Those motifs are1 Main character and goal Antagonist Catalytic event Resolution Dramatic arc Narrative style Narrative shape Tone In order to illustrate how the motifs operate, we will l
Trang 1To talk more specifically about melodrama, it is useful to look at eight motifs that characterize the genre Those motifs are1
Main character and goal
Antagonist
Catalytic event
Resolution
Dramatic arc
Narrative style
Narrative shape
Tone
In order to illustrate how the motifs operate, we will look at two case studies—
Antonia Bird’s Priest (1995), and Mike Van Diem’s Character (1994).
Priest
The main character and his dramatic action or goal The main character is a
young priest, new to a poor parish His goal is to be the spiritual leader of the community What he does not realize is that in a poor community, life is practical and difficult There is little room here for spirituality
The antagonist The young priest is his own antagonist He struggles
with his issues as a man—sexuality and gender As a gay man he struggles not only with the issue of celibacy but also with anti-gay sentiment
The catalytic event The young priest comes to this new community The dramatic arc The dramatic arc in a melodrama is always an interior
journey The young priest learns how to be a better priest by acknowledging that he is also a man
The resolution The priest accepts himself, and the community accepts
him
The narrative style This particular story has both a plot (foreground
story) and a character layer (background story) The background story gravitates around the issue of the priest as spiritual leader and
of the man as a sexual being The presence of another “sexual” priest
in the same parish suggests sexuality is a problem for more than one Catholic priest in the Parish The other priest, however, is hetero-sexual That priest is also socially and politically active in the community, whereas the main character is concerned with the
Trang 2spiritual—as opposed to the everyday—life of his parishioners Therein, he differs from the other priest again The plot relates to the incest revealed to the main character in the confessional What is his responsibility to the young girl and to her family? In the end he acts
on behalf of the girl, against her father
The narrative shape The factor of time is not inherently critical in the
melodrama
The tone The tone is realistic, as expected in the melodrama.
To offer a final comment on Priest, the priest on first appearance is a
power-ful figure in the community By making him a gay priest, the screenwriter makes him one of the powerless minority who struggle for power in society Making him sexually active also presents him as a character in the minority
in the power structure of the Catholic Church
Character
The main character and his dramatic action or goal This story, set in 1920s
Rotterdam, Holland, is a coming-of-age story of a young man His goal is to survive an upbringing of deprivation and suffering
The antagonist The antagonist of the story is the biological father, a man
who never acknowledges the main character When the young man needs his help, he offers it only under very punitive conditions
The catalytic event The catalytic event is the rape of a maid (the main
character’s mother) When she discovers she is pregnant, she leaves the employ of the rapist, the main character’s birth father
The dramatic arc The journey of this main character is very challenging.
Both parents are cold emotionally, and his father is cruel as well His journey is one of survival He does survive his upbringing, but
he pays a very high personal price
The narrative style The background story is dominated by the main
character’s relationships with his parents Fortunately, the plot enables him to overcome the negative qualities of his parents The plot is about self-improvement and education Initially he teaches himself English Later he trains to become a lawyer Although the path to self-improvement means reliance on his father for money, the main character does manage to become a lawyer At this point
he tells his father that they will never see each other again He no longer needs him The father claims to have made the main charac-ter the success he is This idea enrages the main characcharac-ter, but we
in the audience have to wonder whether the father’s claim has merit
Trang 3The narrative shape Mike Van Diem chooses to frame his story with a
murder (of the father) and an interrogation of the son The story is then narrated by the son The story covers the preceding 30 years
The tone The tone of the story is realistic, in keeping with the genre.
