by Lance Lee
Now he guides Paul to see Ben. Paul hides his dilemma behind a transparent “friend.” Ben seems brilliant to Paul when he pierces this charade and helps him. Ben goes off to Miami to get married, only to be roused out of bed by Jelly because Paul is also visiting Miami and needs more help: Paul is suffering from impotence with his mistress. When Ben doesn’t want anything to do with Paul, Paul breaks down and weeps, swaying Ben to help him. Again he is seen as a genius and promises to treat Paul in New York after his wedding. But the wedding doesn’t happen, interrupted as the body of a man trying to assassinate Paul is thrown out the window and lands on a table full of hor d’oeuvres next to the wedding party.
Again, all is seen from the comic angle of vision. Paul needs help to become, again, a thug. Ben is drawn in step by causal step. By serious standards, it is all deeply illogical and improbable, anything but possessing that sense of gravitas usually associated with action conventionally seeming necessary to us. By the time we are at the crisis, as Paul sobs through the shootout, the reality of the absurd world of Analyze This has moved even further from what we take conventionally as reality, and convincingly so.
Central to the comic angle of vision and the movement of comic action which the perseverance and culmination of style underscores is the impulse to and naturalness of illogic.
The climax of The Importance of Being Earnest underscores this further. Lady Bracknell recognizes Cecily’s tutor, Miss Prism, and corners her after a ridiculous pursuit. The truth comes out: years ago Miss Prism disappeared with Lady Bracknell’s brother’s child. Miss Prism is a would-be Victorian novelist. She had her multivolumed effort in a satchel and young Jack in a pram, and in a comic series of mishaps ended with Jack in the satchel and the books in the pram. She lost the satchel: when she discovered only her novel in the pram, she fled. When she identifies the satchel Jack was found in—which Jack has kept all these years—as hers, all realize he is the missing baby.
What makes this convincing is both the satisfaction of our expectation that the style of farce creates for action ever more absurd and the pleasing satisfaction of our expectation of the illogical and improbable treatment of reality that underlies such a comic endeavor. As we have seen, the extent of this illogicality makes us all too aware of the nature of the denial here, yet it is that illogicality and denial which makes it possible for this form of playing to culminate and for the underlying, contrary reality paradoxically to be intuited.
It is our sense of the need for dramatic action to be necessary that brings us here: in the comic angle of vision it is the illogical that becomes necessary, the improbable, probable. That sense of necessity is rooted in human nature, in our sense of what the necessarily defined coherence of play itself and the mythopoetic instinct require to proceed.
To say, then, as Aristotle might in an attempt to define comedy, that it imitates an action in which the subject is the absurd or ludicrous doesn’t bring us very far. The nature of the action “imitated” is necessarily illogical: that is where the essential ludicrousness of the comic angle of vision resides.
The action imitated is the flight from reality.
That flight can only be ludicrous, for the real, except in madness, is where we live. But because comedic flight with its accompanying veil of laughter is transparent, comedy becomes another way in which we perceive the actual state of affairs.
Cause-and-effect writing simply connects the action sequentially, but that vision which ends by standing reality on its head is not one of a defect of character or a lower type of character or story, but a perception in which reality is inherently absurd. What is so striking about comic reality is the extent to which it is prepared to go to reverse our valuations: the noncomedic, tragic substance of our lives becomes absurd while the comic realm becomes real. That is its true absurdity.
Comedy attempts to say, like Hume, that things just aren’t as serious as they seem, but we know that to be false in our heart. Alas that our history makes comedy so very necessary.
The Cooked and Comedy
Comedy itself displaces our sense of the seriousness of reality and so is inherently a cooked medium emotionally, while the raw can never do more than threaten within its realm, as happens in those comedies that flirt with tragedy. However, in farce, the raw readily appears, although never experienced as such by us: it is only experienced by the characters, whose experience is an object of laughter to us. Farce laughs at the raw; flirting with tragedy evokes the raw to deny it.
