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TONE
Tone is the visual and verbal detail that directs us toward meaning. The writer and director also use those details to direct us toward the meaning they intended. How that direction is conveyed to us in a larger sense has to do with the use of character, structure, and form. Both the micro and macro decisions that influence meaning is the subject matter of this chapter.
In order to look at the issue in a way that will maximize our sense of it, let's break down tone to two functions—credibility and editorial direction. I will continue to refer to the credibility function as tone, but I'll call the function of editorial direction voice—the voice of the author of the screen story.
What captures tone with a broad brush is its relationship to genre. Let's relate original intention with genre—wish fulfillment, realism, and the nightmare. What is the tone that will most readily capture these underlying intentions?
When we look at the genres of wish fulfillment, there should be a lightness to the tone, because this is a genre where the main character, against considerable odds, gets what he or she wants. This means that the visual and verbal details should contribute to this sense of possibility. Think for a moment of the tone of musicals from Grease (1978) to The Sound of Music (1965), or the tone of Star Wars (1977) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), two action-adventure films. In each case, the important dramatic goal, the heroic struggle by the main character to overcome insuperable obstacles, means an optimistic tone, almost romantic tone, that makes credible the achievement of the main character.
For the realist genres, the police story, the gangster film, the war film, and the melodrama, believability in the situation and the characters sets the boundaries for the tone of these genres. The tone most observed in these genres is the kind of detail found in films such as Serpico (1974) or Prince of the City (1981) or The French Comection (1971): the details build up the case for believability. This is the impulse behind successful TV series like Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and Law & Order as well. Emotional believability is behind the TV melodramas such as Thirty-something and Once and Again. In all of these cases, language, appearance, and behavior must conform to the principles of recognizability and believability.
At the outer edges of these genres, filmmakers add their own voices. Francis Ford Coppola in The Godfather (1972), Ridley Scott in Someone to Watch ouer Me (1987), Jonathan Demme in The Silence of the Lambs (1991)—these filmmakers add an operatic dimension to the genre-specific realism. They are adding metaphor. It doesn't always work, but when it does, as in The Godfather, the story is enlarged beyond the story of one character and one family—it becomes the story of a society.
With regard to the genres of the nightmare, they require an overheated feeling that makes the unthinkable inevitable. Whether you consider this tone expressionistic or baroque, it is over the top, excessive. In order to have a feeling for this nightmare tone in particular, we turn to film noir, and the example of Romeo Is Bleeding.
THE CASE OF PETER MEDAK'S ROMEO IS BLEEDING
Romeo Is Bleeding (1993) is a film noir story where the main character is a policeman. Sergeant Jack Grimaldi is desperate because he can't deny himself women or money. Although married, he never has enough love or sex. He needs a mistress, and he needs money. Not that we see him spending or enjoying the money—he hoards it. He makes the money by informing for the mob. He tells them where people they want to kill are being hidden.
Everything in his life begins to unravel when the person the mob wants to find and kill is one of their own—a killer named Mona Demarkov. She is seductive and endlessly dangerous. The mob boss Dan Falcone because he is unsuccessful in killing Mona, threatens Jack. Will Jack survive betrayal and counterbetrayal? In the end he does survive, but he loses everything he valued—his mistress, his wife, the money, his job, even his identity.
This plot and summary cannot do justice to the tone that makes this screen story emotionally credible. This is a film about desire, about a character who can never have enough. And so his judgment is poor. As he says, he is motivated by his heart and, as a result, he always listens to the wrong voice in his head.
What is critical is to believe the level of his sexual desire, the constancy of his desire. This dimension, set of relationships, of the story, whether focusing on his wife Natalie, his mistress Sheri, or his targeflover Mona, is highly sexualized. Their scenes are all about desire.