A note on Character: by choosing a murder story-frame, Van Diem catapults
us into the story The strategy energizes what would otherwise have fol-lowed a slower chronological structure
WRITING DEVICES
There are a number of requisite mechanics that will enable you to shape your story as a melodrama The analogy here is to a car or to a building Both have
to be functional; both can be creative But without those mechanics in place,
neither will be either functional or creative So it is with your story—and so
we turn to those writing devices that are the mechanics of the melodrama
Your Character Should Have an Objective
A character without a goal, a passive character, is rudderless, subject to the goals of others and to the plot Although a melodrama can work with a
pas-sive character (Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho are examples), for the most part melodramas
work best when the main character is active and goal-directed
What is an adequate goal for a character in a melodrama? A somewhat negative example will illustrate the need for a purposeful goal The main
character in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show wants to escape his life as an
on-air telecast The problem here is that the character realizes this goal only after
a third of the story has elapsed; once he articulates that goal, he spends the balance of the story achieving it Once the conceit of his world—his life is a 24-hour-a-day television show, complete with the artifice of a set and cast that pretends to be his town, his house, and his wife—is unmasked, there are
no more barriers of understanding for the character to achieve Only the act
of achieving freedom will do We watch him achieve his freedom, as earlier
we watched the artifice of his life The problem here is that the goal, once acknowledged, is too flat in its struggle with the plot (his life as television) His is not a journey toward understanding, but rather, having understood the true nature of his life, he wants to escape that life
This main character has a goal, but the goal results in too flat a story Either the goal or the plot has to give amplitude to the story What we find is help-ful in giving amplitude to a story is the mechanical device of triangulation
Trang 4Triangulation is a device whereby the main character explores two opposing
rela-tionships Those two relationships can be viewed as the two opposing choices They can also be viewed as two opposing means for the character to achieve his or her goal In either case, the exploration of these two relationships gives the melodrama amplitude It prevents the drama from flattening out, as occurs
in Leaving Las Vegas and in The Truman Show described above.
To illustrate how triangulation works, we turn first to a simple structure
(no plot)—the film Truly, Madly, Deeply A woman has lost her lover Her goal
is to refuse to accept the loss, to hold onto her grief The two relationships that are fully explored in this particular triangulation are the woman’s rela-tionship with her dead lover (he comes back as a ghost) and her relarela-tionship with a new suitor The first relationship maintains her goal, and the second challenges it In the end she opts for a live lover and a future, and it is the ghost that in the end says goodbye to her
It is possible in the melodrama to have more than one triangle, although one triangle will always take primacy over the others The presence of more than one triangle simply complicates the story further This is especially
important in Sex, Lies, and Videotape, a melodrama where the main character
is passive, without a goal until the last third of the story
The primary triangle is between the main character, her husband, and the guest (her husband’s friend Graham) Her husband represents the unfaith-ful, untruthunfaith-ful, manipulative mate, while Graham is truthunfaith-ful, interested in her, and not at all manipulative These two male-mate choices represent the primary triangle in the story A secondary triangle is the triangle of the main character, her husband, and her sister Both her husband and her sister are betraying her, and it is the resolution of this triangle that prompts the main character finally to act: she discovers that the two have been having an affair and have been so bold as to make love in her bedroom A third triangle is the main character, her sister, and the male guest It is the experience of being videotaped by him while she talks about sex that prompts the sister to reject the husband, and eventually prompts the main character to choose (via videotape) to awaken sexually and to leave her husband for the guest These three triangulations form the actual progression, the train tracks of the jour-ney of the main character
Use Plot Against the Main Character’s Goal
Just as triangulation provides a method to build the dramatic arc of the story, plot can be used to make the climb steeper and consequently more gripping
It should be said again that it is not necessary for a melodrama to have a plot,
Trang 5but if you choose to use plot, it should be used in a particular fashion In the
melodrama, plot tends to be used against the character and his or her goal.
