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Graham Justice’s A Children’s Story and Elke Rosthal’s My Name Is Rabbit are both short films that are melodramas.. The Dominance of Relationships as a Story Element There are genres tha

PART III

GENRES: FORMING

THE STORY

The term genre often conjures up images of gangsters, Western heroes, or

monsters In fact, the term is applicable to all stories Genre is nothing more than the form, the envelope that encloses the characters and structure of the story Of course, gangster films, Westerns, and horror films are particular genres But so are war films, biographical films, science fiction films, and a wide variety of comedies

In this section of the book, we are going to look at four meta-genres, those

that transcend the more specific genres and yet include them For example, every sports film, every gangster film, every screwball comedy has in it a layer of melodrama Although we will be using long films to contextualize the different genres, we will look only at meta-genres that are suitable to the short film These meta-genres embrace the particularities of the short film— its relation to the short story and to the photograph—as well as the link of the short film to nonnarrative forms such as poetry and abstract art

Now we will turn to those meta-genres and show how they will be useful

to your writing a short film

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THE MELODRAMA

Perhaps it’s best to start this chapter with a bit of fact and fiction about melo-drama First the fiction

Over the years, the term melodrama has increasingly taken on a negative

implication It is associated with soap opera, exclusively with romantic women’s stories, and with a dramatic device best characterized as exaggera-tion (as opposed to realism, or a story that is simply more believable) Although all of the above has a hint of truth, each is too narrow an approach

to melodrama and keeps us away from the usefulness of melodrama as a form Turning to the “truth” about melodrama, what then do we mean by the term? A good starting point is to suggest that melodrama at its most basic concerns itself with stories that are essentially realistic Within that general description, melodrama can be a story about ordinary people in ordinary sit-uations as well as a domestic story about a king (Lear) or a prince (Hamlet) Melodrama can be a relationship story of the privileged (James Cameron’s

Titanic) or of the famous (Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen) Melodramas can be

presented in the form of a novel (Judith Guest’s Ordinary People), a play (Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge), or as a film (Joseph Mankiewicz’s

All About Eve) It can be a long film or a short one Graham Justice’s A Children’s Story and Elke Rosthal’s My Name Is Rabbit are both short films that

are melodramas Both will be discussed later in this chapter

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MELODRAMA

Realistic People in Realistic Situations

Melodramas, unlike fables, are stories that may have happened, or that at least

in the mind of the audience, could have happened That means that the

super-natural and the fabulous are the subjects, or surroundings, of other genres In

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the melodrama, the story is about you or me, or our grandparents, or about someone we believe exists or did exist This recognizability affects every ele-ment of the melodrama—its characters, its shape, its tone Although not all forms of drama are accurate renderings of reality (rather, they are exagger-ated forms of reality), melodrama is essentially constrained by this notion of recognizability and consequently believability

To get more concrete, melodramas on television such as ER and Chicago

Hope focus on the lives of doctors and patients Hospital bureaucracy,

socie-tal problems, love affairs, and the struggle for life are the story elements of these successful series The characters are well defined, differentiated, and above all, very human Hope, fear, passion, commitment, power, and pow-erlessness define the characters and their goals But key to our involvement

is that we in the audience know these people; they are you and me

This quality of the melodrama is recognizable in the most highly

acclaimed films—Titanic, Shine, The English Patient The subject matter of

these recent successes echoes the famous melodramas from the past

Ambition is at the heart of All About Eve Family violence is the core issue of Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors The consequences of divorce are the sub-ject of Robert Benton’s Kramer vs Kramer Racism is the core of Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird, as it is of Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season.

The key elements all these films share are that they treat the core issue realistically, and the characters who inhabit the story are realistic

The Dominance of Relationships as a Story Element

There are genres that are dominated by plot—the action-adventure film, the Western, the war film Other genres, such as melodramas, are dominated by character What this means is that melodramas key in on relationships on a level that is both understandable and appealing to us

In George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1952), the main character deeply

explores two love relationships, one with a working-class coworker, the other with a privileged debutante These relationships dominate the story In

Peter Yates’s Breaking Away (1979), the main character explores his

relation-ships with his peers (a group of working-class mates who do not go to col-lege) and a relationship with a privileged college student In order to pursue this latter relationship, he pretends to be a college student as well To hide more deeply his true identity from her, he also pretends to be Italian In

Anthony Minghella’s Truly, Madly, Deeply, the main character struggles

between loyalty to a dead lover and the life-affirming urge to form a rela-tionship with a man who is alive and capable of a future Her struggle is very much between remaining rooted in a tragic past and risking a viable future

The character in Graham Justice’s A Children’s Story is a 10-year-old from a

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broken family Her mother doesn’t have time for her, and the bus driver who

does have time for her is accused of sexually abusing her.

The Nature of the Main Character’s Struggle

Melodramas are marked by a very particular struggle for the main character Essentially it can be characterized as the struggle of a powerless main charac-ter against the power structure I should add that the definition of powerless-ness has to be viewed in a very liberal way For example, a king may be on the surface very powerful, indeed all-powerful, but if he is as old as King Lear, he will be faced with antagonists who are young, vibrant, and confident that they are “the power structure.” In this sense, an aged King Lear is powerless

A clearer example is the young child in a family drama Relative to his adult parents, the child is powerless So too is a woman in a culture where

male dominance prevails Thus, a story like Mike Nichols’s Working Girl is

one of a bright woman trying to make her way in a workplace that is a male power structure To complicate this story, Nichols places a high-status woman at the head of the company The main character’s working-class roots make class the overlay to the female/male power grid Consequently the female, working-class main character has two layers of the power struc-ture to contend with