The other aspect of the tone is the violence of the film—people are killed, mutilated, and buried alive. This heightened violence is not isolated from the sexuality. In one scene, Mona chops off her own arm so that a body will be identifiable as hers. Jack, the main character, has accidentally shot his mistress, whom Mona had dressed up in a wig so that she would be mistaken for Mona. The amputated arm will confirm the body's identification as Mona. Shortly thereafter, Jack and Mona make love. This scene is not the only scene that mixes sexuality and violence.
The third input to the tone of film noir is a literary quality that is manifest in the language: it tends to be philosophical and fatalistic. When Don Falcone talks to Jack, giving him no choice but to kill Mona, the conversation devolves to if there's any difference between a murderer and a pacifist who find themselves in the cell next to each other. The difference is none—they are both in jail.
But perhaps the most important contributor to the tone of film noir is the pervasive sense of betrayal. No relationship can save you. Jack kills Sheri, Mona betrays Jack, Jack betrays his wife, Jack betrays his colleagues and the police, and betrayal is rampant within the mob. At its heart, film noir is about a character who wants to be saved; he chooses a relationship that will save him, but the person he has chosen betrays him—she makes love to him and then tries to kill him. He has sent away his wife for protection never to connect with her again. He has accidentally killed his mistress. And, finally, to preserve himself, he kills Mona. At the end he is alone in what seems a state or perpetual loneliness.
To sum up, the tone of this film noir is highly sexualized and violent, relationships are overridden by desire, and personal chaos and betrayal quickly follow.
THE CASE OF THE FILMS OF ANG LEE AND STANLEY KUBRICK
If tone is created by the use of visual and verbal detail that are in keeping with genre expectations, voice is created by using tone to a particular and often more personal purpose. This may mean altering tonal expectations. Specific examples will illustrate this and move us on to a fuller discussion of voice.
Every filmmaker has a point of view that both attracts them to material and with which they translate the material. Voice is the screen storyteller's prism. Ang Lee made The Wedding Banquet (1993), a situation comedy about a Taiwanese main character, Wai-Tung, who is in a gay relationship with a Caucasian male. His parents want him to marry and have grandchildren. Their visit to New York prompts a ruse-to pretend to be engaged to a Chinese tenant in one of his buildings. She moves in and they become a platonic threesome. The story twists again when, on their wedding night, he actually impregnates his “pretend” wife. Now he is in a real threesome, and the film ends accepting sexual and racial variations. They will continue to be a threesome.
The tone, which is realistic, as we expect in a situation comedy, has an undercurrent of acceptance and of embracing the outsider, whether he or she is a racial outsider or an outsider in sexual preference. This acceptance and plea for tolerance can also be seen in the family life and generational conflict in Ang Lee's Eat/Drink/Man/Wornan (1994). The same dimension is vivid in Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995), a story adapted from Jane Austen's novel of the same name and set in early-nineteenth-century, British, upper-class society. And the same voice speaks clearly in Ride with the Devil (1999), a Civil War story focusing on a young man whose father came from Germany but who identifies with the values of the American South. In each case, the voice is the same: accept and tolerate the outsider and your community will be better for it.
Voice is not always so specific as in the case of Ang Lee. As in the case of Stanley Kubrick, the range of subject matter over the course of his career is very great. Is there any identifiable voice? I think so. Thematically, Kubrick is attracted to screen stories where individual behavior is examined in the light of a different or majority behavior. As so often is the case in the melodrama, the character, because of his marginal position, is powerless—think of the slave Spartacus; or Joker, the private in the US. Army in Full Metal Jacket; or the poor Irishman Barry Lyndon. In each case, whether the power structure is Rome or the U.S. Army or the British upper class, the main characters are trying to exercise their rights or claim some power in the light of the power of the organization or society. This theme extends to include the sexually individualistic in the case of Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1962), the creatively frustrated in the case of Jack in The Shining (1979), or the moral colonel in Paths of Glory (1958).
