolation and wonder remarked as early as Aristotle.2

  In Oedipus Rex Jocasta hangs herself and Oedipus blinds himself. He is led off to exile by his daughters who are also his incest-born sisters. But that is not where the drama ends, or why Aristotle admired it. The chorus has the last word, the chorus of ordinary Theban citizens, and their prospects are now good. The truth has been laid bare, which handled properly is exhilarating, as with The Usual Suspects. At the End the future has become possible in a New Beginning without the plague from which Thebes was suffering from because of Oedipus’s moral transgressions. The gods’ predictions are shown to be unavoidable, their divinity reliable; Oedipus is left to find his own salvation, if possible. On the Waterfront turns climactically on Johnny Friendly and Terry arguing over the truth of the past and the true nature of their respective behavior. Terry’s victory makes him the man to lead the longshoremen. Again, a New Beginning comes into view.

  Michael Sr. may die in Road to Perdition, but he frees his son for a New Beginning by killing their pursuer. Sometime later from within that New Beginning, Michael’s son narrates the action of the film that set him free, in order to find the truth about his father.

  Time is freed up and moves forward again.

  These intertwined issues of moral substance and ambiguity and the heavy are intimately bound up with dramatic structure and our feeling of a screenwriter or dramatist’s practical success, for the moral substance and ambiguity we experience as heavy is problematic within the fundamental story pattern. The experience of the heavy, let alone its triumph in a story, destroys Eros and defies a sense of structure where the protagonists make possible a new life for those dependent on them, whether they fall by the wayside themselves or lead the way to that life in the New Beginning we see open at the End of a successful
film.

  Michael in The Godfather triumphs as he sinks into profound moral ambiguity, but the problems of the action, past and present, are transcended, however grimly, and a New Beginning can now open out for the family. That beginning can certainly look ambiguous to us in terms of the values we attach to it; a resolution doesn’t have to end ambiguity, for our ambiguity is the métier of our ambivalent natures. But a resolution does end a given story’s particular problems with the meanings engendered in that conflict.

  That New Beginning can be as ironical as Ran’s, where it is the enemies of Ichimonji’s family who inherit the future, as does Fortinbras in Hamlet, the son of an old foe; or the New Beginning can be more upbeat, as for Terry in On the Waterfront. But built into the sense of the New Beginning is the belief life cannot be destroyed. Action turned heavy, whatever its initial source, is the opposite in impact and implication.

  The oceanic feeling Freud traces to infantile omniscience is experienced in drama as the result of moral action carried to a successful conclusion by a hero or heroine who, through the fundamental story pattern of drama, bring us personally, through identification, to the experience of such a prospective new beginning washed clean of the conflicts of the past.

  It’s heady stuff, and a primary example of how dramatic structure roots in human nature.

  CHAPTER 4

  Complexity vs. Fullness

  Belief vs. Disbelief: Complexity

  To call a film full is a compliment that means we experience a cohesive story, however multithreaded, with a morally meaningful conflict necessarily and probably developed with characters who compel belief. We believe the action in such a film: nothing makes us suspend disbelief in order to go on. The suspension of disbelief is always a secondary phenomenon, a breakdown of the primary belief with which we invest a given story until it begins to fail us.1 Complexity, however, is felt as a criticism of a film: a dramatic story has not added up, and its pieces lie in our hands like those of a puzzle we can’t quite fit together. Many roads lead to a sense of complexity. First, complexity grows out of action that is not felt as causal. Everything in a film in the mere hour and a half to three hours of its running time, in which decades can transpire in the action, is necessarily symbolic of our larger reality, whatever style a story chooses to use, whether realism, magic realism, or styles further afield, like surrealism. All styles are equally symbolic ways of handling dramatic reality, and every writer must marshal the action economically and swiftly within his chosen style, for the simplest truth about drama is that an audience’s patience is limited. Every scene must bear on the conflict, ideally: anything that doesn’t feel causally connected makes the story feel slower, and sacrifices time that could have been put to better use. When the story picks up again we are teased with a sense of beginning again: taken far enough, we begin to hold broken story lines in our hands and time congests, with the results we saw earlier.

  Second, unnecessary action, whether judged as causal or not but felt to be unnecessary, also has the effect of both interrupting our concentration and of beginning to break the story line. Such action puts a pause in our sense of a story’s development and makes us grow self-conscious about our experience, the beginning of disbelief. “We don’t need this action,” we think, and begin to rewrite the story instead of losing ourselves in the characters and the emotional development of the conflict. Oddly, it is not a question of probability that is raised here initially, although necessary and probable are usually linked. Probability goes to credibility, necessity to structure. Yet what is structurally unnecessary inevitably starts to feel self-indulgent and potentially improbable. If the handling of a story rouses our self-consciousness enough, we will throw up our hands; at worst, we will leave the theatre. Leaving in such circumstances becomes the unexpected pleasure of the evening.

