Tài liệu Writing the short film 3th - Part 29 doc

Ch14.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 186 15 THE HYPERDRAMA Hyperdrama is in many ways far from both melodrama and docudrama. Although it maintains the basic structural elements and places a conflictual main character against a plot, hyperdrama is the opposite of the tonal real- ism and factual realism so central to the other two meta-genres. In this sense, excessive exaggeration and fantasy are both key ingredients of the hyper- drama. Although the analogy to the fairy tale is too restrictive, the parallels are there—the predominance of elemental moral struggle. In “Little Red Riding Hood,” the danger is known, the wolf, and the moral struggle con- cerns respect for one’s elders. How different is the story in the Star Wars tril- ogy, where respect for one’s elders is modernized? In the trilogy, the ultimate elder, the father, no longer deserves respect. What is a child, in this case a son, to do? Although particular filmmakers have been affiliated with hyperdrama— Luis Buñuel throughout his career, from Spain to Mexico to France—the genre is more often affiliated with humorists, such as Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. Modern Times (1936) is a fable about industrialization and its explicit tendency to mechanize and dehumanize. The many set-pieces in the film have an internal logic, but they are so fabulist in their content that realism is actually beside the point. A similar quality infuses the majority of Chaplin’s work. At the other extreme, the films of the Marx Brothers dwell on the anarchy that befalls characters beset by life problems—making a living, getting along, organizing action toward a goal. All the characters’ goals are sub- verted by the anarchy that allows individual will to reign supreme. In the Marx Brothers’ films, such as Duck Soup, the truly moral thing to do is take care of yourself at the expense of others—a modern moral interpretation that has made their films popular to this day. 187 Ch15.qxd 9/27/04 6:11 PM Page 187 Hyperdrama seems to have taken on new life since Star Wars. Although filmmakers from the past like Fellini occasionally drifted into hyperdrama (Satyricon), today there are numerous filmmakers whose careers are associ- ated with it. They are notable filmmakers, too—Werner Herzog (Aguirre, Wrath of God), Steven Spielberg (E.T.), Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange), Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump), Emir Kusturica (Underground), Neil Jordan (Butcher Boy), and Lars Von Trier (Breaking the Waves). What is also notable is that particular genres—the action-adventure film, the horror film, and the melodrama—are all amended in hyperdrama to incorporate, above all, a moral lesson, which has been powerfully embraced by audiences. In order to understand why, we now turn to the general characteristics that distin- guish hyperdrama from other genres. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS The Centrality of the Moral Lesson At its heart, hyperdrama is a story told in service of a moral lesson. Character, plot, tone, all serve that overriding purpose. The moral lesson might be focused on personal behavior, for example. The main character in Buñuel’s The Criminal Mind of Archibald Cruz is convinced that he committed a crime (murder) as a child. We know that he did not. However, he conducts his life and relationships in an aura of guilt and in the expectation that if he becomes too close to anyone, in a love relationship for example, he will again become a murderer. The moral lesson of Buñuel’s film is that we are all prisoners of our childhood experiences, whether they are negative or positive. How use- ful or not this imprisonment is goes to the core of Buñuel’s goal in this film. The moral lesson can be driven by social or community standards, as in the case of Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump. By community standards, Forrest Gump is slow intellectually, and does not quite comprehend events around him. He passes through the Hippie Revolution, the Vietnam War, the political upheavals of the 1970s, and the rising hopes of the 1980s in America. All the while he is a constant—running toward or away from his peers, ingenuous, a Candide in a shark-infested society. In his naiveté, in his faith in people, and in his constancy he actually becomes “the one good person” who can change the lives of others. Here the moral lesson is that communities sometimes are too quick to label their members and thereby limit them and their contribu- tions. The moral lesson is to back away from labeling and limiting. The moral lesson can also be driven by political goals. The young boy who decides to stop growing, as a political protest to Nazism, in Volker Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum, is making a political statement. The immorality of the regime and its influence on personal codes of conduct is so pervasive 188 Writing the Short Film Ch15.qxd 9/27/04 6:11 PM Page 188 that the young boy’s moral decision about his own physical stature is both pragmatic and metaphorical. The ideology of Nazism, with