To see how the same voice can be culled from such a broad band of material is to see how critical Kubrick is being of the sexual mores of small-town America in Lolita, or of the consequences of power politics in army life (as opposed to just fighting the enemy) in Paths of Glory. Kubrick is critical of the same power politics on a global scale in Dr. Strangelove (1963), and he is critical of the power politics of technology in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969). In a sense, Kubrick celebrates the individual and individual differences as does Ang Lee, but he cautions us that the individual pays a price for being part of an organization—often, too high a price.
Ang Lee and Stanley Kubrick present two polarities of voice around similar themes. To understand how voice has developed, we need to look at earlier examples as well, filmmakers who preceded Bergman's obsession with guilt, anxiety, and identity, or Fellini's playful obsession with the same issues. I now turn to three disparate storytellers who provide a range of voices—John Ford, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder.
THE CASE OF THE FILMS OF JOHN FORD, FRITZ LANG, AND BILLY WILDER
In the case of John Ford, what is apparent in his fifty years of filmmaking is that he was obsessed with particular themes: the immigrant, the West, the poetic character of love and commitment, and the celebration of those institutions that support and discipline the individual to be what he can be—particularly the Army. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), a film that focuses on the last days of a captain in the army prior to his retirement; My Darling Clementine (1946), the iteration of family responsibility and love set against the career of Sheriff Wyatt Earp; and The Searchers (1956), the obsession with primitivism versus responsibility (civilization) in post-Civil War Texas-all of these stories create a portrait of a land and a time that is imagined and poetic, where the individual struggle is a celebration of the forces of life in the face of constant challenge, tragedy, and loss. The vigor of Fords voice finds its best expression in the western, that pastoral place where poetry is a natural fit. Whichever of Ford's films one looks at, whether it is made in 1925 or 1965, the voice is apparent and powerful.
We find a very different voice in the work of Fritz Lang. If John Ford is a filmmaker who celebrates the past, Fritz Lang is a filmmaker who looks at the dark side of the past, the present, and the future. In his films about the past, Lang did make two westerns, and so the comparison to Ford is telling. In both the Return of Frank James (1940) and Rancho Notorious (1952), commitment, love, and the land are as present as they are in Ford, but the emphasis is different. Frank James is looking for revenge for the murder of his brother; for the characters in Rancho Notorious, the land is an escape from the dangers of what lies outside the boundaries of the ranch. Both of these films focus on violent outlaws as their main characters, and their perspective is completely different from the army captain in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. In Lang, a gunfight is necessary for personal survival; in Ford, the gunfight or Indian battle is a moral struggle.
But the issue of morality is more central in Lang's works that are set in the present. In his German production M (1931), the main character is a child molester and child murderer who eludes the police, but who cannot elude the underworld of the community. They see him as a threat to their world, and so he is caught and tried by his fellow criminals. What this says about organized law abiding society is powerful. The world is upside down. This same view pervades Lang's American production Fury (1935), where an innocent man is arrested and almost burned alive by his law-abiding captors. He escapes to torment the decent citizens of the town that has spiritually destroyed him.
There is no relief in Lang's futuristic film Metropolis (1926). Here the workers are regimented and imprisoned in an underground world. Their savior, a female Christ figure, leads them in bloody revolt against their technological masters. But there is throughout the film the feeling that the workers are exchanging one master for another. This view of an immoral world with its corners of moral ambiguity speaks to anxiety and fear. There is no respite in Lang's world. This is the voice of Fritz Lang.
Somewhere between Ford and Lang is Billy Wilder. Each of these three directors had a fifty-year career, and each had a distinctive voice. In the case of Billy Wilder, his voice fluctuates between two extremes—romanticism and cynicism. The best expressions of Wilder's romanticism are present in his first and one of his last films: Five Graves to Cairo (1943) and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970). Five Graves to Cairo is set in 1942 in North Africa. A British tank commander, Corporal John Bramble, is lost during the large-scale British retreat. He hides in a hotel to elude Rommel's advancing troops. By remarkable coincidence, Rommel himself makes the hotel his headquarters, and there the British tank commander, now a waiter, learns the secret of Rommel's success—how he has hidden depots of fuel and ammunition at archeological sites all the way to Cairo. By feigning to be the German informer at the hotel (the real waiter), Corporal Bramble has an escape route. Rommel will send him to Cairo.
