The Death and Life of Drama Read online

  But time and the nature of experience are not settled either in absolute or relative terms beyond the habit of conventional definition; worse, their natures are caught up in the argument our culture is having with itself and in which our drama takes a side.

  The Argument We Are Caught In

  Time has been conceived with enormous variation in history—governing the day with clocks only begins in the later middle ages. The measurement of time permits navigation; its relativity in Einstein has colored our culture. Societies are characterized by their assumptions of time. We think of time as a linear experience in which things get steadily better. Other societies have thought of time as characterized by great, repetitive cycles, as in Hinduism, or progressive, so that societies move forward, even to a state of perfection (see modern variants in Hegel, for whom it was the Prussian State, or Marx, with his utopian proletarian dream). The Greeks and Romans pictured time as a steady descent from a golden age; Christians and Jews, from Eden and innocence. Christianity sees the world as a stage for the soul’s salvation in which history will end in the Last Judgment, just as for a Marxist in a communist utopia.

  But to understand what time means to us and how every screenwriter uses it in our films inevitably draws us into the central argument characterizing our own culture. That argument begins with the prudent move of Rene Descartes from restrictive, Catholic France to tolerant Holland in order to think freely and to understand himself, both radical ideas given our medieval heritage. In that age we were certain we had a soul, what that was, and what rewards awaited us, through God’s grace and good works, or punishments if we fell into temptation. Descartes no longer knows these things: a century of warring faiths opened the door to his rare, inquiring mind. Systematically in his Meditations in his candlelit room in a Dutch inn, he pares away all elements of his experience that can be contested until he reaches his rock of certainty, his cogito, ergo sum “I think, therefore I am.”4 Nothing of sense experience is left but some abstract qualities, while we become a thinking machine in his vision. Our seeing the computer as an analogy of mental functioning descends directly from Descartes’ musings, as well as our periodically remarked alienation, as in Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd in the 1950s.5 If only the individual thinking “I” exists, everything else is secondary, not part of the soul, or exploitable, whether reduced to “other” or “producer” or “consumer.” Dehumanization is the inevitable gift of the lonely self.

  Descartes knows, as do most philosophers, that once he reaches his extreme position he must find some way back to explain our immediate experience, whether as some form of illusion or not. Descartes’ exit from his “lonely I” is embedded in abstract thought, suitably enough for him: he examines the qualities attached to his idea of God, establishes to his satisfaction they can only have come from God, for nothing in experience could give rise to them, and concludes God exists. Moreover, he affirms God is not a liar about the creation, as later Einstein would believe God does not play a game with the universe: reality adds up, in other words. Thus our immediate sensual experience for Descartes, even if reduced to broad characteristics like extension, texture, or weight, is real.

  Nonetheless, a severe dualism results between the abstract, thinking “I” and sense experience, between “me” and “not me,” the realm of which any other “I” is part. This dualism is our modern fatality against whose atomism and solipsism we have been arguing ever since, largely futilely, in the name of a broader sense of self and a wider, more encompassing sense of reality. Drama is as deeply caught up in this struggle as it is possible to be, because it argues reality is not described by a “me vs. not me” description.

  Time, in the Cartesian realm of thought, however defined, is part of the experience guaranteed by God for the lonely thinking machine. The same is true for the experience of space or of a quality of experience like causality: these all apply to the “not me” world the atomistic, alienated “I” of dualism reflects on as external to itself.

  Needless to say, Descartes’ tortuous thinking justifying a divine guarantee of the reality of immediate experience beyond the certain “I” was soon dispensed with, leaving just a “me vs. not me” way of conceiving reality. Philosophy split after Descartes between idealism and empiricism, between the idea that what is real exists above and beyond immediate experience vs. the idea that what is real arises from actual experience and our thoughtful evaluation of it. The Cartesian “I” continued in triumph in both—until subjected to David Hume’s withering attack a hundred years later in his Treatise on Human Nature, which left thinking about knowledge for anyone, empiricist or idealist, in shambles.6

  Hume is one of those rare, readable philosophers able to communicate what he means without tortuous circumlocutions and not afraid to be understood. He is a figure of the Scottish Renaissance, a man who enjoyed his friends, humor, and a good meal. Yet after he examines our experience meticulously, he destroys the Cartesian framework for understanding reality. Since that is the ur-ground of modern thought, its destruction left modern thought in pieces without apparent repair. He observes that the same thinking experience Descartes examines, if examined more carefully, provides no proof of an “I” whatsoever. There are simply associated states of experience with no guarantee of reality or persistence we conveniently label “I.” “I” is no more than a bad intellectual habit. This goes far beyond correcting Descartes to say “it” thinks instead of “I” think: it leaves instead an assemblage of associated conscious states which have no more than an accidental coincidence.

  Hume turns the same spotlight on time and ends with mere sequence and, as if anticipating quantum mechanics, proves causality does not exist: only a certain degree of probability can ever be attributed to one event “causing” the same result again. Similarly, he destroys the conventional idea of space. There is space in the sense of mere immediate extension, the area we occupy, but something called, absolutely, space? Something that exists apart from our all-too-human experience? What would that be? Where would it be? All that is left of humanity and reality for Hume is a being governed by habit, indulging in illusion, with sensations whose source is unknowable.

