The Death and Life of Drama

by Lance Lee

  Contrasted with Sonny, whose passions govern him, Michael is a man of self-control. On his return from Sicily he is vaulted into the leadership by the don, who has finally discovered what the true nature of affairs is concerning Barzini and the others. Since Michael can control himself, he can control others: he displays self-mastery. He is so patient he waits to strike until the don is dead and he becomes a godfather. At the End, with all his opponents dead, we see the others acknowledge him as the godfather as Kay watches, absorbed now into Michael’s world, no longer a symbol of his standing aside.

  Michael is a smart character because he succeeds in remaking the wrong decision he made in the past. His success, like Terry’s in On the Waterfront, means a New Beginning is now possible for the family, given concrete form in the move to Las Vegas. Michael, of course, is a deeply ironic hero; his is, if you will, the dark side of heroism, for his success is a sinking into evil. He murders his rivals as he renounces Satan and his works at the christening. But we experience his success as exhilarating, in part because only the family and other mob families are involved in the story, and fundamentally because his success completes the dramatic drive to lift the weight of the past, establish the true self of the hero, and regain a creative response to reality. The price Michael pays for this success is morally ambiguous but not structurally inconclusive.

  If the whole personality is found through playing, as Winnicott holds, the results needn’t always be admirable, as is true of Michael, Munny in Unforgiven, and Verbal in The Usual Suspects. Human nature is not a pretty thing. What we see in the success of these stories, however, is the structural predominance of regaining volition and creativity, of finding his true self on the part of the hero and so for ourselves through our identifications. The Dionysian is lauded by Nietzsche, but Nazi torchlit parades were Dionysian events, as are drug-filled rock concerts. We may conventionally laud a particular set of values and denigrate another, but in drama we experience ourselves freely; a dramatist of ability reveals the scope of our nature.

  There is a curious echo to Freud here. He is at pains to underscore the negative impact of human destructiveness, its greater strength than love, and the need for guilt and almost inhuman ethical admonitions like “Love thy neighbor as thyself” to contain our destructiveness. Yet there is one instance when not Eros but Thanatos binds people together instead of destroying them: when one group confirms its own sense of cohesion and identity by attacking another. In The Godfather, the binding power of destructiveness gets a rare outing we approve of in the context of Michael fighting other mob families who want to introduce drugs into society. It’s hard not to cheer for the Corleones. But in On the Waterfront it is undoing such criminal behavior centered on Johnny Friendly and maintained by violence that is the central thrust of the story.

  If I turn to On the Waterfront and pull together my earlier remarks, then we see a story that shows a more positive and typical result of undoing the wrong decision from the past. That wrong decision in the past is both determinative and clear, as we see in the immediate action through Terry’s behavior who is locked in compliance with a narrow, self-defeating version of himself, complying with a false self at every turn in the action, whereas Michael’s goal of going straight in The Godfather does not seem a self-betrayal.

  We see how the present for Terry is a repetitious past, however much nowness there seems to be in the immediate action. Just as clearly, everyone else is bound up in his self-betrayal, while competing “hero” figures are tested and disposed of, first Joey and then Dugan, by having a load of liquor dropped on him. Johnny Friendly’s grip on the past, and so the “present,” is unbroken; Edie can’t break it herself, nor can Father Barry. The Crime Commission is essentially helpless. All are betrayed in Terry’s self-betrayal.

  Here Freud’s vision and our own experience of the power of love in its first flood bear on our experience of the action. Freud describes love as a way with which we deal with suffering that moves differently than withdrawal, restraint, or intoxication: love leads to engagement with experience. Yet we never suffer so greatly as when in love, while one of our great sadnesses is the fact love’s first flood fades. Yet love’s first tide can make a Montague love a Capulet and dream of peace, its denial drive Ophelia to madness, and its paradoxically enduring quality in John Nash’s wife provide the environment and ultimate motivation to control his phantoms in A Beautiful Mind. In Witness, the failure of passion to bind Book and Rachel intentionally angers us against the societies that make their union impossible.

