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  A Poetics for Screenwriters

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  (with Ben Brady)

  The Death and Life of Drama

  Reflections on Writing and Human Nature

  LANCE LEE

  UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS Austin

  Copyright © 2005 by the University of Texas Press

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition, 2005

  Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

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  University of Texas Press

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  Austin, TX 78713-7819

  utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Library ebook ISBN: 978-0-292-79674-4

  Individual ebook ISBN: 978-0-292-77805-4

  DOI: 10.7560/705326

  Lee, Lance, 1942–

  The death and life of drama : reflections on writing and human nature / Lance Lee—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-292-70532-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-292-70964-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Motion picture authorship. 2. Playwriting. 1. Title.

  PN1996.L387 2005

  808.2'3—dc22

  2004027264

  to my wife, Jeanne

  and to John Matthews, mentor

  Contents

  Preface

  PART I Immediate Issues

  ONE BY THE OCEAN OF TIME

  Time

  The Argument We Are Caught In

  Time and Drama

  Slow vs. Swift

  TWO THE HEAVY AS OPPOSED TO …

  The Heavy vs. the Exhilarating

  Freud, Civilization, and the Heavy

  The Descent into the Heavy

  THREE MORAL SUBSTANCE AND AMBIGUITY

  Morality and Screenplays?

  Typing and Volition in …

  The Heavy and Moral…

  But What Are We Morally Ambiguous About?

  FOUR COMPLEXITY VS. FULLNESS

  Belief vs. Disbelief: Complexity

  Fullness

  Typing, Volition, and Fullness

  Endings

  PART II The Cooked and the Raw

  FIVE THE COOKED AND THE RAW

  Cooked Emotion

  The Raw

  Blending the Cooked and the Raw

  Antecedents

  SIX THE SMART AND THE DUMB

  Flat and Round

  Hamlet and the Dumb

  John Nash and the Smart

  Plot-Handling Implications

  PART III The Lost Poetics of Comedy

  SEVEN THE LOST POETICS OF COMEDY

  The Comic Universe

  Winnicott and Play

  The Two Roads

  The Bones of the Comic Angle of Vision

  The Cooked and Comedy

  The New Beginning in Comedy

  The Smart and Dumb in Comedy

  PART IV The Nature of Dramatic Action

  EIGHT THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST

  What Is the Past?

  High Noon

  Lantana

  Wild Strawberries

  Lifting Weights

  NINE THE WEIGHT OF THE WRONG DECISION

  The Wrong Decision in the Past

  The Wrong Decision in the Present

  True Heroines and Heroes and False

  TEN THE NATURE OF THE HERO’S JOURNEY

  Campbell’s Hero

  The Dramatic Hero

  1. Arresting Life

  2. Complying with the False

  3. Awakening

  4. Confused Growth—and the Pursuit of Error

  5. Failure of the False Solution

  6. The Discovery of the True Solution

  7. The Heroic Deed

  8. Suffering

  9. The New Life

  PART V The Death and Life of Drama

  ELEVEN THE DEATH AND LIFE OF DRAMA

  Prometheus in Athens, Gladiator in Rome

  Shakespeare in Elizabeth’s London

  The Argument We Are Having with Ourselves

  Appendix: A Case Study

  Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander

  Notes

  Film and Drama List

  Preface

  OFTEN I ask screenwriters, Why not abolish the entire film and dramatic enterprise which consumes billions of dollars a year and endless hours, to say nothing of the money involved in related industries, and use all that money, time, and effort for the elimination of poverty, say, in Africa? Or Appalachia? Why not take all that money and invest it in the elimination of a particular killer disease? Wouldn’t that be morally better and a far more humane activity than writing another screenplay or producing another film? Wouldn’t relieving the suffering of one child be reason enough to abolish an industry whose only widely accepted function is entertainment? To their credit a few writers in a given discussion group vote to do just that.

  Most do not, although even the arguments offered after we get past easy and cynical responses are unconvincing. One response that emerges repeatedly is that abolishing the film and entertainment industry for these purposes wouldn’t work: creating drama and all that entails by way of production and dissemination would start again from the ground up. There is something necessary about this creative activity, hard as it may be to put that necessity into words.

  The nature of that necessity certainly cannot be found by writing another screenwriting manual or reviewing the literature within the field. Drama, which includes the continual creation of new dramas, occupies so pervasive a position in our culture and one so caught up within the argument modern culture is having with itself that to understand its role demands perspectives that go beyond those discussed within the field into broader cultural, psychological, and philosophical areas. This is also true for understanding what we must do when we believe we are caught up in purely technical writing problems, for a continuous theme here is how dramatic structure roots in psychic structure.

