by Lance Lee
For Winnicott, destructiveness creates reality.
Destructiveness is an unquestioned feature of primal fantasy and adult nature. Psychoanalysis is at one within its warring sects on this, and goes on to point out that primal destructiveness continues unabated in the unconscious after we have matured, quite aside from its endless manifestations in behavior. If, indeed, our destructiveness was as effective as we fantasize or imagine, the human race would not now exist. It’s hard to see how such a passion for destructiveness could have developed as a feature of successful evolution. But our destructive urge is not effective, particularly as infants, usually as adults, for all the strength with which we may feel or vent our destructive urges. It is the ability of our “objects” to survive our destructive impulses that separates them from ourselves and which creates a “me vs. not me” universe and which simultaneously makes them available for our use: that use creates a “me–transitional/cultural/experiential–not me” universe. Is destructiveness, then, destructiveness or creativity? It’s hard to see how we can ever answer, apart from its actual results, and those often have a paradoxical meaning. If this somehow lightens the implications of destructiveness, then it darkens the implications of creativity.
This dual nature of destructiveness is one of those insights at once so strange and so familiar we can’t help but say, Aha! How odd—but of course! That dual nature of destructiveness is an omnipresent feature of screen and dramatic writing generally.
Consider Kieslowski and Piesiewicz’s Blue. Julie loses her family, as we have seen, and proves unable to commit suicide. Instead, once out of the hospital, she puts her home up for sale and moves into the city. There she attempts to live withdrawn from involvement with others. Now Antoine, the boy who witnessed the initial accident, shows up with her daughter’s cross. Life isn’t going to ignore Julie. She makes an attempt to destroy her husband’s manuscripts, but even a flautist on the street plays one of his tunes. A mouse shows up with a litter of young: Julie must borrow a cat. Olivier, the lover she thought she had put behind her, tracks her down. She becomes involved with Lucille, one night even answering her call for help, where she accidentally discovers Olivier is going to finish a key composition of her husband’s by witnessing an interview on television at Lucille’s dive. Olivier deliberately shows pictures in the interview as if they are of Julie but which are actually of a mistress Julie knew nothing about. When she confronts Olivier in a rage and asserts he has no right to pursue her or her husband’s music, he is unrepentant: he will do whatever it takes to force Julie fully back to life.
In other words, the direction of action taken at the end of the Beginning by the heroine to solve the problems that have emerged repeatedly suffers a destructive assault in Act 2, failing or approaching failure in the crisis. That resolve, then, undergoes a climactic reformulation into a solution that can succeed, the true resolution of the conflict.
We see a profound twist given this process in Schindler’s List, where Schindler’s effort to war-profiteer at the expense of Jews turns steadily into an effort to save Jews until, at the crisis, he discovers he is willing to use his ill-gotten money to save lives. His initial effort to solve the problem caused by Amon Goeth’s liquidation of the ghetto at the end of Act 1 for himself collapses under testing, to be replaced by a profounder goal/effort that does succeed. Schindler saves his Jews.
This testing by attempting to destroy continues in Act 3, notably as Terry in On the Waterfront fails to unseat Friendly by testifying in court. He is ostracized, and Edie wants to flee. But Terry goes down to the docks to get his rights and finally overcomes Johnny Friendly. Those attempts to solve his problems that were inadequate succumb to destruction: only his final action is right, because that is the one that survives destruction, hard as Friendly tries to win climactically.
In comedy, this process of testing is funny: in serious drama, the reverse. Nothing, for example, is more typical of romantic comedy than for the romantic relationship to be subjected to increasing pressure until reaching the crisis, meaning a way must be found to put the romance on an enduring footing or it will not survive but be destroyed. It will fade from reality. What survives such testing, however, is real, created as an ongoing fact of experience by that “testing.” The ritualized labors given Ferdinand in The Tempest are a reflection of this process: if he fails them, gaining Miranda will become far more difficult; their purpose is to prove his love, and he must not fail—i.e., his resolve must not be destroyed—if that love is to be shown as real. Reality and survival are synonyms in drama and reached through the creative process of storytelling.
