by Lance Lee
But Marianne is uninterested in Isak’s dreams and memories: to her, he’s just like his son, Evald. She doesn’t believe there’s any change going on in him at all. What is Evald like? He is a man who, like Hamlet in Hamlet, can only perceive the horror of life, and is appalled Marianne wants a child. Marianne is pregnant and went to visit Isak to have some time alone to decide what to do, for Evald wants an abortion. Marianne has decided to keep the child. Isak is horrified at this vision of his son; between his own memories and this revelation he is motivated to do something wholly out of character: to help. He will even, in a symbolically huge step for him, tell Evald to forget repaying an outstanding loan, revealing how dry—like a ledger book—has been this father and son relationship.
He receives his award in the End, after they reach Evald’s, and tries unsuccessfully to talk to his son, who misunderstands him to be asking for reassurance the loan will be repaid. Isak is unable to sort this out before Evald leaves for an evening with Marianne; nonetheless, Isak has tried to ask for forgiveness in his way. He tries to move to a first name basis with his old housekeeper and in effect companion, but she refuses; change, as always, is an issue, and from her point of view, this one is too late. In fact, Isak is about to fail, achieving no change between him and Evald. But later that night Evald comes to see him and confesses he cannot live without Marianne and will accept the child, to Isak’s great relief.
It is a deceptively simple story, with the key change out of the hero’s hands and reported after the fact. Yet Isak himself has changed through what happens to him on the journey, and can fall asleep and die sure there will be a New Beginning. The child and future that Val and John lose Evald and Marianne gain, and so too does Isak through them, even at the end of life.
A film without a New Beginning cannot end.
The weight of the past is even more obvious in Wild Strawberries than in Lantana or High Noon. All through the first act, the Beginning, the action drives at revealing Isak to himself: the man who has forgotten to ask for forgiveness, as he is specifically told in Act 2, the Middle. We live that directly through him and through the great contrast of the old, embittered couple and Sara and her young lovers. Active as the journey is, the burden of its action is the way Isak is trapped in an uncaring, habitual response to experience, which has poisoned his son and so endangers Marianne and the future. Isak and Evald’s creative response to life is frozen: they are trying to impose that symbolically on Marianne with Evald’s demand for an abortion. Thanatos hates Eros. Marianne is quintessential, a life force in her pregnancy, a loving, living manifestation of Eros’s drive toward love and family. But the testing all three are subjected to leaves only Eros standing at the end. If we imagine, for a moment, that Evald and Isak triumphed in the demand for an abortion in the End, the consequences would have been as devastating for Marianne and for all the others as is Val’s end in Lantana for John—and would have moved us deeply into an experience of the heavy.
All three films show the power of love through its survival of destructiveness. Love as a transcendent value is created by the failure of destructiveness.
Love may not be as powerful in reality as destructiveness, as Freud shows, but it is nonetheless a power and triumphs with Marianne, as it does with Sonja in Lantana and Amy in High Noon.
Lifting Weights
Drama, if we think of it in Aristotelian terms, is said to be an imitation of an action. We could ask what action is being imitated at the beginning of a screenplay, then, and begin to answer by saying: it is the act of living in the past to an intolerable point. That is certainly a major part of the reality from which comedy is in flight. In drama, however, a specific, intolerable moment is dramatized, with the result the heroine and hero are aroused and energized to regain their creative response to experience and find their true selves through the conflict and their climactic response to the crisis, which makes possible the New Beginning. The prevalence of “the happily ever after” ending bespeaks Eros’s triumph over Thanatos and the renewal of life through death’s defeat. If that is an illusion, then it is one necessary for life. The absence of an Eros triumph results in tragedy for the heroine or hero, but not, as we saw, the absence of a New Beginning and an Eros triumph for others.
But this only takes us so far. A dramatic imitation is not one that says “this,” the screenplay, is like “that,” reality. Reality, we have seen repeatedly, is rarely like a drama. Instead, drama claims to be an imitation of an action, a form of reality that we have seen is rare. But this too is wrong: there is nothing rare about drama or what it imitates, particularly in its cinema variant; it is the daily fare of countless millions of people worldwide. It caters to common experience. Defining drama as an imitation of a rare reality, an action, is wide of the mark, even if we suffer from the hunger for such defining experience. A screenplay, a drama, is a metaphor that makes the claim that the reality of dramatic action is, through our identification with the drama through its characters, our reality. The imagination is real in its own way. But the claim is not that the screenplay is an act of the imagination, which is obvious, but that the action which is imagined is real as “real,” i.e., is reality.
This has an echo in Winnicott’s review of the first transitional object, which the infant is allowed to think it created, even if given it by the mother; its use and meaning are potent while it is not challenged. The infant’s play is encouraged. The reality of a work of drama is potent so long as it too is not challenged, i.e., nothing in its handling undermines the will to believe we bring to a story until something goes wrong. What matters here is not the “object” per se, be it a screenplay or film, but its use, for however much we may study texts in academic settings, they live only in the use we put them to in our imagination through our experience as part of the audience. Self-consciousness about play destroys play, not because it denies the reality of a work of the imagination, but as a result of the fact that self-consciousness belongs to our private, “me” world, not the world of shared experience.