  These reflections led me to adopt the more personal essay style. This does not imply these are essays of aesthetics or criticism. I hope writers will get as much real use out of these essays as any more traditionally specialized text, for the goal is to give them a better understanding of what the various technical tools they use are for. Much of what is offered here has grown from reflection based on long experience as a writer and teacher, although any necessary documentation is given in the notes.

  I use the term “drama” broadly, applying drama equally to stage and film. And like the ancient Greeks, I include comedy within drama as one of its two great divisions in treating human nature and experience. Tragedy may have its suffering mask, comedy its laughing, but if we look at traditional renderings we can find ourselves struggling to distinguish between the pain in either mask, just as in life it can be hard to tell tears of joy from tears of grief. Yet both are part of the great river of drama on which we so strongly float.

  Including screenwriting as “drama” seems obvious on the face of it, although I suppose some don’t realize writing drama for the stage or film is the same, allowing for the adjustments caused by using the different production mediums. A production medium makes for a variety in the art of drama but is not drama itself, not the exploration of the human
spirit through the guise of dramatic action.

  Beyond this, the dramatic impulse has moved powerfully to film in the last sixty years. If we reach for an illustrative dramatic example for some point we are making, we are far more likely to do so from a film than stage drama, including filmed versions of notable dramas such as the multitude of filmed versions of Shakespeare. Even in England the example reached for is far more likely now to stem from a filmed version of Shakespeare than ever before, with arguments over whether Olivier got Henry V right in Henry V or Branagh, in their film versions, or whether Olivier or Branagh got Hamlet right in their film versions.

  I will think of this book as a success if the reflections offered here, however sure or tentative, spark further reflection and help some writer give a screenplay that extra dimension that ensures success and meaningfulness.

  PART I

  Immediate Issues

  CHAPTER 1

  By the Ocean of Time

  Time

  THE title for this essay is taken from a chapter in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain where he reflects on some of the paradoxes we encounter in our experience of time.1 Nothing is more commonplace or harder to understand or more likely to make us feel we are in Plato’s cave watching shadows we confuse with reality. Often we feel a nagging sense, like Neo in The Matrix, that there is a truer reality above or below or beyond what we experience, and that if our immediate experience is an illusion so too is our perception of time, for that is inextricably bound up with our experience of reality. When time drags, experience drags. But it is not easy to say what makes time drag even in the case of dramatic action, which is just a special instance of our larger experience of time.

  Mann writes that if we fill time up with activity, as a drama is supposed to do with action, such that one day after another is full of our doings, cumulatively time seems to go very slowly, even though each day flies by. A week feels like it stretches out, in comparison to others with little activity, and feels full as opposed to empty. Something of our sense of childhood is built into this experience of time, those days of continual activity whether of school or with friends that seem eternal while we are in their midst. Yet if that activity accumulates over a long stretch of experience, suddenly we feel that time has abruptly fled: “Where has it all gone?” we wonder. What was it we were doing? Was it anything at all? What happened to childhood? Or youth? Or … ? The answer “We were living” immediately gives rise to the response “Was that all there was to life?”

  Paradoxically, the opposite experience of time brings us here too. Oblomov’s days pass in almost dreamlike withdrawal and inactivity in Goncharov’s novel Oblomov.2 Each day feels impossibly long and dull, yet the cumulative lapse of boredom is also one day felt as fast, as Oblomov feels in the moment of his awakening to love. He too wonders, “Where has it all gone?” However our days seem to pass, one day we look back as if suddenly waking and they appear like a fading dream: what seemed so full or eternal turns into shadows.

  Drama makes use of parts our fluid time sense, of how a good deal of action can make time seem to fly and life be full, and also how with little dramatic action life feels empty and drags. But we do not get to the paradox in a dramatic story as a matter of story handling of how inactive, time-filled days at first seem slow but then, after some indefinable point, to have flown: a story that drags in any sense loses us before it can ever seem cumulatively fast, even if our experience of it, so soon dismissed as we walk out of the theatre, slides into some of these paradoxes.

  A peculiarity of all these different ways of experiencing time is time’s nowness, whether of experience dragging or speeding or ending up in the same place from different directions. The only time we ever have to experience is the one we experience now.

  Complicating this further in an everyday sense is how time is experienced differently by individuals. There is the clock: the two hours that we see elapse drag for me but fly by for you. Characters in our stories are constantly in different temporal spaces. That is one of the inherent expressions of conflict.

  Look how Hamlet twits Ophelia as the play-within-a-play scene begins in Hamlet. He tells her only two hours have passed since his father’s death: she swiftly corrects him, saying that twice two months have passed.3 Ophelia is not suffering from a loss, however, like Hamlet: her experience of reality and hence time are largely conventional. Her troubles with Hamlet can be seen from her point of view as upsetting but romantic. But Hamlet is trapped within his grief over his father’s death and paralyzed by his father’s demand for vengeance: he is in a single emotional—hence single temporal—space, like Oblomov dreaming away his life on his couch.

