The Death and Life of Drama

by Lance Lee

  Hamlet beguiles himself and baffles others with his famous “madness,” particularly Polonius, as he defers action by looking for a way to prove the ghost is right: the ghost might be a deception from hell. The plot does not falter from his indecision but pursues the subplots of Laertes, Ophelia, and Polonius, as well as their relation to Hamlet, and follows Claudius and Gertrude’s efforts to use Hamlet’s friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on him. A key strand of action is sparked by Polonius’s belief that Hamlet’s problem is one of crazed love for Ophelia, commanded by her father to refuse him. In the midst of these concerns the players arrive, and suddenly Hamlet thinks he may have a way “to catch the conscience of the king,” by putting on a play recapitulating his father’s death.4 But Hamlet does not immediately go into an ecstasy of anticipation: he is instead repelled by a player weeping over the merely imaginary woes of Hecuba while he has so much greater cause to act and weep.

  That is deeply ironic, for Shakespeare and Freud both know we weep over the imaginary as readily as the real: they are different realms that are equally real in their impact on us.

  Hamlet berates himself in another soliloquy, “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I,”5 which brings out these points about his having waited and not acted, and in the next scene gives the great soliloquy “To be, or not to be—that is the question,” where he makes clear he will neither remove himself nor act.6 He destroys the idea he is lovelorn in his brutal confrontation with Ophelia, and then as the court gathers for the players’ performance jokes with her how little time, meaning psychic time, has passed since his father’s death.

  That is how we learn two months have passed since the ghost summoned Hamlet to act. Despite the remarkable sense of flowing action in the play, nothing actually has happened. Hamlet has still to act, yet cannot given his perspective. If we needed further proof, although he exults over Claudius’s guilty reaction to the performance, certain now the ghost is right, when Hamlet finds Claudius praying he does not kill him. Olivier got it wrong with Hamlet: the failure to kill isn’t a result of Hamlet’s reasoning himself out of the action because paralyzed with too many possibilities. Hamlet never acts at any point from reason. Instead, a reason is found to express, not cause, his inability to act. But Hamlet does kill when he sees his mother. He sees a motion behind her arras and thrusts with his sword, killing Polonius as he wonders if it’s the king, although he’s just left Claudius praying. He strikes in a moment of spontaneous rage before he even knows who is there. This spontaneous outburst is the only way he can act, and revelatory for that reason. Sometimes his confrontation with Ophelia is played as if he discovers they are being spied on, provoking a violent, verbal rage that makes the same point.

  Now Hamlet reproaches his mother for her actions when, implicitly, any would have been wrong. In the midst of this the ghost appears to reproach him for his inactivity and counsel forbearance with his mother, driving home the paradoxes of his behavior.

  Handling growth in a major character in this dumb manner drives a writer ever deeper into insight into the human nature embodied in that character, who must find this depth under the decisive pressure of immediate conflict. But within dumb development that character won’t change in the sense of transform, only reveal with ever greater profundity the capacity of human nature. When a writer’s ambition is smaller, dumb development turns into the revelation of an action heroine or hero’s resourcefulness.

  James Bond is betrayed, fails momentarily, and suffers to an unexpected degree in Die Another Day, but he still gets the women, has a telling quip for each turn of the action, and finds a way to succeed at the end. He too is a dumb character, as those around him know, certain he will behave in a way true to character whatever the events, only adapting his responses, not his character, to each event. Such a dumb character is nonetheless interesting in the better Bond films because of the practical resourcefulness and inventiveness the story demands a writer find for him. When we sense a Bond character more rooted in frailty yet as fully resourceful as ever, we are in for a better Bond film; when that is lacking, and the story less memorable, he is a character going through the motions, largely untouchable by emotion, distant, cooked in the problematic sense.