This is true, but broad. The cooked shows up continuously in comedy as its primary modus operandi and works in a way noticeably different than in serious drama. There we saw there is an element of stylization to it, as in Michael’s shooting of Rooney and his guards in Road to Perdition, as well as a displacement of effect, as when the wedding guests weep from the impact of Tita’s tears in the wedding cake in Like Water for Chocolate, or the Comte in Chocolat assaults Vianne’s chocolate display.
In Analyze This Paul is guided by Ben to try and be more open. He calls his competitor in New York, Primo, wanting some sort of “closure,” using Ben’s word, for the confusion and violence going on, most recently the attempt to assassinate Paul. Primo, on his end, can’t figure out what Paul means by “closure.” It’s not mob lingo: we are amused as they struggle over language, a very cooked effect here, inasmuch as they aren’t throttling one another instead. Paul has trouble keeping calm; he finally empties his gun into a pillow, after which he feels good. The shooting is in character, the pillow ludicrous, however; the object of displacement for a cooked emotion in comedy is always absurd. We saw Ben shoot a refrigerator in the shootout in the crisis just as absurdly. In The Importance of Being Earnest we see, literally, Cecily’s fantasy of being saved by a knight in shining armor. Once Algy is on the scene, she fantasizes him in armor astride the white steed. Given what we know of Algy, that too is absurd.
Involved in this use of the cooked in comic writing is the technique of reductio ad absurdum. The cooked in serious drama is never merely an example of reductio ad absurdum—never, by definition, something wholly laughable—but the contrary. Thus the reduction of the Comte in Chocolat to an attack on the chocolates instead of Vianne may turn a serious moment comic, yet because we are empathetic with the Comte’s feelings there is an overlay of poignancy to his absurd, belated release.
The displacement of emotion involved in the cooked in comedy is always from the immediate, serious-to-tragic implication of the action into something laughable, yet that substitute action/symbol is always transparent enough for us to see through to the noncomic, serious original that has been displaced and transformed: Paul shooting a pillow instead of Primo, and so on. There is no poignancy involved or any other emotion to work against a sense of comedy. Farce takes this transparent substitution to an extreme: we no longer judge a displacement against the underlying reality implied, but against one cooked displacement of emotion leading to and exceeding the next. It’s harder to write a great farce because of this than an effective comedy that flirts with the tragic: few writers have the sheer inventiveness to pull it off.
The Importance of Being Earnest manages to do so built around the revelations concerning the satchel, the pram, and the novel by Miss Prism: Analyze This doesn’t succeed as well, even with the fountain and Vic Damone singing at the end: both are farcical but have the quality of being dreamed up in a story conference and feel stretched, while the absurdity of Miss Prism’s revelations grow out of character and resolve conflict. They feel organic and developmental to the story: those at the end of Analyze This do not.
The New Beginning in Comedy
Something very curious happens at the end of comedy. Jack and Gwendolyn, Algy and Cecily succeed in their attempt to get married; Ben and Laura dance as Vic Damone sings and the fountain burbles away in Analyze This; Hero, Claudio, Benedick and Beatrice all end up together at the end of Much Ado about Nothing. On the face of it, this seems in keeping with the point made in the fundame
ntal story pattern that the end of conflict offers a glimpse into a new future where the issues the characters have just struggled over are definitively at an end, the time of those issues is now set, past, and lives can move on.
The farmers in Shane will no longer have to contend with the gunslinger Wilson or the men who hired him; Shane has killed them. Julie in Blue will no longer try to avoid life but accepts Olivier and love, and presumably is now going to compose in her own right. The Jewish nightmare is over at the end of Schindler’s List, and Schindler himself, though fleeing, is going to end up being perceived as one of the righteous. Munny in Unforgiven avenges both the slashed whore and his friend’s murder and gains the necessary money to start fresh in San Francisco, where we are told he thrives, while the action has shown the effort to deny his true nature was futile. Billy will stay with Ted in Kramer vs. Kramer because Joanna recognizes the rightness of that solution.