  Or think of Edie and Terry in On the Waterfront as she urges him to leave the docks, after his failure to unseat Johnny Friendly by going to court has become apparent. She is urgent, her emotions hammer at Terry: “Let’s go, let’s go now, let’s go upstate and farm, let’s not deal with Johnny Friendly and his thugs and the longshoremen who are now ostracizing you: let’s have a life away from all of this.” Terry is silent, thinking, marking time deliberately and almost literally with the way he plays with his longshoreman’s hook. They are experiencing reality in radically different ways and so experience time differently, urgent vs. reflective, fast vs. slow, fleeting vs. rooted in place and milieu, for Terry’s final decision is to go down to the docks and get his rights. As in Hamlet, we experience both times simultaneously through these characters.

  Flashback is based on this fluidity of our temporal consciousness, namely, that we can go back and relive time, we being the audience as well as the characters whose memories we relive through them. We think of flashback as a writing convention, but it could not exist unless it accorded with how our minds work and experience memory, or with the way in which we live daily in a stream of experience that interweaves many different senses of time. What’s more, when we do use flashback in drama, that relived past is experienced as now, for our experience of time is always now. Language may begin to break down into paradox when we put “past” and “now” together, but not our experience of reality.

  Various forms of psychotherapy, which many of us have experienced directly, take us back in time as we recall and rethink events, even find what we had forgotten, and thereby change our perception of the past. In doing so we know that in some sense we alter that past too. We discover that time past and time now are far less divided than conventionally thought. Even outside the framework of psychotherapy, all of us routinely relive events in memory and, as time passes in our lives, start to see some of those events differently. Suddenly we are in the middle of paradox: what should have been past is not past but still undergoing immediate change. Take away our ability both to remember and to alter the meaning of memory and we cease to be human or become frozen in our response to experience.

  What do we mean by calling something past, then? If the experience of our lives changes even those parts we thought past, if characters’ experience changes in dramas the same way, and this is all experienced in the nowness of immediate experience, how can we ever maintain a purely conventional sense of experience or time at all except as a convenience of discourse? Granted we and the characters in our dramas don’t live on this level of awareness all the time, yet it hovers continually just below consciousness. Only a little reflection makes us feel an illusory quality to our experience and sense of time, like Neo in Matrix or Hamlet in Hamlet or as in Plato’s haunting cave image.

  A film like Rashômon depends on our underlying sense of time’s fluidity and brings me another step in this reflection. Our experience of the film goes well beyond understanding each individual storyteller’s tale or reflecting on the ultimate unknowability of experience as we sort through their contradictory stories, told largely in flashback, each in turn as convincing in its detail and sense of nowness. It breaks in on us that there is no limit for the mind in how often an experience with its associated time frame can be now, relived and changed. That realization
comes with a shock of familiarity: “This was always true,” we think suddenly, as some intense memory fills our mind.

  This is the part of our fluid sense of time, with which all screenplays deal. Hamlet’s father may be dead in Hamlet, but what to make of that death, how to judge whether his father’s ghost is the real thing or a devilish deception and his tale of murder a lie, and what to do about Claudius are all living questions. Time is not just a date in a chronology but the experiences that go with that event: to speak of an event as set is to say that those experiences and the experience of time they embody are equally set, which is not the case in drama generally or Hamlet specifically, any more than for Rashômon with regard to the husband’s death, the wife’s motivation, or the bandit’s character. Everything is up for grabs; it is all still now. Even the husband is experienced in the present through the medium, as well as variously in flashback.

  Modern psychoanalysis and analytic psychotherapies offer an interesting variant. We refer to a behavioral pattern developed to deal with a past trauma that we keep applying to present experience when we speak of neurosis. Hamlet can be seen as neurotic because he continues to treat new experience in the same way in which he coped with his father’s death. He continually recoils from that experience and the ghost’s demand for action as though death made him see the wholly illusory nature of immediate experience/action, like a kind of Buddha or Neo in The Matrix discovering that reality is a programmed illusion. This fixed pattern of imposing past behavior on the present forms an essential part of the transference in psychoanalysis, as we act now toward the analyst as we have toward key others in our lives as if the circumstances that first gave rise to our arrested behavior still endure.

  This kind of behavior has a fixity to it. In reality, it leads to a great deal of suffering and stunting for an individual who cannot move past temporally frozen responses. Once we recognize such a pattern in a character, we know we are in for a radical change or, if not, for a defeat or a death. This fixity of experience and time is the opposite of what we mean by living creatively and of what we expect from a dramatic hero or heroine, who must overcome the conflict he or she is engaged in and defined by—unless the story is a tragedy, in which case the larger community, even if an antagonist’s, transcends the conflict.