its racism and its celebration of Aryanism, is visually assaulted by the main character’s stature. He is German, he is imperfect, and yet more moral than his peers. The engine at the heart of the hyperdrama is the moral lesson. This qual- ity distinguishes the form from other genres. Realism Is Not Important Although moral tales can be presented realistically, if hyperdrama is to be dramatically acceptable, realism actually gets in the way. Perhaps a more inclusive description of hyperdrama requires that the fantastic, positive or negative, be integral to the genre. This might mean the monster within, as in John Frankenheimer’s Seconds; it might mean the existence of magic, as in John Boorman’s Excalibur. It certainly embraces the active imagination, as in Jean Claude Lauzon’s Leolo and Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz. Skirting around the issue of realism is the notion that hyperdrama films are really children’s films, like The Lion King et al. This is not actually the case. Although the main character in Jordan’s The Company of Wolves is a teenager, the presentation is too violent for children. The film is more a cau- tionary tale for adults. The same is true for Boorman’s treatment of the Arthurian legend in Excalibur. Hyperdrama may include a film for children, such as The Wizard of Oz, but often the subject matter or its treatment is far too extreme or sophisticated for children. The key issue here is that realism plays no part in hyperdrama, whether the intended audience is children or adults. Perhaps it might be more accurate to consider hyperdrama as the genre that speaks to the child in all of us. Character Is the Vehicle In melodrama, the main character provides the direct means to identify with the outcome of the narrative. In hyperdrama, identification with the main character is less important. The main character is only the means or vehicle for the narrative. Consequently, we experience the character more as an observer rather than the stronger role of participant. We view the main char- acter’s alienation and depression in Frankenheimer’s Seconds, but do we feel deeply about his fate? In a melodrama we would; here we do not. We remain detached from Lauzon’s Leolo, a young boy so alienated from his family that he creates a new identity (Italian instead of French-Canadian) rather than be identified with it. As he says, “I dream and therefore I am not [a member of this family].” He is detached, and so too are we. The Hyperdrama 189 Ch15.qxd 9/27/04 6:11 PM Page 189 In Boorman’s Excalibur we observe Arthur, the idealistic and cuckolded king, but we do not identify with him. We position ourselves far more easily with Merlin the magician, a man above the worldly and otherworldly goings-on of Excalibur. We understand, and even like, the character of Forrest Gump, but do we identify with him? I think not. In hyperdrama, the main character is the important vehicle for the story, but no more than that. Plot Is Critical Consider the plot in hyperdrama as a lengthy journey wherein the main character will encounter many obstacles. The characters may succeed, or they may fail, but in one way or another, they will be transformed by the journey. In the Star Wars trilogy, the galaxy is the path that will take a son into a confrontation with his father. In Excalibur, the journey for Arthur is from a warring, barbaric origin (his birth) to an attempt to establish a just society (Camelot), where nobility and honor will supplant cruelty and betrayal. In Forrest Gump the journey is from childhood to parenthood, the twist here being the childlike (simple and pure) quality of the main charac- ter. In Kusturica’s Underground, the journey is from the violence of World War II Yugoslavia to the violence and irrationality, even madness, of the dis- solution of the country in the late 1980s—a 40-year descent from hell to a deeper hell. The journey is substantial, and therefore the amount of plot tends to be considerable. In a sense, the degree of plot in hyperdrama is so great that it makes the main character either a superhero or a “supervictim.” The Structure of the Plot Is Rife with Ritual Plot in hyperdrama tends to differ from the deployment of plot in the war film, which is typically realistic. Indeed, the plot in hyperdrama has a very different rhythm from plot in other genres; it is ritualistic and formal rather than realistic or familiar. Some examples will illustrate the point. Battles between good and evil, whether in Star Wars or Excalibur, tend to be for- mal—in Excalibur, they are orchestrated to the music of Wagner. Those bat- tles, in their details, veer from realism into a formalistic, archetypal struggle analogous to the gunfight in the classic Western and the conclud- ing series of executions in The Godfather Part I. These ritualized events make these plot points metaphors more than “historical” points in a narra- tive. It is those rituals that make the character a symbol, a superhero, or a supervictim, rather than a mere mortal. Ritual is very important in trans- forming the plot from realism to a symbolic journey—more complex, with 190 Writing the Short Film Ch15.qxd 