All of these endings represent what we demand from a successful piece of drama, and nothing implied by the future for the various heroines and heroes flies in the face of expectation or the dramatic realities in which they have been involved. Terry in On the Waterfront will lead the longshoremen but remain a longshoreman. Munny will no longer be a gunslinger, but then he won’t try and persevere as a farmer either. Bess in Breaking the Waves and Maximus in Gladiator die—but Rome will apparently see Marcus Aurelius’s dream carried out, and the elders in Bess’s village find themselves denounced by her sister-in-law, while bells ring for Bess at Jan’s oil rig. There is no essential change in the nature of reality itself in the New Beginning in serious drama, only a completion of conflict and a moving on of the lives of those involved.
The same is not true in comedy, which is one of its essential differences from serious writing. The comic angle of vision, the impulse to illogic, and the flight from reality these support, with the latter’s paradoxical affirmation of reality through denial and laughter, all come to an end in the New Beginning for comedy. We are led to believe Paul is a changed man in Analyze This and has withdrawn from the mob; the implication is of a new life free of crime once he’s released. Analyze That shows all that can go wrong when writing a comic sequel: the repetition of the same flight strains credulity past the breaking point. Why? The New Beginning implied in comedy is a return to reality. We don’t expect it to be followed by further comedy.
The comedic New Beginning may be in the form of “And they lived happily ever after,” as happens for serious drama’s New Beginnings too, yet the implication in comedy is “like everyone else.” Presumably Ben and Laura are now going to settle down to normal married life. He will be a better psychiatrist for his experience, his son will grow up, maybe he and Laura will have a new family—who knows? But there is nothing to betray a comic angle of vision.
Jack and Gwendolyn and Algy and Cecily will be married, we assume at the end of The Importance of Being Earnest, and will “settle down to reality.” Jack will have a formidable mother-in-law, and Cecily will have to come to terms with the fact Algy is not a knight in shining armor. There is nothing unusual here: they are embarked on the pursuit of normal reality at once predictable and familiar. Comedy has gone from their lives as a governing principle. The tyranny of the real has been reasserted. Comedy simply makes the reassertion of reality a relief, a reassertion to be desired after its laughing flight.
Perhaps this is the true reason for the need the Greeks felt to append one satyr play to three tragedies. It would have been a unique audience indeed that was content to leave the theatre after a daylong immersion in the raw, inescapable mandates of character, tragic conflict, suffering, and destiny. Nor would the bawdiness of some of the satyr plays have been out of place in proportion to the grievousness of the preceding actions. After so strong a dose of the inescapable suffering of our lives, despite the sense of wonder and exhilaration at the end of true tragedy, nothing could be more pointed than a flight that at once affirms reality through denial yet makes us laugh even as we know the laughter is illusory.
Here we need to take note again of Aristotle remarking that the “comic mask is ugly and distorted but does not imply pain.”7 A frequently remarked difficulty in reality is making the distinction between extreme grief and joy: tears of joy are distinctly not tears of pain, yet they are tears. If we wanted to ask ourselves, what in reality is most likely to distort a face and make it ugly? the answer would have to be: the impact of death. Freud’s insight into our insistence on beauty being a crucial part of our requirements for civilization takes on an unexpected life when put in the same sentence where ugliness does not imply pain.8 Beauty, the very embodiment of desire, is the denial of death. Comedy denies death by denying the painfulness of the pain-distorted face. That is the deepest level to which we can take our understanding of comedy’s flight from reality, and it lends a powerful shading to the implication of “happily ever after” in both comic and serious writing.