  As the great contemporary British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott observes, and as we all intuitively know, and as every dramatist knows in his or her bones creatively, we and the characters we invent live in a space-time continuum characterized by, among other things, causality and necessity.7 We insist on those qualities in good writing and conventionally, echoing Aristotle, consider that such storytelling imitating an action embodies reality. Certainly Hume’s friends, unable to disprove him, were concerned about this destruction of the meaningfulness of experience: How could he get on with his life, they demanded?

  Unrepentant, Hume reminded them he enjoyed good conversation and meeting his friends for a convivial drink and meal, and otherwise had no trouble going about his business. What he implies is that understanding the nature of life and reality just doesn’t matter nearly as much as everyone likes to think. He’s dazzling: some part of myself would like to think we could dance so lightly through life, but little in our long, lamentable history supports such an idea.

  Even as silly a story as Billy Crystal going west to herd cattle in City Slickers as he tries to find his smile is impossible to conceive in a Humean universe, let alone Curly’s actually knowing the meaning of life, even if, like a good modern citizen, the meaning he finds is relative to each individual. The Humean ludicrousness of an art form dealing more substantially with the meaning of our actions, as in a film like Schindler’s List, is apparent: certainty in life cannot be found, while an art dramatizing a rise to knowledge in a character is inherently a fraud in Hume’s universe. Drama wouldn’t exist if we actually shared Hume’s ideas. If this exaggerates Hume, then it serves to drive home how radical and dismissive his thought is and to what an extent we live and practice within a society’s underlying assumptions about time and reality.

  Worrying about dualism i
n a Humean universe certainly makes little sense—skepticism makes worrying about the nature of reality absurd. Yet we do so nonetheless: a movie series can be made about the nature of reality and make a huge profit, like The Matrix and its sequels. It remained for the Prussian thinker Immanuel Kant to pick up Hume’s gauntlet. Kant knew knowledge and self-conception could not be left in a Humean state, even as he found Hume’s views electrifying. He saw everything was at stake.

  Immanuel Kant was a man of such regularity that housewives in late-eighteenth-century Konigsberg in East Prussia set their clocks as he walked to and from the university. He might have remained a minor German thinker of impenetrable prose if he had never encountered Hume, for no one will claim Kant is readable like Hume or possesses Nietzsche’s aphoristic glitter.

  Kant realizes most people live perfectly well without worrying about what philosophers think, but he understands that a culture’s root assumptions about how we think and believe, conscious or not, ultimately condition what we do and fail to do individually and as a society. He also knows we cannot live in a skeptical universe: people never have and never will. We approach our lives with a commonsense assurance that our actions have varying merits and our experience is real, including time, space, and causality. Philosophies themselves are never disproved: their times come and go as our broad cultural experience and expectations alter and evolve. We no longer worry much about what troubled the medieval scholastics.

  In another sense, philosophy hardly ever alters. It has long been divided between those like Plato who argue our immediate experience is deceptive and true reality is something above and beyond or below it, and those like Aristotle and the practitioners of modern science who maintain that experience is indeed real, although there are formative forces working within it that careful discrimination can lay bare. Kant falls into the latter camp but gives it a spin that forms the modern cornerstone of our conception of reality. He is the essential thinker.

  Kant agrees with our commonsense approach to reality in the sense that he bluntly asserts all knowledge rises from experience. Thought may move into abstract realms trying to understand experience’s nature in outer reality (physics) or inner (psychology), but its root in the reality of immediate experience is essential.

  He also knows very well that even though we all take time, space, and causality for granted, there is no certain way to refute Hume. A revolution was called for in our understanding in order to move beyond Hume and make him not wrong but irrelevant. So Kant takes for granted the reality of the elements in dispute and shifts the ground of argument. He points out that having experience at all depends on the presence of our senses of time, space, causality, and the self. In other words, time, space, causality, and the sense of self, or ego as we might say, are a priori ordering principles of the mind.8

  We take this way of thinking for granted now. We know our bodies have evolved over millennia, so that much that characterized the australopithecine called Lucy is still with us, if much developed and refined. Some of us up on the literature know that despite all our evolution, the difference between our gene pool and a chimpanzee’s is minute. We know that embryonically we recapitulate an even longer period of evolution, at one point even possessing prototypical gills. Hearing and sight, we know, refine a sensory stream into the particular sounds and sights we “hear” and “see.” Kant lays the groundwork for thinking the mind comes into the world with a similar ordering structure.

  Saving time, space, and causality as forces of mental structuring that make experience comprehensible comes with a deep price, however. It plunges us even deeper into ourselves than Descartes: the “me vs. not me” split is profounder, thanks to Kant. We may all share these ordering characteristics of the mind and the sense of the reality of experience they make possible, but ultimately we can never know in itself what it is that gives rise to experience, what Kant calls the thing in itself. I can’t be you or, more simply, a table: I can only deal with how either impacts “me.” This is something so obvious my, and I’m sure your, reaction amounts to, so what? But this way of thinking isn’t obvious at all—it’s a prejudice of modern self-conception, and one with which I have said drama is profoundly at odds; in fact, part of drama’s enduring hold on us is its provision of another view of reality altogether.