  Hamlet’s dumb growth isn’t finished yet. Claudius exiles him with letters ordering his execution in England. As he leaves Hamlet observes Fortinbras leading an army to contest a stretch of land and mocks the illusory nature of military glory. He embarks for England, uses Claudius’s letters to cause Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s execution, and returns to Denmark. Does he leap to confront Claudius after the king’s attempt to kill him, start a conspiracy, rouse a popular revolt? No: he pauses at a grave to lament overtly the folly of life’s shows, and shows a spontaneous if overwrought grief over the dead Ophelia, as if in some sort of contest with her brother, Laertes. Then he returns to Elsinore and waits.

  It is Claudius who acts through Laertes, plotting the duel in which Hamlet is killed by a poisoned blade. Only when the dying Laertes confesses, and Hamlet sees his mother die from a poisoned drink, does he act again in a sudden, spontaneous rage like when he killed Polonius. Horatio can tell his tale insofar as he understands it: “The rest is silence.”7 Fortinbras takes over, his relation to action untouched by a sense of life’s pointlessness, while we leave the theatre or cinema having looked into human nature to an unparalleled extent.

  A search for “Hamlet” on the Internet brings 1,330,000 references: Gandhi, Lincoln, Lenin, Thomas Mann, Mother Theresa, Mao, De Gaulle, FDR, even Romeo (and Juliet) have fewer. Madonna and Superman have more, as do George Washington, Hitler, Marx, Einstein, and Freud (the latter by only a few thousand): yet in my cursory search, Shakespeare had twice as many as any of these, and only trailed Jesus. Not bad for a dramatist and an imaginary character.

  John Nash and the Smart

  Now we can easily grasp a smart handling of character growth entails character transformation rather than an ever deeper revelation of capacity.

  John Nash in A Beautiful Mind arrives at Princeton brilliant, socially awkward, and inept with women. We meet Charles, never thinking he is a schizophrenic projection, who seems a good deal more “one of the boys” than the hopelessly introverted Nash. Nash’s tutor tells him his work is undistinguished as he moves into the room where a professor is being honored for a Nobel nomination: stung, Nash struggles for an original insight ever more desperately, at one point heaving his desk out the window in frustration. Finally he has a breakthrough that is triggered by an adroit linking of his private and professional life in the bar scene. He modifies Adam Smith’s enlightened self-interest as the alpha and omega of human motivation into a more cooperative version of self-interest, whereby all in the bar could “get a girl” by ignoring the one blonde they all desire and going for her companions instead. This is the beginning of his Governing Dynamics, which now stuns his professor and wins a coveted prize and position at Wheeler Labs at MIT.

  Up to this point Nash’s growth has been handled in a dumb way: Nash has simply been driven to reveal his existing nature under the pressure of events, like Hamlet existentially or a Bond type of action hero in an action-adventure film. But when we see Nash five years later as a successful professor called to the Pentagon to break a code, he is well tailored and supremely self-confident, transformed by success from the awkward student at Princeton. He has become a smart character. This is only the beginning of the transformations he will go through. He is fascinating now to others: the same line that got him a slap as a student gets him the young woman who marries him. William Parcher recruits him for top-secret government work. We don’t know that Parcher or the little girl we have met before are also schizophrenic projections.

  But we begin to suspect all is not what it seems as Nash sinks into paranoid fear and withdraws from his wife under the pressure of doing Parcher’s work, who turns threatening and won’t let him give it up. Nash becomes driven and desperate, another transformation. Worse, becau
se we experience the action from his perspective, we have become part of his madness in a way Hamlet never lets us share with him, for Hamlet is not mad. We suspect government agents of some sort pursue Nash as he flees from a lecture, not aides to a psychiatrist.

  Suddenly our point of view swings 180 degrees: Nash is not brilliant, not an admired professor and mathematician but a paranoid schizophrenic who finally submits himself to electric shock therapy in an attempt at a cure. It is a major Reverse like the kind Oedipus suffers when he discovers he has not avoided his fate of killing his father and marrying his mother but brought it about with every step he took in flight.