  As we saw, Edie’s impact on Terry exemplifies this power in a deeply moral form, for Edie is motivated by altruism as well as revenge. That means Terry can’t have Edie without a moral reform. The terrible fact is that however uneasy the hero is in complying with a false self at the start of the action, he is not so unhappy that he has to act. Something must happen to make him act. Not just, say, falling in love per se, but in the demands love makes on him as defined in a particular story. Those demands always challenge his ability to maintain a false self. If love is not involved, then a critical emergence into reality of the full meaning of his actions challenges the hero to alter himself, as happens to Schindler as he watches Amon Goeth liquidate the ghetto in Schindler’s List.

  This is the nature of the inciting event, structurally. It sets a screenplay on that path where “past” and “present” are seen for what they are and culminate together as they are resolved in the climax. The inciting event makes intolerable the continuing solutions based on the weight of the past in general or on the wrong decision in the past in particular. Change, we saw, is painful: moral transformation is agonizing, the very demand Edie makes on Terry as a prerequisite to any satisfaction of passion. The burden of the wrong decision, and the more general elements that go into the weight of the past, are the immoral consequences of those errors.

  Consider a story where this wouldn’t seem to be the primary focus, as in the maritally centered Kramer vs. Kramer. Joanna has simply lost touch with herself in her marriage, and Ted lost touch with her in his pursuit of career success. If we think about the implications of that commonplace behavior, however, they are immoral. Ted colludes in the repression of another human being, while that human being, for the best of reasons, acts against her own nature until she hardly knows who she is or what to do, except that the extent of self-loss has become intolerable and she leaves Ted and abandons her child. Book does not keep Rachel for moral reasons at the end of Witness; his is the way of violence, and hers is not. A specifically moral turn is given events in Chocolat, as the priest in his final sermon celebrates a life marked by generosity and inclusion as opposed to the Comte’s former self-denying exclusiveness. In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita remains at home to prevent her niece being used by Rosaura as her mother used her. Tita is on a moral quest: to mistreat another is not just anguishing but immoral.

  Love as a primal force combines with guilt for Terry in On the Waterfront. It plunges him into suffering; i.e., he is tested. Friendly wants him to stop seeing Edie: he sees Edie. Father Barry wants to speak over the body of Dugan: Terry keeps one of the thugs from silencing him. Christ is here in the hold, Father Barry tells the men. He is everywhere—love is everywhere, as the poem asserts that Isak Borg surprisingly knows, despite the lovelessness of his life in Wild Strawberries.

  Edie is horrified by Terry’s subsequent confession, while he is beside himself from desire and in a fury over that word “conscience.” He is stunned when Charley pulls a gun on him after he now refuses to be bought off and reminds Charley it was he who betrayed him in the past, just as he is betraying Terry again right now by trying to buy him off. Past and present have a way of wholly coinciding in our best writing in decisive moments because they are the same in drama, which strives to awaken the protagonist to this reality so she or he can move beyond it. Charley lets Terry go as he takes in Terry’s point, the key complaint of which is that Charley should have behaved altruistically with Terry. T
erry’s reproach to Charley is in essence Edie’s to him earlier in the bar. But Terry isn’t done suffering yet. He has a lot to pay for, including murder.

  So Charley is killed, then Terry is ostracized. When he finally confronts Friendly, they debate directly the nature of the past: does Friendly have it right, or Terry, who now presents the past as a continuous sellout of all of them by Friendly? When they fight Terry does so with renewed vigor. “That kid fights like he useta,” a longshoreman observes.1 Terry relives and remakes the wrong decision from his past. Although he is beaten by the thugs, he still gets to his feet, something the longshoremen had to see together with the beating for Terry to be free of his association with Friendly. Now he can lead the longshoremen to work. He is the winner, the hero to whom the past belongs, and so the future. The destructiveness aimed at him has failed, and that failure made him the man to follow. His view of reality prevails. Terry, in short, is profoundly smart in the nature of his transformative growth.