The Two Roads
Now we can move closer to understanding comedy.
I start with the simple question: Is the denunciation of Hero by Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing, so vividly filmed in Branagh’s adaptation, to be taken seriously? We know the truth already, which has been found out in the subplot: Hero is innocent of Claudio’s charges. Claudio and the others have been set up by Don John. But they do not know this.
Except for that we could see the outburst as ludicrous, or as overwrought as Laertes and Hamlet contesting their grief in Ophelia’s grave, or as Paul’s various sobbing fits in Analyze This. All such outbursts are inherently overwrought: worse, derangement and jealousy border on the heavy, which we get more than a whiff of as Claudio pours it on the innocent Hero and Leonato considers taking his daughter’s life. For if Hero’s infidelity is true, which as far as Claudio and the others know is the case, then Claudio’s emotion is dramatically justified.
Tragedies can turn on accident, like Romeo and Juliet, and mistaken judgments, like Ran; what is to prevent something of a similar kind happening here? Suddenly we are outside the comedic realm that seemed to govern the story to this point and have a tantalizing sense of the awfulness that can characterize reality, so absent from the preceding action. Tragedy denies the comic vision altogether.
Crucially, as audience, we feel at this moment, as we always do in a comedy of this kind, that we don’t want or expect the denial of the comic vision to succeed. First, and not least, and deeply rooted in the nature of “play,” we want the story—literally, the “play” or “screenplay”—to stay consistent. If a writer hasn’t prepared us for a drama turning serious as part of the reality a screenplay defines from the start, abruptly changing gears from comic to serious destroys credibility. A reality which we expect to turn serious, however, will not involve us in the comic angle of vision. In Much Ado about Nothing we know we’re within the comic realm and neither want nor expect what we take to be reality with its dreadful possibilities to become the reality of the screenplay, and that’s the point.
That irruption of the possibility of tragedy into the comic action makes us feel our wish to deny reality. Reality is, in fact, undeniable outside the realm of a given comic screenplay. That wish, of course, is not just unrealistic but illogical: the comic, the cooked may exist, but so does the raw, and it cannot be gainsaid.
That flirting with the tragic in Much Ado about Nothing brings us to the realization that the preceding comic action has been absurd, not lower than average as Aristotle would have it, but ludicrous in relation to the serious nature of true reality.
Swiftly the comedy returns in Much Ado about Nothing. Don John is exposed and Hero’s innocence established. Claudio, as penance for a Hero he is told died of grief, marries another girl of Leonato’s choosing, only to discover this is his Hero. Beatrice and Benedick, having been tricked into becoming lovers, decide to get married, nonetheless, when they discover each has been trying to write love poetry for the other, if not very well. Before the ceremonies are carried out, they all break into a celebratory dance that spreads over Leonato’s estate, driving home just how illusory is such a line of happy, funny development.
Playing as dancing literally engulfs their behavior in Much Ado about Nothing. At the same time, by pursuing this vein of comedy with its flirtation with tragedy, we have a pure cooked hand
ling of emotion that in this case is also Apollonian: the drama is experienced as a known dream, perceived as illusion, and all the more convincing thereby. What makes the action feel cooked here? The displacement of tragic passion into comic absurdity.
Yet this flirtation with tragedy brings about our simultaneous self-awareness of its possibility and an intense pleasure in its denial, however illusory. For we are caught up in our will to believe, laid bare by the fact that we will believe an act of the imagination like a screenplay only so long as it is consistent with and develops coherently from its initial establishment of dramatic reality, its rules of play for the imagination. Allied to the will to believe, then, is our sense of story elaboration, the mythopoetic instinct that organizes experience into coherent, consistent wholes for their fun and/or ability to illumine and make it possible for us to grasp our experience. The mythopoetic instinct grows from and expresses our ability to play. We do not, after all, even as infants once the experience of the environment as a “me vs. not me” fact begins, ever play without an attempt to make experience coherent. But we elaborate only one story at a time.