  We are not done. Nash is next a recovering figure, living simply with his wife and child, trying to resume work but inhibited by the treatment and medication. He relapses and almost loses his wife after having begged her not to have him taken back to the asylum, protesting he can work this out. He stops her flight in the rain with his realization his figments never change, so they can’t be real. It’s yet another change in Nash, from a false recovery to the beginning of a true one.

  Why the lack of change in Nash’s figments is crucial to his understanding their lack of reality is fundamental to understanding him and storytelling. The simplest way to get to this is by reminding ourselves of Aristotle’s definition of drama as the “imitation of an action.” Human beings do not live in set, finished time: life is a process, a becoming, an activity that drama lets us bring to a point. Freud points out the folly of hoping happiness will overcome suffering: happiness is an emotion in transit, a reaction to an experience caught up in the flow of time. We cannot remain happy: ecstasy cannot endure unchanged. We move on to something else. Hamlet’s tragedy is expressed precisely by his inability to move on from the impact of his father’s death which has made him dumb. He is frozen in time, which only an active drama of peculiar genius is able to make vivid. Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire struggles to move on to a new life with Mitch: when he and Stanley deny her, tragedy ensues, freezing her in a dumb relation to how she has become since the death of her love, fixing her in time.

  What is fixed in time is over and, worse than dead, no longer real, for growing out of our most basic sense of ourselves, despite the sensed continuity of our “I,” is this sense of change in living through time, and what to make out of change as we age and see life-as-becoming ever more profoundly. Changelessness is unreality, like the little girl, Charles, and Parcher of A Beautiful Mind. The less volition a character has, the more unchanging, the greater the loss of the sense of his reality to us in writing as well as life. Hamlet does not feel remotely real to himself but is caught in the limbo between desire and fear, revealed in his “To be or not to be” soliloquy. The dumb development of growth, at its profoundest, taps into this underlying sensibility in us; the smart is always more comfortable. How ironic that on the surface dumb characters like Bond are so pleasing.

  Finally, Nash goes through his last transformation at Princeton, from an eccentric to a man embedded in the living flow of time now instructing the young, crowned with a Nobel award that is honored in the same pen ceremony we witnessed near the beginning of the film. Noteworthily, it is Eros that Nash lauds in his acceptance speech, the love of his wife that made it possible for him to find himself. Thanatos destroys.

  Thanatos makes dumb.

  In a sense, a happy ending is always a transparent Eros triumph, for it is the procreative urge made manifest in life triumphing and moving forward into the New Beginning of the fundamental story pattern. This, however, is true of all drama, even tragedy, as we saw even there how some community triumphs. Films where Thanatos triumphs are, as we saw in Breaking the Waves, heavy.

  In sum, smart characters redefine themselves or grow consistently in the cause and effect, necessary and probable development of dramatic action. Dumb characters only reveal their unchanging character ever more deeply. Types are by definition dumb; a type who changes becomes smart and is no longer a type. Smart or dumb characters will be rounded: they cannot be flat.

  Plot-Handling Implications

  Typically, the action of a screenplay begins in a dumb fashion. The action we see in the Beginning reveals situation, conflict, and character, but the hero and heroine at that point are locked in misconception and responses that are revelatory, not transformative. In Witness Book is predictable until he discovers that Captain Schaeffer is a criminal and realizes he cannot be sure about anything, instead of being certain about everything. He is, too, ultimately a dumb character, revealed definitively as such when he replies to Eli’s assertion that violence is not the Amish way by insisting it is his way as he confronts the tourist smearing ice cream on the others. Up to this point he has flirted with the Amish lifestyle, deeply attracted by Rachel: to fit in would transform him into a smart character. His response to Eli reveals him untransformed, if with a depth of self-awareness previously lacking.

  The same dumb development is apparent with Terry in On the Waterfront. All Terry does only shows the nature of his existing relationship to Johnny Friendly and himself. He stays that way until he finally responds to Edie’s plea for help, first intervening to let Father Barry be heard in the hold as he speaks over Dugan’s body, then definitively as he takes Edie into his arms. He has becomes a smart character as he confesses to Father Barry and her.