In the relationships between Corporal Bramble and the French waitress, Mouche, in the hotel, between Mouche and a lieutenant on Rommel's staff, and between Rommel and the other characters in the story, Wilder creates a deeply romantic film about commitment and loyalty, personal and national. There is none of the darkness one associates with Billy Wilder. The same can be said for Some Like It Hot (1959) and for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970). In this version of the Holmes story, Holmes is melancholic about the love of his life, and it is this love that leads him in a gentle way into depression and drug-taking.
The apogee of Wilder's romanticism is his film Avanti (1977), a story about a stiff American businessman, Wendell Armbruster, who comes to Italy to pick up his father's body. It seems the industrialist died at a resort to which he had returned year after year. When Wendell arrives he discovers a secret—his father had a mistress; that was the reason for his trips. They died together in an automobile accident. Also present is the mistress' daughter, Pamela Piggott, who is there to pick up her mother's body. Naturally, Wendell falls in love with Pamela. What to say to the thousands of employees about his father, and what to say to his own wife? These are the challenges to the main character.
The darker, more cynical side of Billy Wilder's work is well known. This is found in his stories of moral turpitude to advance one's desire for a woman, as in Double Indemnity (1944), and one's desire for a career, as in Ace in the Hole (1951) and Sunset Boulevard (1950). In each case, the main character pays with his life for that desire. But en route, that desire takes the characters through lying, manipulation, even murder, to achieve their goals.
Ace in the Hole captures the pervasive cynicism of each of these screen stories. A New York journalist, Charles Tatum, has to go to the Southwest to get a job after questionable behavior with his former employer. He works for a small New Mexico paper, but he hasn't given up his ambition of being big again. One day he trips over a story about a local man stuck in a shaft in which he had been looking for Indian artifacts in a burial site. Tatum wants to develop and exploit this situation as a human interest story. He organizes with the police to get the man out more slowly. The story grows and in fact goes national. The problem, however, is that his judgment is skewed by his own desire and the man dies before he can be rescued. The American dream of success has turned into the American nightmare, and Tatum suffers an appropriate fate. He is killed.
Ace in the Hole is representative of Wilder's dark stories, but he has also been responsible for screen stories that exhibit both the darkness and the romanticism, primarily his early film The Major and the Minor (1942) and the film he's best known for, The Apartment (1960). Both dimensions of voice are exhibited in the visual and verbal detailing of the screen stories, the nature of the character, the dramatic arc of the character, and the type of incidents that make up that arc.
THE CASE OF THE FILMS OF STONE, LEE, MAMET, BERTOLUCCI, AND EGOYAN
Turning to a more current profile of voice, we begin to see patterns of a far greater assertion of voice. Few writer-directors have opted for as visceral a voice as Oliver Stone. In his Vietnam War film trilogy—Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Heaven and Earth (1993)—Stone has been singular in the notion that ideals were lost, whether through the betrayal of colleagues (Platoon) or political knowledge (Born on the Fourth of July). He has broadened this idea through his examination of power and politics in JFK (1991) and Nixon (1996). Personal tragedy and national tragedy undermine personal idealism and the belief in one's “country.” That loss of belief gets carried over into a critique of the media that support or exploit the power structure—journalism in Salvador (1986) and television in Natural Born Killers (1995). And this dark, disapproving vision culminates in the idea that the system will destroy you whether you are a rock star (The Doors [1991]) or a petty criminal (U-Turn [1998]). The incident will be treated aggressively; the character will be treated as operating with knowledge (as opposed to being an innocent); the dramatic arc will be tragic, moving inevitably toward destruction—all contributing to a sense of inevitability and doom: these are the ingredients that create the assertive voice of Oliver Stone.
