Tài liệu Writing the short film 3th - Part 30 doc

of World War II, with his parents dead and the fate of Danzig decided (it is captured by the Russians and becomes part of Soviet-occupied Poland). Now 20, Oscar begins to grow again. The goal is made more plausible by giving Oscar other eccentricities and characteristics. For instance, he always carries his drum. The drum, and his scream, which shatters glass, are the two means Oscar chooses to use to communicate his feelings. The Antagonist There is no single antagonist in The Tin Drum. If there is any force that plays this role it would be nationalism, specifically the Nazi form, which in its aggressiveness destroyed countless people, relationships, and commu- nities. The focus in The Tin Drum is on one family, on its destruction in the period when its progeny, Oscar, chose stunted growth as a defense against Nazism. Oscar is not a political character, and his story unfolds in a reactive, emo- tional, and visceral fashion. Consequently, the antagonist—nationalism— manifests itself only in the relationships within Oscar’s family and in the fate of those who have been kind to him—a Jew, a female Italian dwarf—and of course in the fate of the three people who he considers to be his parents. In this sense the antagonist is an atmosphere, a distant political entity, rather than a single person. The Catalytic Event Oscar’s birth is the catalytic event of the narrative. In the birth canal, he appears already fully formed, with knowing eyes, the same size he will be when he makes his fateful decision to stop growing. He is thus presented at birth with a sense of seeing and knowing that one does not associate with a newborn child. This presentation makes credible the act of will that marks the end of his growth. It also positions Oscar as the perennial observer rather than participant in the events that shape his life. Also, because he is pre- sented as a passive observer—in essence the position of the child in society— we observe events as he does, with an unusual detachment given the nature of the events that will follow. The Resolution The war ends. His German father chokes on his Nazi Party pin while try- ing to hide it from a Russian. At the burial, Oscar consciously decides that he will resume physical growth. His stepbrother throws a stone, which strikes him. He falls on his father’s grave, and he begins to grow once more. The Hyperdrama 193 Ch15.qxd 9/27/04 6:11 PM Page 193 The Dramatic Arc The journey that Oscar travels spans the 20-year history following World War I. It is a political history wherein Danzig is made a free state, neither German nor Polish. It is an uneasy state, because each minority identifies with its ethnic parent, whether it be Germany or Poland. As events shift and German nationalism becomes a force, brownshirts and swastikas begin to proliferate, and brutality toward Jews grows. War comes on September 1, 1939; the battle for the post office becomes the microcosm for German aggression and Polish resistance. The town is quickly occupied. The Germanization of Danzig is rapid, and the rise and fall of German fortunes of war chronicle the history of the town. Finally, the Russians overrun the city, and the war is over. This is the plot of The Tin Drum. The background story is the chronicle of Oscar’s relationships with his grandmother, his mother, the two fathers, a housekeeper, and finally a troupe of midgets and dwarfs. Only among the dwarfs does Oscar have any- thing approximating a peer, an adult relationship. In all other cases, he is the child reacting against the cruelty and unsettling qualities of the adult world. The relationships never progress very far; they are always inhibited or ended by the progress of the plot. The Narrative Style The Tin Drum has a great deal of plot, as one would expect in a hyperdrama. But it also has many character scenes. The character layer, however, is never developmental. Oscar is principally the child, and the adults seem transient in his world; they exit, or they die. Only the grandmother provides any con- tinuity for Oscar. The Narrative Shape Time is not a critical factor in this story. Because the character is resistant to the passage of time (he stops his own physical growth), physical time is in fact suspended as an element in his life. The story itself follows 45 years of the history of one family in this Baltic region. Tone “Fantastic” is the first observation one makes about the tone of this film. Events are extreme. A woman hides a man from the police beneath her expansive four skirts. While she is being questioned by the police in the mid- dle of a potato field, he impregnates her. Later a birth canal is observed by the child who is to be born. Three years later, the main character decides to grow no longer. All these events are fantastic, beyond belief, and yet together they set the moral parameters of this story. 194 Writing the Short Film Ch15.qxd 9/27/04 6:11 PM Page 194 Later the fantastic is joined by the macabre. Oscar’s parents observe eels being caught in the sea. A dead horse’s head yields the fresh eels that will be dinner. The wife is revolted, and yet later she kills herself by overeating fish. Even later, the father is killed by choking on his Nazi Party pin—he had tried to hide it from a Russian by swallowing it. All these events are symbols of the relationship of life to death in the period of the Third Reich. In the end, all the death symbols—the swastika, the bodies of men and animals—prove to be toxic. They kill all of Oscar’s parents. Seconds The Main Character and His Goal The main character in the film Seconds is Arthur Hamilton, a 55-year-old banker who no longer finds meaning in his life. Although married, father of a married daughter and a bank vice