  Both Star Wars and Blue seem to start off with major changes: Princess Leia is captured, and the robots flee; Julie lives through an accident that kills her husband and daughter. But as we follow Julie in the hospital, at first she is handled in a dumb way: i.e., she is grief-stricken, suicidal, withdrawn. Although she cannot kill herself, she does the next best thing: withdraw from life. Thereafter the action systematically challenges her, once she explains to the woman with the petition against the prostitute, Lucille, that she does not want to get involved, until Olivier finally forces her to make a choice. She is transformed into a smart character as she chooses to live, love, and compose (create), just as Mathilda transforms Léon in The Professional.

  Luke, in Star Wars, is similarly handled in a dumb way at first. Neither the robots, the appearance of Leia in a projection from R2-D2, nor the meeting with Obi-Wan does more than bring out the existing nature of his character. But once he finds his uncle and aunt charred by stormtroopers and decides to help Obi-Wan, he sets off on a pattern of smart development.

  This, I repeat, is not to imply a preference for handling character growth in either a smart or dumb way: both, as we have seen, are equally valid, common, and popular. But it does show that in plot handling, in the initial stage of the action, both the situation and main character(s) are handled in a dumb manner, despite appearances to the contrary. That bespeaks the reality that far from living with volition, the main characters are caught up in a false modus vivendi with past problems, preventing the present from having, paradoxically, any real nowness. That present, seeming so immediate while actually a continuance of the past, is necessarily dumb and cannot change until volition is (re)gained and the failed choices of the past revealed and rejected.

  In Hamlet in Hamlet we see how plot and character development diverge in screenplays where the main character is dumb. The plot shows constant change and transformation, as does a smart character. But that same transformative nature of a developing plot drives a dumb character to find ever deeper expressions of his nature. Both smart and dumb characters show volition too, even if in the profoundest example, as with Hamlet, that volition is expressed in a refusal to act. In different ways both kinds of characters bring us to drama’s successful climax and resolution.

  Yet that raises profound questions about the real nature of the dramatic journey of heroines and heroes and of the experience their action takes us on, irrespective of the seemingly all-important nature of the specific story within which we find each. I sometimes wonder if beyond the obvious the specific dramatic story we call “the film” matters at all. But before I take up the ultimate nature of dramatic experience, we need to
have the nature of the comic experience in hand too.

  PART III

  The Lost Poetics of Comedy

  CHAPTER 7

  The Lost Poetics of Comedy

  The Comic Universe

  No one knows what Aristotle’s lost chapters on comedy contained, so I am free to imagine what such a basic analysis of the essential nature of comedy might be. It will not be one of the plethora of comedy-writing “how-to’s” but instead refer to what comedy is in itself, and how and why its viewpoint is necessarily so at odds with that of tragedy and serious drama generally. Typical comic techniques can be left to a review like A Poetics for Screenwriters, where mistaken identity, reductio ad absurdum, physical humor, misuse of language, witty dialogue, and irony all get their due.1

  The comedic universe is so dissimilar to the serious that writers tend to excel in one or the other. Crossovers happen but are not the commonplace: Shaw could never entirely leave the comic universe behind, if only in his cerebral and witty dialogue in plays like Saint Joan and Heartbreak House. He never uncorked a tragedy on a par with those of Shakespeare, who, however, is as famous for his comedies as his tragedies which constantly appear in screen adaptations. Laughter is not what springs to mind when we think of Ibsen or Strindberg, any more than of O’Neill, Williams, Miller, or Albee, let alone most of the outstanding modern dramatists of other countries.

  Bergman may have written Smiles of a Summer Night, but we hardly think of him as amusing, while we don’t approach the screenplays Capra or Wilder directed in the same way as Bergman or Antonioni’s screenplays. Hitchcock brought a powerful sense of the comic and absurd to the screenplays he directed, yet they are not comedies, however mordant or witty. The divide between the two ways of seeing reality is profound.