Whether the main character is dealing with gender, class, race, or age, the key element to the melodrama is that the main character’s struggle is always against the power structure In genres such as the action-adventure and the situation comedy, the plot enables the main character to achieve his or her

goal In the melodrama, the plot is set against the main character and his or

her goal

In Breaking Away, the bicycle race that concludes the film offers the main

character a chance to win the race, but in doing so he loses the college girl with whom he was infatuated To win he has to drop his pretense No longer

a foreign student, no longer a college student, he acknowledges his working-class self He wins the race (plot) but loses the girl (goal)

The Adaptability of Melodrama

Although melodrama tends to be a character-driven proceeding, whether

without plot (Truly, Madly, Deeply) or with plot (A Place in the Sun), it is not

rigidly so The form can be adapted if the story benefits Specific examples will illustrate

George Miller’s Lorenzo’s Oil is a melodrama in which the mother and to

an extent, the father, initially believe they are powerless when their son is The Melodrama 155

afflicted with a fatal illness Rather than accept his fate, they fight the med-ical establishment (power structure), which views their son as raw material for scientific experiments—experiments that will enhance the doctors’ repu-tations but not save the son The parents decide to explore science for

solu-tions to halt the disease, and in the end they are successful Lorenzo’s Oil uses

plot in the way the thriller does—to victimize By eluding the victimization

of the plot (the disease), mother and father are victorious, and they save their

son (their goal) In Lorenzo’s Oil, the adaptation of the structure of the thriller

makes this melodrama unusual and powerful

The same adaptation of plot from the thriller form makes Christopher

Morahan’s Paper Mask an unusual melodrama The main character’s goal is to

pretend that he is a doctor The threat this poses to his patients, his friends, and

to himself creates the tension that relentlessly moves us through this story

Melodrama Explores Issues That Are More Psychologically

Complex Than Other Genres

Because the melodrama is essentially character-driven, and because all sto-ries require us to form a relationship with the main character, it is critical that

we understand and identify with the issues that character faces This means that the issue must be primal, not peripheral Consequently, it has to be an issue that touches us quickly and deeply, one that is close to each of us Family relations are complex, and they are the key to many of the critical issues in melodrama Acceptance and rejection within the family, particu-larly between parent and child, is at the heart of many of the great

melodra-mas—Elia Kazan’s East of Eden, Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata The

problems of commitment and autonomy are at the core of melodramas like

these, which focus on problematic marriages: Irvin Kershner’s Loving, Paul Mazursky’s Enemies: A Love Story An identity crisis is at the heart of Yates’s

Breaking Away and of Steve Kloves’s The Fabulous Baker Boys Conformity vs.

individuality is the central issue in Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the

Cuckoo’s Nest and Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner Issues of loss, gender, sexuality, ambition, jealousy, envy, all are

prime subject matter for the melodrama

What is important here is that these issues not be treated casually The more deeply they lie in the heart of the story, the more likely we are to deeply engage with that story

Melodrama Is Adaptable to the Issues of the Day

One of the most notable qualities about melodrama is how the form can be used to embrace the key social, economic, and political issues of the day

156 Writing the Short Film

When the downturn of coal mining was a central concern of British society,

films such as John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley and Carol Reed’s The

Stars Look Down were produced Today, sexual abuse and incest, particularly

concerning children, is a powerful issue Films like John Smith’s The Boys of

St Vincent, Angelica Huston’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Tod Solondz’s Happiness, all attest to the power of this issue in the public consciousness.

Women’s issues, children’s issues, education, religion, morality, amorality, immorality, the lives of politicians, priests, pundits—if they are issues of the day, they quickly become the material of melodrama

This impulse is most pronounced in television—both series television and

TV movies One of the reasons melodrama is so gripping for audiences is this very malleability

Melodrama Is the Fundamental Layer of Many Genres

A biography of T E Lawrence or Jake La Motta, or an epic screen treatment

of the religious/secular struggle of Thomas More or of the political/personal struggle of Yuri Zhivago—each of these stories has a layer of melodrama In fact, it is the layer of melodrama that humanizes and dramatizes the story

To be more specific, the plot of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is the story of

the Arab revolt against its Turkish rulers Lawrence led the revolt, essentially a sideshow in the larger world war of 1914–18 The progress of that revolt and its

outcome is the plot of Lawrence of Arabia The melodrama layer is the story of

T E Lawrence, bastard of a British nobleman, a man who sees himself as an outsider in British society This outsider affiliates himself with a group of other

outsiders, Bedouin tribesmen He unites them and is united with them, one

out-sider leading other outout-siders against the power structure (the Ottoman Turks and the British, two distinct empires) Of course, he wins the battle but loses the war: the Arabs merely change masters, from the Turks to the British, and Lawrence has been their instrument In a sense the melodrama is the story of Lawrence’s search for a new identity He finds a new identity, but sadly it lasts only for a short while Once the revolt is over, there is no place for Lawrence

He must return to his own again, to be an outsider (and soon die)

This same pattern shapes David Lean’s Dr Zhivago The plot is the

Russian Revolution of 1917 and how its success was the ruination of the individual and of the family unit The melodramatic layer of the film cen-ters around Yuri Zhivago’s relationships; the Revolution always under-mines the only thing he truly values, love—embodied in an intimate relationship first with his wife, then with Lara In the end the personal losses and sacrifices are so great that Yuri is literally heartsick Does he die

of a heart attack or of a broken heart? Choose whichever interpretation you wish The key issue here is that melodrama is the fundamental layer

in biographical, sports, war, gangster, and epic films

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