president, Arthur Hamilton has no enthusiasm for life. As he says about his wife, “We get along.” That state- ment captures his sense of his life. His goal is to change, to be “reborn.” The Antagonist The company that promises to recreate Arthur Hamilton and to totally alter his life is the antagonist. Although it undertakes extensive plastic surgery and physically relocates him from Westchester to Malibu, the company in fact completely controls his life. The Catalytic Event Arthur receives a call from an old friend, who has himself been reborn. This contact begins the process of Arthur’s rebirth. The Resolution Arthur decides he wants to go back to his old life and so informs the com- pany. Furthermore, he will not cooperate with them to find a replacement for himself. The company destroys Arthur, now called Tony Wilson, using his body to help another reborn client. The Dramatic Arc The journey that Arthur Hamilton, 55-year-old banker, will take is to be transformed into a 35-year-old artist, Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), living in Malibu. Much effort is put into acclimatizing Arthur/Tony to his new life. The Hyperdrama 195 Ch15.qxd 9/27/04 6:11 PM Page 195 Many company employees and other “reborns” participate. When Arthur/Tony finally feels comfortable in his new life (he has the love of a woman, a relationship), a drunken indiscretion about who he really is breaks the facade. His lover in fact is an employee of the company. His neighbors are all linked to the company. Totally disillusioned, Arthur/Tony returns to Westchester. There he visits his wife under the pretext of securing one of her husband’s paintings. There he discovers what his wife thought of her hus- band—that he had been dead long before he was the victim of a hotel fire (the ruse to cover his transformation from Arthur Hamilton to Tony Wilson). Now he understands—it was not his age; it was his attitude toward life. He wants to go back. He is returned to the company in New York, but he is non- cooperative. He does not know it, but his fate is sealed—he no longer has any value for the company. It kills him. The Narrative Style Seconds is plot-driven, focusing on Arthur Hamilton’s transformation into Tony Wilson and then his desire to become Arthur Hamilton again. Throughout, he is a victim of his own alienation and his unhappiness. When he wakes up, it’s too late. The character layer of this story is principally the failed relationship with his wife and the developed relationship with a younger woman in Malibu. Only later does he discover she is an employee of the company. The two male relationships that are explored are with his college friend Charlie, the reborn who brings him to the company, and with the paternalistic head of the company. In both cases, Arthur is naive enough to believe what they say. The character layer throughout demonstrates Arthur’s poor judgment. He keeps making bad choices. Only his wife seems genuine, strong, and nonmanipulative—and he walks away from that relationship in order to be reborn. Together these two layers portray how alienation can promote poor judg- ment, and in the end, self-destruction. Tone The tone of Seconds is extreme. Both the urban and rural settings focus on isolation and separateness. Also there is paranoia. Arthur is pursued in Grand Central Station by a faceless man. When he first visits the company, he finds himself in a slaughterhouse. Critical moments are ritualized— the operation, the grape-crushing sequence in Santa Barbara where Arthur/Tony loses his inhibitions, the drunken scene at his home in Malibu. All these scenes are rituals, meant to mark Arthur/Tony’s rites of passage. Key in both environments (his past life setting and his new life setting), is the fact that the tone is excessive and far from realism. 196 Writing the Short Film Ch15.qxd 9/27/04 6:11 PM Page 196 WRITING DEVICES There are many stories that can be framed in terms of a moral tale, but not every story can carry the excessive elements of hyperdrama. Stories that are factual, or too recent in terms of their relationship to a specific historical or cultural event, are difficult to render as hyperdrama. This, however, still leaves many options. Stories about children often lend themselves to the moral tale. They also lend themselves to excess and fan- tasy. A good example here is Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies. Novels such as Orwell’s Animal Farm have their filmic equivalent in George Miller’s Babe in the City. Stories about animals, such as the above mentioned, are naturals for hyperdrama. So too are stories set as fables. Even a film like Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait becomes hyperdrama when issues of birth, rebirth, angels, and Heaven become active elements of the narrative. Finally, stories about mythical figures or periods, such as Vincent Ward’s The Navigator, work well as hyperdrama. In these stories, the characters are either archetypal or they are metaphors serving the moral tale that is at the heart of the narrative. The Use of Character and a Goal Character in hyperdrama has to be a vehicle for the story rather than a source of identification for the viewer. We have to stand apart from the character. Consequently, it’s not important that we care deeply about the character. But it is important for us to understand the character and why the individual does what he or she chooses to do. The vigor of the character’s striving toward a goal is very important in hyperdrama. If Little Red Riding Hood is not eager to go through that for- est, her story and its moral will simply have no impact. The characters and their goals in hyperdrama are internally far more complex than they seem to be on the surface. That passion, that commitment to a goal, is vital. Without it, the resistance to that goal offered by the plot will not be enough to qual- ify the main character as a superhero or a supervictim. The goal is key, but again, identification—recognizability as we find it in melodrama—is not necessary and may even prove counterproductive in hyperdrama. The Use of Plot to Create a Superhero Moral tales and fables function on a mythic level. In this respect, writers and teachers of scriptwriting who ascribe to Joseph Campbell’s ideas about sto- rytelling are right. 