The flip side to this is the situation comedy, where the plot is used in the
opposite way, to enable the character to achieve his or her goal Having stated
the ground rule, we should also mention that inventive writers alter those
rules A case in point is Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors Allen mixes
both melodrama and situation comedy in these tales of two characters—an ophthalmologist and a documentary filmmaker The goal of the main char-acter in the melodrama is to maintain his life situation and status His mis-tress threatens to upset the status quo by telling all to his wife The plot is the murder of his mistress In classic melodrama, the plot should lead to the downfall of the main character Instead, in this story the plot enables the character to achieve his goal
The second plot line about the documentary filmmaker is a situation com-edy The character’s goal is to produce ethically worthy documentary films that will give him the status he feels he deserves Unhappy in his marriage, the character is offered the opportunity to produce a TV biography of a Hollywood TV producer (his wife’s brother) This plot should bring him the money to make his worthy projects It also introduces him to a woman he believes will elevate him out of his unhappy marriage Again, Allen upsets our expectations The plot undermines the filmmaker, dooming him to failure on all fronts Indeed, even his ethical goal of a worthy production is thwarted, by the death of his subject by suicide
Woody Allen’s film is unusual; typically, genre expectations are met as described earlier in this chapter Plot should work against the main charac-ter and his goal Two additional examples will illustrate how this works
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights is the story of a man whose goal is to
gain recognition or, in a more modest sense, acknowledgment that he has value in his family and in his community The plot that he looks to as the opportunity for recognition is a career as a star in pornographic movies Although initially his star rises, and his career could be deemed a success, he quickly falls, and the plot becomes the means to his devaluation In the end
he is a victim of the plot
The tension between the character’s goal and the plot can be as important
as the triangulation in making the melodrama dramatically viable
Resolution or No Resolution
Generally, melodramas resolve when the main character either achieves his
or her goal or fails to do so For the majority of melodramas, the issue of res-olution has been the end point of the story However, a number of story-tellers have begun to opt for no resolution—or to put it another way, for an
Trang 6open-ended ending Films such as Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It and Atom Egoyan’s Exotica have opted for a two-act structure, essentially relinquishing
the resolution that comes in the third act of a story
The choice, then, that the contemporary writer faces is whether to follow the linear progression of story to its resolution or to opt for an open-ended conclu-sion The choice has serious consequences for the reception of the film Clearly, the majority of audiences are accustomed to resolution; they expect
it, and in certain ways they are comforted by it The absence of resolution can
be disquieting, even troubling
If you choose to avoid resolution, it will be helpful if the dialogue and characterizations are especially vigorous The more you can do to engage your audience, the greater their tolerance for the journey of the film—in this case a journey without resolution
Use Structure to Meet the Needs of the Story
Structure is the servant of story, although much that has been written about screenwriting these past two decades might lead you to believe otherwise The key to story is character—its nature, its dilemma, and above all its goal If you know these, the structural options become clearer In melo-drama, the key structural layer is the character layer, the background story
If you use this layer and triangulate the key relationships quite early in the story, you will have used structure well Act I has other requirements as well—to join the story at a critical moment, for one Secondly, you need a turning point at the end of the first act, to open up the story to begin the main character’s journey—and yes, if there is a plot, it is often also intro-duced in Act I
Having introduced the notion of plot, we should reiterate the idea that melodrama can proceed without a layer of plot If, however, you opt for plot,
it should be introduced sooner rather than later
Act II, the act of confrontation and struggle, is often where relationships are explored most fully By the end of the act, the main character has made a choice Act III follows the character moving toward that choice In Act III, both plot and the background story are resolved
THE SHORT FILM
As stated earlier, the broad qualities of the melodrama are most clearly apparent in the long film Many of these qualities are also present in the short film There are, however, key areas where the mechanics are different, and it is to those differences that we now turn The most useful way to
Trang 7proceed to highlight those differences is to describe them and then illustrate how they manifest themselves in a short film
Main Character and Goal
In the short film, the goal must be more urgent than in a long one The short film is all about compression There is no time to explore relationships in as elaborate a manner as is appropriate in the long film Making the goal of the main character more urgent means that there is less time for characteriza-tion A choice must be made quickly in the short film Consequently, charac-terizations of the secondary relationships are simple, even stereotypical More time is thus available to experience the main character’s reaching for his or her goal
Structure
There are numerous differences between the long and short film in terms of structure Most obviously, the proportion of Acts I, II, and III, generally held
to be 1:2:1 (30 minutes to 60 minutes to 30 minutes), simply does not apply Act I is more likely to be 5 minutes in a short film There will be no middle act: there will be Act II or III, depending on the writer’s choice of a resolu-tion or an open ending If the opresolu-tion for resoluresolu-tion is taken, the structure is Act I–Act III, in feature-film terms If a more open-ended script is the choice, the structure looks like Act I–Act II of the feature film
There are other differences In Act I in the feature film there are key points—the critical moment (where you join the story), the catalytic event (where you kick-start the story), and the first major plot point (at the end of Act I) In the short film, all three can be the same; at the very least, the cat-alytic event and the first major plot point are the same The catcat-alytic event can occur 5 minutes into the script, at which point the first act is over In the next act, we rush to resolution (Act III), or we explore options (Act II) Then the script ends, with a resolution or not The second act, whether it be an Act
II or Act III, is quite lengthy relative to the first act
Plot
The deployment of plot in a short film is in one way similar to the presenta-tion in the long film: a short melodrama can proceed without a plot and
remain effective If, however, you choose to deploy plot, its utilization leads