We do not live by bread alone, nor by fact, or even by a profound attempt to grapple imaginatively but seriously with reality and experience, but by deliberate, knowing illusion too, by our imagination’s dream that reality doesn’t matter and if it does, it is a deathless delight. That we can take a stand free of reality’s imperatives, however briefly, is a remarkable facet of our nature.
The Smart and Dumb in Comedy
These categories of character growth apply in the same way to comedy as to serious drama, just as does the need for cause-and-effect development of the dramatic action.
Paul in Analyze This is a smart character, as is Ben; Laura is dumb. Being either doesn’t make either funnier or more serious. Jelly is dumb, a type, and amusingly so; Primo is also dumb, a straight man, a type, if you will, what Paul was but is no longer by the end. Types in comedy tend to become the butts of jokes; in serious drama they are just part people.
Jack is a dumb character in The Importance of Being Earnest: he has already decided on his course of action in pursuing Gwendolyn and settling down; the impact of Lady Bracknell forces a revelation of resourcefulness but does not alter his initial nature or goals. Algy, on the other hand, is a smart character, his growth one of considerable change through his involvement with Cecily. Gwendolyn and Cecily prove resourceful and show a clear pattern of growth by discovering their abilities, but do not alter and become smart in the sense of transformed, like Schindler in Schindler’s List or Julie in Blue.
As we have seen with Hamlet, a character need not be developed in a smart manner to be effective, moving, or, in comedy, funny. What we do see in both serious drama and comedy in developing a character in a smart manner is a story in which growth as transformation is necessary for the resolution of conflict, not growth as in deepening capacity being developed in a character in a dumb manner, whether for action-adventure type heroes like James Bond or Indiana Jones, or for a tragic character like Hamlet.
What is more decisive is the nature of the New Beginning and the return to reality in comedy, or the “happy” reality “ever after” in serious drama. That a dumb development can be every bit as effective in serious or comedic writing rubs against us a bit: we like to think of growth as transformation, and wonder how always transformative dramatic action can have a hero or heroine who deepens but does not otherwise alter. This is not a problem for comedy then, but for drama, and turns on the nature of the journey the protagonist takes us on, and the meaning of dramatic action.
PART IV
The Nature of Dramatic Action
CHAPTER 8
The Weight of the Past
What Is the Past?
ALL knowledge rises from experience, but often on reflection our noonday certainties give way to unexpected doubts and the suspicion arises that whatever reality may be, it is not what we experience immediately. That suspicion deepens as we discover experience can now seem this but then that. That suspicion hardens to certainty when we add to it our sense of the relativity of time, where time may feel swift to me but slow to you as we go throug
h the same events.
That suspicion underlies a film like The Matrix, where experience turns out to be a virtual reality program fed into us while we sleep our lives away in vast assemblages of nutritive pods where we are bred and stored for use as “batteries” by living machines. This sense that reality exists beyond the illusion of the moment underlies Plato’s great image in The Republic of the man in the cave who must turn around and leave the cave to find the realities casting shadows on its walls.
That is even harder than meets the eye, as change instantly puts us into conflict with what we are used to. It is no wonder Nietzsche singled out change itself as a profound challenge, realizing the implication of our Humean dependence on habit. Modern psychology lets us understand that part of the problem is the way in which we identify, not just with others, as we might with a heroine or hero in a film, but with an entire lifestyle with its implicit set of values, as Freud intimates with his point concerning the similarity between private and cultural superegos and Winnicott shows a way to understand through his shared, transitional area of experience.
The truth is that the man or woman who stands up to find reality lives in a social reality where others resist any change with all the power of their habitual identifications and comfort with the familiar, even in the face of a shared need to the contrary. Thus it is almost impossible to imagine a private conflict without social ramifications. Terry in On the Waterfront may wrestle privately with Edie over his decision to go down to the docks to “get his rights,” but acting to get them precipitates the final confrontation with Johnny Friendly, while inaction would leave the longshoremen in Friendly’s power. Nothing the hero or heroine does has only private consequences.