  So we can say everyone is trapped in the specific nature of the wrong decision in the past that affects a protagonist, who is the only one that matters. He or she is the agent of change, and that wrong decision removes him or her from effecting the change necessary. Instead, confusion reigns, and/or a numbing stasis, suffering, continuance of the past, and the constant paying for the wrong decision in repeated consequences flowing from it whether violently, as with killing Joey and Dugan in On the Waterfront, or ethically, as in Wild Strawberries. But the inciting event in the present action draws in that fatefully wrong decision from the past and makes possible its being decided differently. If the hero typically succeeds, the decision is reversed and the hero becomes a kind of Moses who leads his flock from captivity into a New Beginning, however defined by a particular story. The nowness of experience ceases to be an illusion, but actual, and a creative response to reality ensues. It’s always hard to imagine specifically what that means, although easy to imagine generally: sequels fail on that reef alone. If the hero fails and tragedy ensues, a New Beginning still follows but without the hero or those intimately involved with him. A different community inherits the “happily ever after,” as we see in Ran and Hamlet.

  The Wrong Decision in the Present

  The wrong decision in the past leads to a story where present actions repeat its consequences in new guises. The inciting act in the immediate action forces this repetitive, ongoing past into consciousness and drives the heroine or hero into an action where that decision can be relived and altered as necessary for the resolution of the conflict.

  The wrong decision in the present does not alter the balance between past and present: both must still be recognized and resolved together for the immediate conflict to reach an end and a New Beginning to emerge. But the wrong decision in the present is itself the inciting event, and it too empowers the past but in this case to a degree it would not have been, on the face of it, otherwise.

  The great lord Ichimonji in Ran divides his kingdom among his sons. He will keep the trappings but not the substance of power. Each son receives one of the three key castles; Taro, the eldest, First Castle. Ichimonji has his sons easily break a single arrow, then hands them three to break at once, which Taro and Jiro fail to do. Stand together and you cannot be overthrown.

  Ichimonji goes through this performance before Ayabe and Fujimaki, both old foes Ichimonji has overcome who now represent subject states assembled to witness an orderly transfer of power.

  Ichimonji seems wise on the face of it. Instead of clinging to power over impatient youth, he voluntarily hands it to his sons. It shows his certainty of his sons’ fidelity and that they can be relied on to maintain him with appropriate dignity while they rule. He seems the opposite of Johnny Friendly who fights to keep his power; Ichimonji gracefully adjusts to age instead while ensuring the continued obedience of Ayabe and Fujimaki.

  His behavior is wrong, however. His youngest son, Saburo, directly challenges Ichimonji, wondering if he has lost his mind. Saburo is bold, not deferential, and apparently ungrateful, inconsiderate, and false compared to Taro and Jiro who overflow with honeyed gratitude. But Saburo tells the truth to the egotistically blind Ichimonji. He demonstrates his father’s folly by taking the three arrows and breaking them over his knee. Taro and Jiro act shocked: Ichimonji is beside himself and, as Saburo persists, banishes him. It is a disastrous decision.

  Taro and Jiro are left in control, but neither is any more the true hero than Sonny is in The Godfather. Nothing more positive can be expected with Saburo out of the picture than with Michael standing aside in The Godfather. Worse, Taro is married to Lady Kaede, seductive, powerful, and—unknown to them—driven by the desire for vengeance for her family, whom Ichimonji killed on his ascent to power. The First Castle Taro is given at first was her family’s. Had Ichimonji realized the truth and made Saburo head of the family, Kaede would simply have been a secretly venomous figure with only a small arena in which to act. As a result of Ichimonji’s decision, she is empowered: she is “first lady,” far stronger in character than Taro or Jiro, and with a lethal agenda.

  The consequences from Ichimonji’s decision flow swiftly. Taro is easily manipulated by Lady Kaede into a confrontation with his father, who leaves in a rage. She has Taro forewarn Jiro that Ichimonji is coming to him, vengeful and clinging to the trappings of power. Sadly, if a person wishes to give up power it must all go, trappings included, for power is a kind of Schopenhauerian will. Its appetite for more is insatiable. Thus Jiro refuses to let Ichimonji into Second Castle with his entourage. His father leaves Jiro too, his eyes now opened to his folly. They must open wider.

