The Death and Life of Drama

by Lance Lee

  On the simplest level, both Complying with the False and Confused Growth—and the Pursuit of Error on the part of the heroine and hero cause suffering and must be expiated. That expiation, which is a subsequent and pointed additional suffering, leads to The Discovery of the True Solution and puts it into effect for others. Julie in Blue must be yanked back into life by Olivier, but finds his efforts make her suffer in the ways she has tried to avoid. But she is in the wrong and must go through this suffering to pay for her errors, if she is to have a renewed life. I said drama has a Old Testament, “eye for an eye” sense of justice where each misstep must be paid for. Terry in On the Waterfront cannot lead the longshoremen until he takes the beating at the hands of Johnny Friendly and his thugs and survives; then he can lead the men in. Suffering and expiation go hand in hand, the latter just a pointed version of the former. One of the implications of the heavy is that suffering comes to be indulged in without an expiation and hence of a point being sensed and achieved. The heavy brings us up against unrelieved suffering in everyday reality, unendurable to experience or the imagination.

  But the survival of suffering is as important as suffering too: Terry by surviving his beating and Julie by surviving Olivier’s recall to life display the creative essence of being a hero. They are the ones who survive the destructive side of creativity and show themselves to be both true and the source of the creative response to reality for others. Tragic heroes achieve the same end at the cost of their own future.

  Thus Emilie has to suffer for misjudging first the past and then Edvard, and does so dearly. Alexander, though a child hero, must also suffer: he is full of undisciplined rage and fantasy. The bishop is wrong to attack him as he does, yet one thing Alexander learns from Edvard is the dangerous power of the imagination for both himself and others, as his wishes seem to cause Edvard’s death. The imagination is a mighty tool because it is most expressive of the true nature of reality, as we saw, reflecting the creative, “becoming,” changeable nature of our experience. The hero and heroine do not just survive, they grow—whether dumb or smart—through their experience and suffering into something more than what they seemed at the start: they grow into the truth.

  The other characters dependent on the heroes’ success cannot do anything but suffer along with them until they find the true solution. Until then the hero’s/heroes’ are caught in the arrested life the Beginning reveals through the false modus vivendi. The true solution, then, with the climactic occurrence of The Heroic Deed, is the great gift of the hero to whatever their community/society/civilization may be, whether the stripped-down one of the typical western, the Holocaust one of Schindler’s List, or the longshoremen’s of On the Waterfront. It is the finding of the true self and the restoration of the positive, creative flow of experience for that self’s community.

  The latter film gives a particularly clear demonstration of how the other characters hang helplessly on the hero’s phases of The Discovery of the True Solution and The Heroic Deed. Neither Pop, Edie, Father Barry, nor the Crime Commission can do more than live in a continuing false modus vivendi despite all their efforts unless Terry succeeds against Johnny Friendly. When he does so climactically by taking the past away from Johnny Friendly and transforming its meaning, as well as expiating his errors through the savage beating, everyone is free to follow him into The New Life, or be appropriately sidelined, like Johnny Friendly.

  In Fanny and Alexander, the thrust to find the true manner of living depends entirely on the affirmation Emilie and Alexander’s experience brings to the Ekdahl lifestyle, which their affirmation transforms from one of convenience and privilege into an idealized vision of how things should be. Moral substance and/or ambiguity are always at hand in screenwriting, varying only with the level of ambition of a given drama.

  The New Beginning and the New Life

  In the End the restored Ekdahl clan gathers in as lavish and spectacular a manner as we saw in the Beginning at Christmas. Even Oscar is there in his corporeally ghostly way. Emilie is willingly present. Gustav Adolf makes very clear Emilie and Maj’s infants are the cause for this family gathering as he emphasizes all are now together to celebrate the new babies: Maj’s Helena Viktoria, i.e., victory, and Emilie’s Aurora, i.e., dawn. He reminds them how terrifying the world can be, and that the Ekdahls are best suited to live in this “little world” represented by their gathering. The little world at first was the theatre but now is the tolerant, middle-class/artistic, protected, material world of the Ekdahls. If at first the little world meant the theatrical one of staged creativity, now it means the real world of creative response to experience. Where, then, is the “big world” Oscar spoke about at Christmas? Beyond this middle-class world that it menaces continuously, the true “other” reality where figures like Edvard with one mask embedded in their souls continually try to stop time and life and fix these in their own, unchanging likeness.

  What kind of people are these Ekdahls? The kind that love what they can understand and enjoy their little lies that make life bearable, answers Gustav Adolf. The Ekdahls give a pointed representation to Nietzsche’s idea that life can only be made bearable as an aesthetic experience. Without their little deceptions a man “goes mad and begins hitting out.” Our white lies create a tolerable reality not from distortion but necessity, not from falsification but to serve a communal truth.