1 A main character goes on a mythic journey. He or she faces many challenges and setbacks. The journey, once completed, makes The Hyperdrama 197 Ch15.qxd 9/27/04 6:11 PM Page 197 him or her a hero. In hyperdrama, this heroic position is in the end a byprod- uct of the scale of the plot. Whether that plot is a war, a difficult journey, or other challenge, the ritualization of the confrontations with the opposing forces makes the character a hero. Think of Mad Max in George Miller’s three “Mad Max” films. 2 Think also of the everyman coffee salesman in Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man (1974). The larger the scale of the plot, the more likely we will experience the main character in a way that is in keeping with the genre’s expectations. The Proximity of Hyperdrama to Children’s Fairy Tales If you think of the story form of the fairy tale, it will help you fashion your story as hyperdrama. The story is narrated by someone. It is told as a cautionary tale, a life les- son, so that the child will see in the fate of the character a warning to him or herself. But that tale has to be told in such a way as to grip the child’s imag- ination. Also, the resolution has to contain the message, the moral, and the reason for the telling. Always, the teller, the narrator, is outside the story (as we are), looking in. This is the approach so often used in children’s fairy tales, and it is useful in conceptualizing a story in the hyperdrama form. Think for a moment of children’s fairy tales—the stories of the Brothers Grimm, of Hans Christian Andersen, of noses that grow long when lies are told, of children too innocent or naive not to follow a pied piper—and you have the driving force behind the hyperdrama. The fairy tale is a life lesson, a moral tale wherein the moral is the driving force for the telling of the story. A narrator or storyteller takes us through the cautionary tale. The Structure The search for structure finds a shape in the moral lesson that is being taught. The story of Excalibur, the Arthur–Guinevere–Lancelot story, has been told quite often. The same story has been told as a love story (Cornel Wilde’s The Sword of Lancelot), as an action-adventure (David Zucker’s First Knight), and as a musical (Joshua Logan’s Camelot). John Boorman’s treatment of the story as hyperdrama arises out of a structural choice to make the story a cautionary tale of idealism (of what might be in the future, and of more primitive values—vanity, violence, impulse). Here Camelot is an ideal, albeit temporary, created by King Arthur. His ideal kingdom is destroyed by his rage and jealousy at Lancelot and Guinevere, and his consequent loss of faith in his original goals. The story is really 198 Writing the Short Film Ch15.qxd 9/27/04 6:11 PM Page 198 about the importance of an ideal in the forging of a more secure future. It is also about the importance of leadership. As first Merlin and later Parsifal remind Arthur, the king and the land are one. If the king is strong, idealistic, and wise, the land will flourish. If he is lost, the land will be lost. The moral lesson to be conveyed will help you form the structure for your story. The Catalytic Event Where you start your story will help you elevate your main character to the status the genre needs. The intervention of angels and Heaven in George Bailey’s attempted suicide is the catalytic event that elevates Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life to the importance and meaning the genre requires. In Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, the wedding of a character disdained by the entire community sets the boundaries for the meaning of sacrificial love the wife has for her crippled husband. The main character is a limited, low-status person, and yet her love heals her husband. The catalytic event provides the narrative with the elasticity it needs to make the moral lesson effective. Without it, the narrative would flatten or be too realistic for hyperdrama. Tone There is no question, you need to create an over-the-top tone for this form or genre. In this form, the authorial voice is not gentle; it screams a warn- ing to the viewer. Therefore, the tone you should seek is one of excess; nat- uralism is what you should work against. Zemeckis uses irony in Forrest Gump, Kusterica uses absurdity in Underground, and Buñuel uses both absurdity and irony in The Criminal Mind of Archibald Cruz. This is where you have to take your story if it is to take advantage of the strengths of hyperdrama. THE SHORT FILM The short film is actually a more natural form for hyperdrama. The long film, with its complexity of character and relationships, is more immediately com- patible with realism. The short film, with its relationship to the short story, the poem, the photograph, and the painting, is a more metaphorical form, and thus it adapts easily to hyperdrama. The Hyperdrama 199 Ch15.qxd 9/27/04 6:11 PM Page 199 . together they set the moral parameters of this story. 194 Writing the Short Film Ch15.qxd 9/27/04 6:11 PM Page 194 Later the fantastic is joined by the. imag- ination. Also, the resolution has to contain the message, the moral, and the reason for the telling. Always, the teller, the narrator, is outside the