This flirting with tragedy is a kind of comedy capable of great and revealing poignancy; when it succeeds it brings us to a wise but humorous and tolerant view of our limits, as Benedick does at the end when he speaks of man as a “giddy” thing.
Farce, however, develops the comic story in a different manner and brings us far closer to realizing the radical nature of the comic vision.
Farce, too, contains apparently tragic elements; sometimes these provide needed pacing between bouts of laughter as a fillip of sobriety so we can catch our breath, or appear in the moment of the crisis, which is always predicated on the notion of failure and consequently flirts with a more serious reality, even with the raw and heavy.
Consider the crisis in Analyze This. Paul is convinced Ben must be killed, fearing rightly that he is working for the feds. But Ben begins to discover key elements about the past he has been trying to help Paul recover from as they meet in the restaurant where Paul’s father was killed years ago, and goes to the bathroom to remove the wires letting the feds overhear them. When Paul rips Ben’s shirt open, he is clean: nonetheless Paul takes him to the river and threatens to shoot him.
Ben asks him a “last question” which leads to Paul recalling the memory, so far repressed, of his father’s death. We discover Paul saw his father’s assassins and realized what was going to happen, but did nothing. “I should’ve said something,” he admits to Ben now, beginning to sob: “I let him die.” The remorse that had been repressed and has been progressively disabling him is out at last. “I’m sorry,” he says, and breaks down into helpless sobbing.
Taken out of context, we could be in the midst of a very serious film at an equally serious moment. Yet we know several things: Paul has been tracked to the river by enemies. The feds, in a detail of pure farce, listening to repeated toilets flushing, finally sent someone into the men’s room and discovered Ben’s discarded wires. We are not in a tragic frame of reference, nor do we experience this moment in Analyze This as we do Claudio’s denunciation of Hero in Much Ado about Nothing. We never believe Ben is going to be shot, and Paul Vitti’s grief seems ludicrous to us, however tragic to him. We’re waiting instead for a comic topper, which follows immediately on Paul’s breakdown.
The pursuing enemies arrive and begin shooting. Ben gets Paul to cover, and implores him to shoot: he’s released his repressed memory, he’s cured, it’s time to blow away some thugs. When Paul can’t stop sobbing, which is even more ludicrous now, Ben grabs his gun and begins shooting in his stead. The thugs are killed. Ben discovers he didn’t hit anyone, but shot the refrigerator.
A topper has been found, tragedy has not irrupted into the story at all but been made absurd in context, and the will to believe and mythopoetic instinct been satisfied by fully realizing the improbability of the moment, which is what is necessary and probable here.
Or take The Importance of Being Earnest in its recent film version. Jack Worthing is leading a double life, a responsible country gentleman with his attractive ward, Cecily, in the country and a life in the city as a playboy named Ernest. He explains his departures for the city as a need to see his brother, Ernest, who of course is him. However, as the action begins he decides to put his affairs in order, get rid of “Ernest,” and propose to Gwendolyn. She accepts him but informs him she is destined to love a man called Ernest: someone called Jack would be unacceptable. Jack’s quandary has only started. Lady Bracknell, Gwendolyn’s mother, interviews and rejects him as unsuitable because he does not know who his parents were: Jack/Ernest was found in a satchel. He is criticized for his carelessness in misplacing them and advised to find some relations.
One turn follows another until the climactic confrontation between Jack, who is prepared to change his name to Ernest, Lady Bracknell, Gwendolyn, Cecily, and Algy, his friend and nephew of Lady Bracknell who has pretended to be Jack’s “brother,” Ernest, to win Cecily. A past has been found for Jack which makes Algy a relation, an older brother; all turns on how Jack was actually christened. On review of the military records of his father, Jack exclaims he was named “Ernest,” which makes him acceptable to Gwendolyn and is accepted by Lady Bracknell, resolving the threat posed by her against a happy ending and a double marriage.