Aristotle approached this perception in reviewing metaphor in The Poetics, then shied away as he realized metaphor was a function of genius, not practice, which he was at pains to illustrate. He never thought through the implication of action being a metaphor, although he understood the nature of metaphor quite well.1 Yet a mind as astute as Aristotle’s would neither have lied nor avoided an obvious difficulty: what possessed him, then, to drag in the word “imitate”?
To answer that question we need to remember screenplays are just that: plays. A dramatist is a playwright. Playing, if we follow Winnicott, is what creativity arises from in its ever greater sophistication. But if we said when children play a game of, say, doctor and nurse, that they are imitating the reality of being a doctor and nurse, we would immediately be struck by how bad a description that is of what they are doing. Those involved in the game are doctor and nurse. Drama is a very sophisticated kind of playing indeed, one in which the identification of an audience is involved with the characters playing the game, who certainly are enacted as real in the given story. We take their reality for our own while playing their game vicariously through them.
A mature, successful play leaves us with a sense of fullness, not complexity or the triumph of the heavy. Leon at the end of Lantana can dance with feeling. Isak is consumed with the desire to be helpful in Wild Strawberries. Amy is able to kill, to be destructive, at the End of High Noon in the name of love, for creative purposes, while Kane is confirmed in his rectitude.
Julie in Blue is able to cry at the End, love, and contemplate life and creativity overtly as a composer. Michael becomes the godfather in The Godfather: Schindler in Schindler’s List is given a marriage ring and, if for a profounder reason, weeps as Leon does in Lantana. The “playing” that these characters go through is one in which they play themselves to wholeness, to volition, to selfhood, wherever that takes them, which can be satisfying and dark, as with characters like Munny in Unforgiven or Michael in
The Godfather. Whatever vicissitudes Winnicott’s way of thinking may go through in psychoanalytic circles, it provides a useful language for summing up what is at the center of a screenplay for a hero’s development, a playing into the fullness of the self that was smothered by compliance with the dead hand of the past at the start of the screenplay. Italicize “is” in the preceding sentences: a screenplay makes the claim that its characters’ reality is our reality.
One dramatic consequence of the failure of the hero to break through in this manner, and for ourselves through identification, is seen in the inability of the other characters around them to escape to the future. Their movement is dependent on the movement of the hero. In On the Waterfront Father Barry realizes that he cannot undo Johnny Friendly: someone else must, and it turns out to be Terry. If Terry succeeds, then the dead, corrupting hand of the past that Johnny Friendly embodies can be overcome and a New Beginning follow. The longshoremen will be freed from Friendly; Terry will have overcome his past, regained volition with his conscience, and have a personal future free of the past with Edie. But if he fails, all will be trapped in how things have been. The “past” then will be and its weight not lifted. We would find such a story unendurably heavy in effect.
Dave comedically flirts with the triumph of the past as Dave learns the accusations made against the actual president, who is in a coma, are true and threaten his own ability to continue impersonating the president. Dave fakes a heart attack after first setting the record straight, and escapes back into his private life, where he goes into politics and is tracked down romantically by the ex-president’s wife. If the past triumphs, there cannot be a New Beginning: the New Beginning is the restoration of that mutational, evolutionary moment we think we live in.
There are no screenplays where the past triumphs definitively. They may, as in Hamlet and Ran, lead to tragedy, but there are successor characters who take over for the failed hero or heroine. We are not left with a total failure. Characters can certainly fail, and when they do, those characters are necessarily handled in a dumb way: Hamlet can reveal himself, or, more interestingly in this light, Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire can struggle to change in a smart way, but when that is blocked by Mitch and Stanley, tragedy ensues: tragedy by death, tragedy by incarceration, tragedy by insanity, and tragedy by the hopeless repetition of the past, its conflicts, its compliance to false solutions and false selves.
This doesn’t help us with Aristotle directly, but it may let us sense perhaps what he intuited in using “imitation.” The action “imitated” by drama is that of fantasy: our dream of a reality cleansed of the unrelenting past where something new and with the innocence of the new becomes possible and can be entered by ourselves as whole personalities.
Lifting the weight of the past is the burden of drama.
Its claim to be our reality is true for the running time of a drama.
CHAPTER 9
The Weight of the Wrong Decision
THE weight of the past with which the protagonist struggles is often made up by life experiences that have steadily gone wrong, as in Kramer vs. Kramer or Lantana or A Beautiful Mind or Wild Strawberries. Sometimes an event thought past, like his father’s death for Hamlet in Hamlet or the missing drugs for Book in Witness, are found to be vividly alive as the ghost haunts Hamlet and Book is almost killed after he links McFee to the drugs. Sometimes there are past events of which the heroine or hero had no knowledge, as with Julie in Blue, who knew nothing of her husband’s infidelity, or Oedipus in Oedipus Rex, who thinks he has fled from his true parents. Sometimes there are known elements of the past mistakenly thought settled. These, with their variants, are all part of the general weight of the past that turns out to be the characters’ repetitive present which the action strives to make known and lift. But in some films the weight of the past takes on particular focus because of a key wrong decision taken then that thereafter goes on impacting the protagonist’s life wholly negatively. A critical variant of such a wrong decision in the past is a similar wrong decision taken in the immediate action of the Beginning. The weight of the past is decisive there too, if in unexpected ways.