In the case of Spike Lee, we also have a writer-director who has a strong voice, but in the case of Lee, his goal differs considerably. Spike Lee made his reputation with a number of melodramas: She's Gotta Have It (1986), Do the Right Thing (1989), and Jungle Fever (1991). More recently he has shifted to genre films: Clockers (1995), He Got Game (1997), and Summer of Sam (1999). Throughout his work, Spike Lee has an overriding and powerful goal—to exhort and educate his community, the African-American community, to have stronger family ties (Crooklyn [1996], Clockers), to be fathers that care for their sons (He Got Game), and to understand that community prejudice is as corrosive and violent as personal prejudice (Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever). The treatment of character, visual detail, dialogue, dramatic arc, all serve this single purpose; education. And so the issue of voice for Spike Lee is to above all speak to his own community, to incite his own community to become educated and informed and to act for the benefit of other members of the community—their brothers, their children, and themselves. This is the purpose that overrides all else in Spike Lee's work; this is the voice in his work.
Another assertive voice is the writer-director David Mamet. In a series of very different films—Things Change (1988), Homicide (1991), The Spanish Prisoner (1998), The Winslow Boy (1999)—Mamet is concerned with more personal issues. They include the issue of maleness: what is the nature of give and take between males, particularly in America (his play Glengarry Glen Ross), and what is the nature of adolescent-adult maleness (Sexual Peversity in Chicago [1984]) and of father-son maleness (The Winslow Boy). In the films that Mamet has written and directed, the main character struggles with the various dimensions of his identity as a man (best presented in Homicide). In his screenplays, he has articulated the moral struggle for integrity together with a goal—eliminating the Capone mob in The Untouchables (1987) and regaining personal dignity through a professional case, a law suit against medical malpractice in The Verdict (1982)—and in his plays that struggle carries a darker price when embracing one's goal (Glengury Glen Ross, Speed the Plow).
In this body of work, Mamet illustrates the layers of creative tension between those elements that contribute to the male identity, but essentially, he helps us feel good about embracing all of the contradictions in feeling and behavior. In this sense, he differs radically in his voice from an Oliver Stone or a Fritz Lang. Although he is very much the modern writer, he is also saying that we define ourselves by action, not words. In The Winslow Boy, a period British play, a father sacrifices everything to prove his son's innocence in the matter of a petty theft he is accused of at boarding school. This sacrifice is very compatible with the actions taken by Elliot Ness in The Untouchables and by Frank Galvin in The Verdict. These men risk everything because they believe and need to believe in a cause, in a case, in a son. Without that belief, they are diminished and life is no longer livable.
Two non-American examples will flesh out this contextual consideration of current voice, the work of Bernardo Bertolucci and of Atom Egoyan. Bernardo Bertolucci came to prominence with a series of films in the 1960s that were poetic, literary, and above all obsessed with verboten behavior, particularly love relationships. This tendency never left him. When one looks at The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972), Luna (1979), The Sheltering Sky (1990), and Beseiged (1999), one is struck by the improbability of the couplings involved. Older men with younger women, mothers with sons, political adversaries, class adversaries, racial intermixing out of keeping with the class of one of the characters—all of these have populated Bertolucci's work, as if the unconscious controlled the conscious choice of the main characters.
The other theme that runs through Bertolucci's work is the orthodoxy and betrayal of political belief. Politics never equals personal desire but it often destroys desire. 1900 (1976), The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), The Conformist, Before the Revolution (1964), all of these are screen stories of political orthodoxy and personal tragedy. In The Conformist, a man in Mussolini's Italy must conform because his upper class parents were non-conformists. To gain membership in the Fascist party, he has to betray a former professor, now escaped to Paris. The assignment is to facilitate the assassination of the professor. The problem is he has fallen in love with the professor's wife. She too is sacrificed to his need to belong in this time and place, to the Fascist party.