  I can make this plain in, third, the use and abuse of the slice-of-life technique. In themselves, slice-of-life treatments of story structure don’t pitch us out of our belief in a story, make us self-conscious, or begin to excite questions about how it all adds up, i.e., make us start to feel the story is complex. If a film defines its initial reality as containing a slice-of-life quality, we will accept that as readily as a science fiction premise. We will accept any reality clearly defined at the start of a film, because our sense of reality is almost infinitely plastic. Any reading in the anthropological literature will drive home how our storytelling plasticity reflects our equally diverse ways of organizing our societies.

  Moreover, since the impact of naturalism in the nineteenth century, we have had the prejudice that slice-of-life writing deepens the sense of reality.2 That prejudice, however, assumes the reality evoked in slice-of-life writing is the one we encounter in our lives, as if we all live in the same culture and share the same metaphysical assumptions. An American slice-of-life is radically dissimilar from a Chinese or Indian or Samoan: each looks, in fact, fantastic to the other.

  Once within any cultural frame of reference, if we begin to feel slice-of-life writing is indulged in at the expense of the forward movement and cohesion of the conflict, then we experience it as unnecessary. Once perceived that way, slice-of-life writing, far from representing ultrarealism, instead undercuts it and our attention and belief in the story break down. We end with a sense of complexity instead, for the root cause of the sense of complexity is that story elements do not add up—that, in other words, our experiences in a story fail to cohere meaningfully.

  Moreover, despite our prejudice, the sense of properly developed conflict is inherently at odds with slice-of-life writing and makes it always teeter on the edge of the faults reviewed here. Everything, we saw, must bear on a successfully handled conflict if we are to judge a film successful. But our sense of dramatic structure is not just at odds with slice-of-life writing, but with life itself. We are often overwhelmed with a sense of complexity in reality that we hunger to simplify so we can live with more purpose, do what is truly necessary, and avoid the merely expected or repetitive. Dramatic conflict through its resolution embodies that urge, and thus, fourth, when the conflict is not carried through cohesively, that structural failure evokes our underlying sense of complexity from which we ache to be freed and gives considerable sting to calling a film complex.

  That is why, fifth, sequences of action causal in themselves but discontinuous with one another are so unsatisfactory, another reason why Unbearable Lightness feels problematic. We don’t want to be left in the complexity and perplexity we bring with us into the theatre. Yet Unbearable Lightness is a likeable film, despite its brushes with incoherence. It is held together by our sympathy for the characters and our willingness to allow the disjunctions of their experience to be excused by our knowledge the Soviet invasion did happen, exile does override other concerns, and repression does drive individuals into isolation and a concentration on purely private matters, making them amoral in the larger picture, even if caused in part by taking a politically principled, moral stand, as does Tomas.

  This tolerance for Unbearable Lightness’ faults testifies to two things: my unwillingness to immerse us in genuinely bad films in order to score points, and the extreme latitude our will to believe grants any screenwriter. Story elements must be handled appallingly badly to break down our willingness to accept imaginary experience as emotionally and intellectually meaningful, for the imagination is a part of our experience of reality itself. Dramatists have few tools so powerful as our will to believe.

  The problems in episodic writing, sixth, bring us further into the nature of the experience of complexity. Sequences in an episodic film need not be connected through cause-and-effect action on the protagonist’s part, yet are not felt as complex. Rather, episodic writing goes directly to our experience of our fate being at the mercy of others. Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark has a good and necessary cause to go to Nepal to get the artifact that will let him find the Ark, but he has no way of knowing the Germans will arrive when he does, or that his succ
ess will not derail the Nazis’ plans. Once in Egypt, he survives an attempt to kill him but loses Marion. Then, at the archeological site, he finds the Germans already at work; although he finds the Ark he is discovered and entombed. Next he pursues the truck transporting the Ark, triumphs, and arrives in Cairo with both the Ark and Marion, only to have a German submarine take both in the following episode.

  What is operative here and explains the film’s success is an overall unity of story purpose: all bears on gaining the Ark from the Nazis, even if the episodes are linked as much by accident or others’ initiatives as by the protagonist’s perspective. In each episode Indiana does what he must to attain his overriding goal and cause-and-effect writing reigns supreme; between episodes his fate is in the hands of others. By way of contrast, Terry in On the Waterfront and Book in Witness have a much more thorough sense in Acts 2 and 3 of what kind of difficulties their actions lead them toward: they are the architects of their own development.

  If the overall unity of story purpose in an episodic film is broken, then the episodic handling of the story collapses into its disparate parts and is felt as complex. The problem of continuity in story line as we encounter it Unbearable Lightness but don’t in Raiders of the Lost Ark turns on our sense of this unity of story purpose. In its absence, the failure of a story’s structure to add up evokes our underlying fear that life itself does not add up and we are at the mercy of imponderables. That angers and frustrates the same desire for clarity and resolution we bring to our experience of the conflict.

  We will experience complexity in all of these instances even if we sense a story is substantive and fully engaged with issues of Eros vs. Thanatos. Beyond this, whether we experience elements of an action or an entire film as heavy or as lacking in moral weight, and so weightless and without meaning, are separate issues; yet while both the heavy and moral lightness can appear in a film we experience as complex, neither appears in a film we feel is full.