  He takes refuge in Third Castle, which was to be Saburo’s. There Jiro and Taro attack him. In the ensuing battle Taro is assassinated by Jiro’s retainer Kurogane. Ichimonji walks off into the wilderness, aided only by the fool and the faithful Tango, swordless, distraught at the death of his wives and retainers, now realizing the depth of his sons’ treachery and of his own misjudgment.

  The old hero, who banished the young hero, has a long road of suffering to explore. The weight of his misdeeds from the past is enormous, while the grief he has caused himself in the present drives him mad. I said there is an Old Testament sense of proportion in screenwriting and drama: do much evil, suffer much evil. That is Ichimonji’s fate. He refuses to appeal to Saburo from guilt and wounded pride; these too must be burned out.

  Lady Kaede’s ascent is now clear. She immediately half-seduces, half-frightens Jiro into taking her as his wife, swiftly establishing her power over him to the disgust of Kurogane. Saburo reenters the action at the head of his small army to confront Jiro and rescue his father from the wilderness, while Fujimaki, who aids him in his banishment, appears in moral support on a hill’s crest. Jiro, under Lady Kaede’s urging, can’t allow Saburo to have Ichimonji. Too much legitimacy would be conferred on Saburo, too dark a light cast on Kaede and Jiro. A plot is hatched to let Saburo get Ichimonji but ambush them on the way back to the army.

  Lady Kaede wins if the plot succeeds; if it fails, she loses nothing that she has and will have further reason to rule Jiro through his incompetence. The plot succeeds, and Saburo is shot after a joyous reunion with his father, who now is in touch with the truth and sees things clearly and accepts Saburo’s aid, begging his forgiveness: he recognizes the true heir, the true hero. His heart breaks at Saburo’s death.

  Now Ichimonji, Taro, and Saburo are gone. There is just Jiro who leaves the battlefield in haste as he discovers Ayabe, who also appeared on a hill’s crest to encourage Saburo, had feinted and instead marched on First Castle. Jiro returns in disorder from the battle with Saburo’s army and can only prepare to die. Lady Kaede reveals her satisfaction that at last her family is to be avenged. Kurogane beheads her, but it is too late: all of Ichimonji’s house will be swept away.

  The past triumphs through Lady Kaede. Ichimonji’s entire lifetime and predominance are shown to have been built on quicksand. He may have been the auth
or of his own rise, but so too was he the author of his own demise. Ayabe and Fujimaki finally triumph, just as Fortinbras does in Hamlet: the future doesn’t stop but moves away from those unable to inherit it. Thus the wrong decision in the present, if not undone, leads inevitably to the reassertion of what appeared to be past and overcome as the now newly triumphant future. The New Beginning then belongs to others than the protagonists or their followers. They seemed to be primary but turn out to have been an unhappy interlude in others’ lives.

  One consequence the triumph of the wrong decision in the present drives home is that what the characters in conflict fight over in a screenplay is to whom the story belongs. Does it belong to Ichimonji and his heirs or to Lady Kaede? Is it Johnny Friendly’s or Terry’s? Is it Captain Schaeffer’s and the other corrupt officers in Witness, or Rachel and Book’s? We hope for a particular outcome, but that outcome is not guaranteed any more than the desired outcome can happen easily and satisfy, for that thwarts the harsh sense of proportion and consequence in dramatic writing. In Ran, the story passes to those from whom the old hero Ichimonji took it. The testing power of the action destroys his clan: the future belongs to the community of the survivors, who have been found and made fitter by surviving.

  An action is a conflict to own the story: to own the reality the story represents, the lives within it, and, by extension and identification, to own us so that we sense reality adding up as the hero or heroine adds it up. For not all wrong decisions in the present result in tragedy. A brief consideration of Blue helps bring into light the nature of the protagonist’s more typical success in undoing the wrong decision in the present.

  Julie, we saw in Blue, moves to the city after her losses and refuses to be involved with anyone, choosing the Freudian choice of stoicism and withdrawal to cope with suffering and avoid fresh pain. God knows Julie has a right to choose so, given the depth of her loss, yet it is impossible to withdraw completely and claim one is still alive. Julie tries to make any growth in herself dumb: there is to be no transformation from the state the accident left her in, as there is none for Hamlet from the impact death has on his perception of reality in Hamlet.