9/27/04 6:11 PM Page 190 meaning yielded from what the journey represents, rather than its more lit- eral meaning. The need to seek out ritualized events also moves the story away from the individual, empathic course of events to the symbolic level, where the char- acter is the means rather than the end. Tone Is Formal and Fantastic The tone of hyperdrama has to embrace both the ritualistic and the fantas- tic—the opposite of realism. Even the poetic tone of the Western is insuffi- cient to capture the tone in hyperdrama. Hyperdrama is a form that simulates the children’s fairy tale, and as such it has to be filled with an excess (without the pejorative connotations of the word) that embraces the fantastic. “Operatic” is a description that comes to mind; “florid” is another. The key is essentially an over-the-top tone that allows a story to seem plau- sible in which anything goes. Ridley Scott’s Legend is a good example of this “anything goes” tone, and so are Boorman’s Excalibur, Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum, and Frankenheimer’s Seconds. In a sense, the tone of hyperdrama is as far from the realism of melodrama as you can imagine, plus a bit farther. Even the more formal examples of the style are over the top; they have a greater aura of ritual than of anarchy. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves exemplify this dimension of tone in hyperdrama. The Authorial Voice The authorial voice is quite muted in melodrama and overarching in docu- drama, but in hyperdrama it is powerful and passionate. After all, the goal of hyperdrama is the moral lesson, with the main character the vehicle for that lesson. In fact, the goal of the writer in hyperdrama is to convey that voice despite the viewer’s involvement with the story. That is not to say we do not care for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Rather we are much more aware of the writer’s views on childhood, play, and the importance of the imagi- nation. At its heart, the film is about the importance of hope in a child’s life; this is what we take away from the experience of The Wizard of Oz. The writer views himself or herself as a moralist, exploring moral choices and issuing cautions or recommendations for how we the audience should proceed in the world. This is above all the goal of the writer in hyperdrama. In order to do so, the writer looks for the most elemental means—simplicity of character, a basic conflict, and an imaginative journey, which together will make the point for the audience. The Hyperdrama 191 Ch15.qxd 9/27/04 6:11 PM Page 191 Although on one level this may seem pompous (when it does not work), in fact it signals the seriousness of the writer. Given the elemental nature of the lesson, the struggle must be imaginative to convey the moral lesson and to make the vivid connection so necessary for the child in all of us to relate to the story. Issues of the Day Because of the serious intent of the writer in hyperdrama, issues of the day have to be used in a particular way. An effective treatment is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Heaven and angels seemed out of place in the immediate postwar period. But today, after 50 years, the Capra film is shown continually and celebrated. What the film suggests is that hyperdrama has to treat issues of the day in a more urgent manner than does melodrama. The treatment implies that meaning would be lost with a superficial concern with current questions. The result is the introduction of an active, positive deity in It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s as if only the interventions of the gods can prevent the society, com- munity, or individual from drowning in the challenges of the day—in It’s a Wonderful Life, the cause being George Bailey’s overwhelming sense of responsibility to the community and his willingness to sacrifice his goals, even his life, in service of that sense of responsibility. MOTIFS—CASE STUDIES As in the case of the earlier genres, it is useful to look at a few case studies in order to understand hyperdrama in a fuller sense. The two case studies we will use are Volker Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum (1929) and John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1964). The Tin Drum The Main Character and His Goal Oscar is a young boy born at the end of World War I in the contested Baltic area of Danzig. Part German and part Polish, the zone is neither and both. These national tensions are represented in Oscar’s paternity. His mother loves two men, one Polish and the other German. One of the two is his real father, but Oscar doesn’t know which. Growing up in this confused familial and national environment, Oscar decides at age three to stop growing. He only gives up this goal after the end 192 Writing the Short Film Ch15.qxd 9/27/04 6:11 PM Page 192 . analogous to the gunfight in the classic Western and the conclud- ing series of executions in The Godfather Part I. These ritualized events make these plot. Lars Von Trier (Breaking the Waves). What is also notable is that particular genres the action-adventure film, the horror film, and the melodrama—are all