Love and politics are the throughlines in Bertolucci's work. His voice encompasses the power of desire (the unconscious world) and the disappointment of politics (the conscious world). No film displays the duality of these two themes as clearly as Bertolucci's The Last Emporer (1987). The earthiness of the visual details and the conscious destructiveness of the political choices coexist in the same character and in his narrative. The life force of sexuality and the death instinct inherent in politics, this dialectic constitutes the voice of Bernardo Bertolucci.
Atom Egoyan's voice is more elusive, less conscious, but no less powerful. An Armenian immigrant to Canada, a young artist in the age of technology, Egoyan is interested in the converging lines, the discontinuity in identity resulting from immigration, and the convergence between intellect and feeling in an age of technology. The result is a profound sense of anxiety in his work. Whether it is Family Viewing (1987), Exotica (1997), The Sweet Hereafter (1998), or The Adjuster (1991), Egoyan's characters are caught in a crises of meaning and self-worth. Whether they are the result of their own doing or the result of social forces beyond their control, the crises of these characters become metaphors for postmodern doubt and the perpetual searching for relief—but finding none. Sensual experience is momentary and to be relished in a world where tragedy and loss are the norm. This is a very dark voice, but not as dark as the voice of Fritz Lang. In a sense it is an exploratory voice looking for coping strategies. In this sense, the work has overtones of Bergman and Tarkovsky. Visual detail, dialogue, and the dramatic arc have to present a discontinuous sensibility. Linear storytelling is simply too stable for this voice. Consequently, Egoyan has turned to nonlinear structure to portray his ideas and to articulate his voice, as I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 9, “New Models.”
GENRES THAT ELEVATE VOICE
Most genres can mask voice in the schematics of screen story. Melodrama, for example, invites us to identify with the main characters and their goals. If we do identify with the main character, voice, although present, is subtle, masked by that identification. It is easier to identify with the writer-director when the main character is a victim. This does not entirely distance us, but when coupled with a literary style, as in film noir, it begins the process of posing the question, do I want to identify with this character? And when we ask that question, we begin to see voice more clearly.
There are however, particular genres where the construction is such that it is voice that we clearly hear and see. This requires the process of distancing us from the main character to go much further. It may mean multiple main characters or no main character. It will mean deploying narrative techniques that highlight voice and deepen the distancing effect—the use of irony, for example. Whatever the techniques deployed, the upshot is a clear relationship between audience and writer-director. Character and structure will become part of the distancing technique rather than the means of identification. It is to three of these genres that emphasize voice that we now turn.
The Case of Satire
Satire as a genre has particular characteristics that differentiate it from other genres. Specifically, satire has no main character. Replacing the main character is a premise that attacks and criticizes a significant organization, an ideology, or a set of values. In a sense, the voice of the writer-director becomes the substitute for the main character in other genres, such as melodrama or the thriller. If the story follows a character, that character is the vehicle for the narrative rather than a main character with whom to identify.
In Sydney Lumet's Network (1976), the target of the satire is the power of television. The conscience-ridden producer, Max Schumacher (William Holden), is the character we follow through the story. In Arthur Hiller's Hospital, it is writer Paddy Chayevsky's outrage about the dangerous state of the medical care system that is the premise of the narrative and it is the chief of medicine, Dr. Herb Bock (George C. Scott), who is the vehicle for the narrative. In Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove there is no main character, only an incident that leads to nuclear holocaust. The premise is that human beings are fallible and will make mistakes that in the military will lead to the destruction of the world as we know it. Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man (1972) is a critique of capitalism; Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993) is a satire on the consequences of ultra-urbanization. His film The Player (1992) is a satire on Hollywood and its values.
Satire needs a big target to be effective. But having chosen that target, it has other notable qualities. Satire has great latitude in tone. It can shift tone, and that tone can range from realism to the absurd to the fantastic. This shifting is part of the process of distancing us from the characters. Satire is also plot-intensive. A great deal happens in satire. Humor is present in abundance in the satire. Recall the executions on air to boost ratings in Network and the final ride of the bomb to its target in Dr. Strangelove.