It is the height of illogic and improbability, and necessary and probable here if the story is to complete itself consistently, if its kind of playing is to be carried through. Moreover, the consciousness of the illusory quality of such action isn’t derived by risking tragedy, but by the sheer magnitude of the improbability and denial of any version of reality we would regard, actually, as likely. That denial, which we accept as consistent with the nature of the story, doesn’t destroy the story’s impact on us—it never asked to be taken “seriously.” Yet it is the very scope of such a story’s denial of reality that makes us aware that no, of course this isn’t how the world works.
Hero’s pain may be ours in Much Ado about Nothing; Paul’s in Analyze This is not, although we recognize its nature and recognize his suffering. But we find that suffering ludicrous. Nonetheless, farce arrives at the same place flirting with tragedy brings us. The experience we fear may become real in flirting with tragedy is denied with such extravagance in farce that, as we laugh, we know this isn’t the nature of reality at all. We laugh for that reason. Both directions of comic plotting bring us to a perception of the truth through its denial. To minds that have lost their ability to respond to experience creatively, like the monks in The Name of the Rose, such behavior must seem outrageous, disrespectful, and subversive, rather than a road to the truth. But such a frame of mind as theirs has strayed from that road so far they have elevated their straying into the truth and cannot bear anything that reminds them of their falseness.
Comedy does so as it lets us have our cake and eat it simultaneously.
The Bones of the Comic Angle of Vision: The Impulse to Illogic and Perseverance of Style
We demand an absolute persuasiveness in serious drama, let alone tragedy, insisting the action follow a cause-and-effect sequence and strike us as necessary and probable. We demand the same in comedy. How then can I speak of the necessary and probable, as I have just done, insisting on the necessity of improbability?
All screenplays establish their particular reality in the Beginning. In The Importance of Being Earnest we meet the improvident Algy fleeing from his creditors and are immediately transported to a comic realm. We meet the sober Jack with his charming ward, Cecily, in the country, where he is responsibly raising her. In the city, however, Jack is friends with the improvident Algy, and as a matter of style as “Ernest” refuses to pay bills at the Savoy or anywhere else. If Jack has an imaginary brother and alter ego, Algy has an imaginary friend, Bumburry, that lets him escape periodically from social engagements with his formidable Aunt Augusta, Lady Bracknell.
Jack, we know, comes to town to propose to G
wendolyn, a simple cause-and-effect sequence of action that puts him in the situation of satisfying Lady Bracknell’s illogical demand. What is necessary has become action that accords with that illogical, improbable line of development. A style once established perseveres wherever it takes a writer, just as in the other arts a style once established is pursued until it reaches exaggeration, as in the increasingly irrelevant flourishes on medieval Romanesque capitals, or is exhausted, like expressionism or surrealism, or finally perceived as passé, like abstract expressionism.6 These are all forms of play, of specific creative responses to our shared cultural experience, and each drives to its logical conclusion if not abandoned due to its inanity. Thus the infinite variations of reality created and defined at the start of every specific screenplay define a style of playing that must be carried through—if it threatens to alter, as it does in flirting with tragedy in comedy, we balk, insistent the defined reality be maintained—or it will cease to be what it is and collapse.
Cause-and-effect conflict is not affected by differences in dramatic reality: cause-and-effect conflict is how any dramatic action proceeds. But our perception of what is necessary and probable in comedy is neither in serious drama. Consider Analyze This. We begin by a comic reliving of the 1957 mob meeting and its breakup by federal agents. A new meeting has been called because of a contemporary killing, but Paul Vitti finds he can’t bludgeon someone to find out who was behind the killing. Shortly thereafter he can’t breathe and ends up at a hospital, where he is told to his disgust he is suffering from an anxiety attack. His henchman, Jelly, has Ben’s card from an earlier accident when Jelly was so concerned about Ben seeing the body in his trunk his only concern was to shoo the solicitous Ben away, assuring him there would be no insurance problems.