The Wrong Decision in the Past
The past remains definitive until the wrong decision that determines the hero or heroine’s loss of volition and creates a false modus vivendi is redecided. A writer knowing what the key wrong decision in the past is for the protagonist should know to develop the immediate action of the screenplay to a climactic recontest of that decision to let the protagonist remake it with the right outcome, barring tragedy. The hero’s failure to challenge the wrong decision in the past empowers the past and makes any notion of a genuine present nowness an illusion. A smart handling of character growth results if the protagonist succeeds in remaking that decision: otherwise he or she must ultimately be seen as dumb, for those characters caught in the past can only reveal a continuing, unchanged or trapped response to experience, as happens with Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. Their creativity is frozen into a repetitive mold they cannot break, and tragedy ensues.
Characters trapped in such a continuing past deny others what they deny to themselves: think of Terry in On the Waterfront as he resists Edie’s request for help and her altruistic, moral vision of behavior. He wants her to see that his “every man for himself” way which binds him to Johnny Friendly is right. So he refuses to help her and Glover from the Crime Commission, when he meets the latter on his roof, on the docks, and in the bar where he is served a subpoena. In Terry’s case this all expresses the self-denying, frozen nature of his response to experience, since he made the wrong decision in the past.
The wrong decision in the past is definitive and focused in a way the general weight of the past is not. We see the Comte’s dilemma in Chocolat without any sense of its proceeding from a specific wrong decision in the past; it is character-driven instead. The Godfather and On the Waterfront let us see the unique characteristics of the wrong decision in the past clearly.
The Godfather certainly comes with a general weight of the past: all of Don Vito’s career, the Mafia, the war that made Michael a hero, and the recent past where drugs have become a hot issue. Don Vito doesn’t know of Barzini’s machinations, of the way the Tattaglias are fronting for Barzini, or of Sollozzo’s real patrons when that individual asks for the Don’s help in moving drugs. But outweighing all of this is the past decision that Michael will stand aside from the family and go legitimate.
Although Michael occupies the position of an outsider at Connie’s marriage reception, he is necessary nonetheless—the don won’t take a family photo until Michael is included, even though the rest of the family gathers for the photographer. By singling him out this way, the story underscores his unique importance, for he is the hero the others think they can do without. Kay’s appearance underscores this in another way, for she is not Italian but as blonde and “Anglo” as possible.
The consequences of removing heroes or heroines from their destiny are inescapable for everyone. Terry missed his chance to be a contender, and his ensuing bumhood preserves Friendly’s rule, meaning it preserves a false hero. Sonny in The Godfather may be colorful, dominating, high-spirited, and hot-tempered and act as if he is the hero when the don is shot—isn’t he the eldest? Fated to take over? The answers may be yes, but he isn’t the hero, just a particularly well-rounded type whose “typed” temper leads to his death. The decision to let Michael stand aside empowers the wrong character, just as Terry at first empowers Johnny Friendly. Sonny endangers the entire family and hasn’t a clue concerning the true nature of his opponents.
This wrong decision in the past ensures the continuance of the same error and the entrapment of the present in that “past,” which we see as the preexisting Sollozzo-Tattaglia-Barzini conspiracy is revealed progressively. The action, by singling out Michael and simultaneously allowing the wrong decision about him to stand, almost writes its own developmental prescription: that decision must be challenged and undo
ne if those for whom Michael is the hero are to triumph. Sonny must be shown, not just inept, but be removed, no less than Johnny Friendly must be overcome in On the Waterfront.
The process starts when Michael is moved by love for his fallen father and saves him at the hospital, promising to stand by him now. That doesn’t make him head of the family, and his plan to kill Sollozzo and McCluskey is laughed at initially, but Michael won’t be thwarted. Michael carries his plan through too, but still isn’t head of the family. He must flee to Sicily until the clamor dies down.
The consequences from the wrong decision in the past continue fatally and disastrously as Sonny continues in control.
Michael’s Sicilian journey is essential, however. This is the place of family origins, the root of all he was going to stand aside from, the source of the Corleone “seed power” where Michael begins to find himself. He does so by choosing to become Sicilian in the sense of marrying Apollonia and the past he thought to stand aside from, but makes a crucial error like Will and Amy in the Beginning of High Noon. He and Apollonia cannot have a New Beginning that is just their own in the Middle. Michael pays a price for this error with Apollonia’s death; he no sooner seems to have lost the deep bruise from McCluskey’s blow than the explosion from the car knocks him flat.
Protagonists who have made the wrong decision, you see, have to pay, i.e., they have to suffer grievously in proportion to the error committed. There is an Old Testament sense of proportion in screenwriting and drama: do this, and that must happen. In Winnicottian terms, Michael has to be tested by being subjected to potentially destructive experiences to see if he has survival quality, i.e., to see if he possesses the reality of a hero, for the hero is the one who survives, except in tragedy, which transcends his loss.