  Bergman takes this one step further and presents the Ekdahl world as a kind of knowing dream, an Apollonian construct of the first order that has been put through a kind of Dionysian wringer by death and Emilie’s Confused Growth—and the Pursuit of Error with Edvard, which threatened to sweep away the family by denying its self-valuation. We live in the meanings we create for ourselves. Bad times may be coming, but

  GUSTAV ADOLF

  … let us be happy while we are happy, let us be kind, generous, affectionate, and good. Therefore it is necessary, and not in the least shameful, to take pleasure in the little world … (italics mine)23

  “To take pleasure in the little world” of our immediate experience, that “me–you/me–not me” tripartite reality in which we mingle and enjoy one another and our lives, and in which, implicitly, the presence of the “other” is a necessary element of our own wholeness. For Isak too is at this feast, as he has been with the Ekdahls all along. Fanny and Alexander, as a play, sees Emilie and Alexander find their true selves, and we vicariously share that experience by destroying Edvard and affirming Gustav Adolf. And just as the “other” embodied by Isak is part of the Ekdahl world, so too is Edvard part of Alexander’s world, for Alexander is tripped up by Edvard’s “ghost” who will now, with his father, haunt him as part of himself. Johnny Friendly ends On the Waterfront reminding the longshoremen he will be back. These “villains,” the true antiheroes, can only be overcome, not expunged, because they are permanent parts of ourselves, expressions on the personal, psychic level of the destructive possibility of the creative nature of reality itself.

  Gustav Adolf drives home the moral as he lifts his daughter.

  GUSTAV ADOLF

  … I am holding a little empress in my arms. It is tangible yet immeasurable. One day she will prove me wrong, one day she will rule over not only the little world but over—everything! Everything!24

  She is potentially the empress of the world, perhaps a world redeemer who will spread innocence and redemption everywhere. No profounder expression could be given the nature of The New Beginning in drama or as the final phase of the hero’s/heroes’ journey, The New Life in his/their renewed community.

  Later that evening Emilie hands Helena a play she wants her to consider returning to the stage in, Strindberg’s A Dream Play. It is Bergman’s last clue for the journey world of Fanny and Alexander: through dream and nightmare a New Beginning has been reached, a true Awakening into The New Life.

  Notes

  Repetitive page references to key works are given for convenience as follows:

  Aristotle: Poetics, trans. S. H. Bu
tcher, ed. Francis Fergusson, 43rd printing (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

  Bergman: Fanny and Alexander (New York: Pantheon, 1982).

  Burckhardt: The Greeks and Greek Civilization, trans. Sheila Stern, ed. Oswyn Murray (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).

  Campbell: The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).

  Freud: Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).

  Hamlet: Hamlet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954).

  Lee: A Poetics for Screenwriters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).

  Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956).

  Rodman: Winnicott: Life and Work (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2003).

  Schama: A History of Britain, vol. 1: At the Edge of the World (New York: Hyperion, 2000).

  Schulberg: On the Waterfront (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980).

  Winnicott: Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

  1. By the Ocean of Time

  1. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Heritage Press, 1962), vol. 2, p. 195.

  2. Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov, trans. David Magarshack (London: Penguin Classics, 1954).

  3. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), Act III, 2, ll. 124–130.

  4. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Laurence J. LaFleur (New York: Liberal Arts, 1960), p. 24. The general reader may find The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), useful for quick summaries of the general work of the philosophers mentioned in the text.

  5. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). This was for the 1950s the work that caught the public mind on the topic of alienation, the subject explored in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, specifically focused on the middle class.

  6. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford/Clarendon Press, 1960). Hume’s seminal work appeared in 1739 and has gathered readers and impact down the years.

  7. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 50. The analysis of Winnicott’s views on creativity is central to these essays, and found in large part on pp. 132ff. in “The Lost Poetics of Comedy.”

  8. The Critique of Pure Reason was first published in 1781, and the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans., intro., and abridged by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Modern Library, 1958).

  Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. John P. Mahaffy et al., ed. Paul Carus (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1955).

  9. Jung differed in this from Freud, who was reluctant to ascribe anything positive to the unconscious until late in his career, and then minimally. Jung differed further in that he saw the unconscious as the seat of positive drives toward health as well as of neurosis and psychosis. It’s better to consult a Jungian primer than search through Jung’s work, given its breadth, diversity, and tendency to involve one in long, arcane passages followed by a few golden paragraphs.

  However, Jung’s Tavistock Lectures serve well as a general introduction: C. G. Jung, Analytical Psychology, Its Theory and Practice (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). The lectures were first given in 1935 in English by Jung in London, and editorial insertions update the material.

  Swedenborg’s thesis was that there is a correspondence between inner and outer nature, the physical and the ideal, immaterial world of the mind. What might be physically distant in one world could be near in another. Emerson used Swedenborg as his representative of “The Mystic” in Representative Men.

  There is a good discussion on this in Robert J. Richardson, Jr.’s The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 197–199, among others.

