MOTIFS To talk more specifically about melodrama, it is useful to look at eight motifs that characterize the genre. Those motifs are 1 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 158 Writing the Short Film Ch13.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 158 spiritual—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 character, but we in the audience have to wonder whether the father’s claim has merit. The Melodrama 159 Ch13.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 159 The 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. 160 Writing the Short Film Ch13.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 160 Triangulation Triangulation 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 relationship 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, untruthful, manipulative mate, while Graham is truthful, 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, The Melodrama 161 Ch13.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 161 but 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 162 Writing the Short Film Ch13.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 162 open-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 The Melodrama 163 Ch13.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 163 proceed 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 option for resolution 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 catalytic 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 164 Writing the Short Film Ch13.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 164 . (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. 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