  But we can highlight one beneficial consequence of this revolution in thinking, namely, that our experience of time is a mental activity, a construct. Good writers make creative use of this built-in sense of time’s fluidity, as we saw in Hamlet and On the Waterfront; poor ones use it prosaically and conventionally. Every dramatist as she or he begins a screenplay or, more widely, drama, establishes the reality of that story—where it is, who is there, what problem they have, and how that reality is handled temporally.

  Are we in for straightforward narration, as in Indiana Jones? Are we going to do a realistic narrative with key use of flashback, as in the classic chestnut Suddenly Last Summer? Or is time going to be almost hopelessly fluid, the protagonist mired in a life in which he or she can remember no more than the last twenty minutes, as in Memento? Are the characters of a given story delusively repeating themselves, blindly under the past’s sway, contrary to the apparent immediacy of the action? Is that why so often an event comes along to jar the heroine or hero, and so ourselves, into an awareness of error that also alters our sense of the nature of the time being experienced? All of these and more are possible because of the internal, fluid nature of time itself.

  Perhaps the deepest insight Kant yields of relevance here is that experience itself is creative: by the time we are aware of whatever is holding our attention at a given moment, it has already gone through a physiological filtering and, crucially, a mental structuring in order to be perceived as what it is in the first place. Imagine, briefly, if this was not true and we were mired in a flood of sensation from which only indifference and habit could save us. The question of abolishing the entertainment industry for a higher activity could never be asked: there would be no creative industry to abolish.

  Modern psychology is inconceivable without this Kantian perspective, however it refines Kant’s views. We accept, with many an argument over what it means, that the mind has conscious and unconscious parts, and perhaps possesses an intermediate subconscious area as well. Both Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian analytic psychology, for all their divergences, agree on certain characteristics of these parts of the mind. The conscious mind, which we commonly call the ego, deals with immediate experience and is, somehow, the seat of awareness. The unconscious mind is the home of dreams, instincts, all that is repressed, and other elements, and is only indirectly accessible to the ego. Freud wrote of dreams as the road into understanding the unconscious, and most psychotherapeutic practitioners agree to some extent.

  There are more profound differences between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind, however. As Freud and others soon noticed, conscious time works in a more or less linear way. Consciously, opposites are experienced as opposites and experience is governed by a sense of causality. All is different in the unconscious, where the opposite of one thing can stand for another, where distant and near are interchangeable and causal connections harder to find than hens’ teeth. In the unconscious, past and present are inseparable. The differences become immediately clear to all of us if we contrast our waking experience and assumptions to our dreams or nightmares.

  For the ego a thing is what it is, we are here and not there, now as opposed to then, and one thing follows another for determinative reasons. Kant rescues only this conscious, linear way of thinking from Hume: the a priori concepts are elements of the structuring of experience the ego imposes on our conscious experience to make it cohesive and usable.

  Carl Jung made an interesting hypothesis as he wrestled with the bizarre implications of quantum physics. He wondered if the fluid, unpredictable sense of time and space characterizing the unconscious wasn’t more in tune with reality than our conscious, linear presump
tions. Unconsciously we could be in more than one place at a time, or we could know what was too distant according to the conscious mind to know, because unconsciously it was not distant at all. Emerson puzzled over how Swedenborg in Sweden could accurately know about a fire at the moment it happened a continent away: within the Jungian hypothesis such knowledge becomes explainable. Reality is much more strange than we realize. Experiments separating paired electrons conducted at CERN in Europe discovered that what was done to one, although removed from the influence of the other, happened simultaneously to the other.9

  This brings us to one of the key elements of dramatic writing, for drama utilizes both senses of time: indeed, drama allows us to experience both senses of time knowingly. We may be caught up in a cause-and-effect sequence of action, but the time portrayed may be anything but straightforward. Drama is a fundamental managing of time through the management of the experience the action. Time and structure are inseparable in a screenplay because time and experience are inseparable, which means that dramatic writing structures the very experience it creates, just as our minds create our experience from the raw stream of sensations in reality.

  Time and Drama

  These aspects of time we struggle to give rational voice to and argue over philosophically and psychologically have been known to drama for its entirety. What seems peculiar in modern science is commonplace in a screenplay. Einstein noted that if we set off at light speed and come home a few years later, we will experience time conventionally yet find those we come back to far older. Recently some physicists have shown that we needn’t go off at light speed and return to have this experience:10 time can be experienced differently, depending on how one is positioned to view an event, as we saw with Hamlet in Hamlet and Terry in On the Waterfront earlier. Dramatic conflict always positions characters differently: one of its characteristics is the effort of protagonists to position themselves through the action so that their perspective on experience prevails for all. In so doing they invariably alter the nature of the time and experience characters think themselves within.