  A different perspective on relating inner and outer nature, with particular point for the subject of our own identification with the hero and heroine, is given by a series of studies published in Science and Neuroimaging, as reported in the Los Angeles Times. In one of these, a member of a couple was subjected to a shock; then, using brain-mapping techniques, the other member was given the same shock as the first looked on. Results showed the onlooker’s brain “was a mirror of suffering, reflecting through many of the same neural circuits the pain that others feel, much as if the sensation were its own genuine torment.” It’s a nice instance of science and drama converging in the understanding of something as fundamental as empathy. See Robert Lee Hotz, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation section, February 20, 2004.

  Recent experiments in Europe at the atomic accelerator at CERN reportedly show separated electrons echoing one another’s behavior instantaneously. Curiously, this quantum behavior was anticipated in fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Dispossessed, among other works, where a device named an “ansible” is able to communicate instantaneously across light years with its mate. Arthur C. Clarke is the most famous of the “hard science” fiction writers, whose ideas have had a way of moving from conjecture to experiment and realization. Most recent is the idea of building elevators between a space station and Earth’s surface: see Kenneth Chang, “Not Science Fiction: An Elevator to Space,” New York Times, Science Times section, September 23, 2003.

  10. Dennis Overbye, “E and mc2: Equality, It Seems, Is Relative,” New York Times, Science Times section, December 31, 2002.

  11. The inciting event is that event in the Beginning, or Act 1, that sets off the primary conflict by forcing the hero and heroine cumulatively to resolve the lingering problem(s) from the past preceding the immediate action within the immediate conflict. See “3. Awakening” in Chapter 10, “The Nature of the Hero’s Journey,” in these pages. See also Lance Lee, A Poetics for Screenwriters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 75–76.

  12. Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

  2. The Heavy as Opposed to …

  1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), pp. 59–60. Here Nietzsche speaks of the way the Sophoclean heroes were like “luminous images” reflected back from “a deep look into the horror of nature.” The selection of a narrow range of Greek myths for tragedy reflects this dramatic need for material strong enough to bare and break human nature for examination and finally tragic consolation.

  2. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, ed. Francis Fergusson, 43rd printing (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), pp. 71, 109. Aristotle is at pains to make us understand tragedy ends in wonder, whether called “tragic wonder,” Aristotle, p. 71, or “the wonderful is required in Tragedy,” Aristotle, p. 109. Nietzsche means something of the same when he speaks of the need for a state of enchantment in which tragedy can transpire, Nietzsche, p. 56, culminating in the “metaphysical solace,” Nietzsche, p. 50, and “metaphysical delight,” Nietzsche, p. 102.

  3. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).

  4. Sigmund Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, in Collected Papers, vol. 5, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1959), pp. 316–357.

  Freud, Constructions in Analysis, in Collected Papers, vol. 5, trans. and ed. James Strachey (Basic Books, New York: 1959), pp. 358–371.

  Analysis Terminable and Interminable was written in 1937, two years before Freud’s death; Constructions in Analysis was even later, 1938, a year before he died.

  5. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Penguin Riverhead Books, 1998). The title pretty well speaks for itself; if more is needed, try: “Consciousness is his salient characteristic; he is the most aware and knowing figure ever conceived,” p. 404. Or, “We can hardly think of ourselves as separate selves without thinking about Hamlet,” p. 405. Bloom is hardly reticent about his claim,
nor of his admiration of Shakespeare; for him, there has been no post-Shakespearean dramatic achievement reaching similar, if different, heights. Shakespeare is definitive. See also Bloom’s citation of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Hamlet on p. 363. Our words may be different, but we share Nietzsche’s opinion. See “The Smart and the Dumb,” chapter 6 in this book.

  6. Freud, p. 33.

  7. Freud, p. 58.

  8. Freud, pp. 64ff.

  9. Freud, p. 69.

  10. Freud, p. 82.

  11. Freud, p. 107.

  3. Moral Substance and Ambiguity

  1. Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), p. 71.

  2. Aristotle, pp. 71, 109. It’s worth also noting Aristotle on p. 117 rates tragedy as more pleasurable because it is so much more concentrated than other art forms. Uncomfortable as he is with the irrational, he knows this sense of wonder grows from the irrational, from the action issuing in pity and fear and yet being transformative and enrapturing, not depressing, which would be typical of the heavy, a state with which one hardly associates wonder.

  4. Complexity vs. Fullness

  1. Lance Lee, A Poetics for Screenwriters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 20–29. These pages review both the will to believe we bring to drama and our mythopoetic drive by which we elaborate experience into meaning through stories.

  2. Lee, pp. 17–20. The development of naturalism through Ibsen in the nineteenth century is reviewed here, including the naturalistic approval of slice-of-life writing because of the way it emulates actual life.

  3. See the third part of “The Death and Life of Drama,” chapter 11 in this book.

  4. Aristotle, pp. 65–66. His Poetics are shot through with considerations of structure, action, and the nature of the imitation of an action. These pages review his specific elucidation of Beginning, Middle, and End.