Turning now to two examples of satire, we look first at Michael Ritchie's Smile (1974). Ritchie's film is focused on a beauty contest that takes place in California. The beauty contest for adolescents, the Young Miss America pageant, takes place over one week. There is no single main character. The premise is that great hypocrisy abounds in these contests. Although they talk about encouraging community and good values, they are actually about competition and commerce. The narrative focal point is on the duality of behavior in virtually all the characters, participants, judges, and members of the Santa Rosa community. Humor, often cruel humor, is aimed at the characters. One example will illustrate the point. The head of the judging panel is Big Bob (Bruce Dern), a man who considers himself a pillar of the community. When his son is caught taking Polaroids of the participants in their changing room, Big Bob and Little Bob must go to a psychiatrist for counseling. Big Bob's aggression and his lack of understanding about his responsibility for his son's behavior is covered up by Big Bobs overstated commitment to the appearance of good manners—the importance of the situation is to be polite rather than to look at and alter inappropriate behavior.
No target goes untouched in this satire. In the final scene the real victims, the contestants who are being sexually exploited, become, in the next scene, the target of Ritchie's commentary on these beauty contests. Two of the contestants sabotage the public presentation of the Mexican-American contestant. The real reason they cruelly destroy her act is that they are so competitive. They fear that the guacamole dip she keeps foisting on the judges will be effective. If they ruin her performance, there will be less competition for them. No target goes unspared in Ritchie's film.
Warren Beatty's Bulworfk (1998) is the story of a conservative senator running for reelection. He decides he can't win anyway, so he might as well try to change. He is attracted to a young African-American woman and that desire transforms him into a man who begins to speak his mind about political, social, and economic issues. He changes from a far-right, anti-Semitic racist to an extreme rapjiving, left-speaking radical politico. In terms of moving from a man of the establishment to a man against the establishment he has become dangerous. And so in the end he is killed.
Bulworth in its extremes illustrates how tonal shifts work in the satire. When we look at the narrative progression in a rational way, we see how illogical and unbelievable that progression is. But in satire, the issue of voice is actually aided by this kind of narrative transgression. Tonal shifts and sudden transformations, these are the very devices that move us away from a credible identification with character and toward a powerful sense of the voice of the writer-director.
To repeat, in satire the target has to be significant enough for us to engage readily with the screen story. Both Smile and Bulworth are critical of American economic, social, and political values. We could call them both criticisms of American values, with the beauty contest and the political contest as the institutions that provide the dramatic arcs of the two screen stories.
The Case of Hyperdrama
Hyperdrama is a moral fable for adults. The goal of the writer-director is the moral of the tale. Character and plot serve the moral (the voice of the author). This means that we need to be distanced from character and plot. Whereas there is no main character in satire, there is a main character in hyperdrama. How that distancing takes place is through tonal shifts, as in satire, and in the nature of the character presented in the hyperdrama.
The character can be a guide to the narrative, as he is in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), the story of an ordinary man who, when facing a crisis, contemplates suicide. An angel comes down from heaven to show him what life would have been like without him, that is, had he never been born. The purpose is to show this man, George Bailey, that even though his has been a life with limits and personal sacrifice, it has been a worthwhile life.
Another approach to character is to make the character pivotal to the narrative but disappointing in his or her nature. John Boorman's retelling of the Arthur- Camelot legend, Excalibur (1981), is a study in an all-too-human but not necessarily sympathetic character.
A third approach to character in the hyperdrama is to make the character so excessive and inconsistent that again we are distanced from him or her. This is the approach taken by Emir Kusterica in his film Underground (1995). An imaginative telling of the history of Yugoslavia from 1944 to 1994, it is a tale of personal aggression, betrayal, and a self-imposed dementia. The main character has charisma and tremendous energy, but his actions illustrate a self-destructive impulse that goes further and further. This narrative direction distances us from a character we are initially drawn to.
Another atypical narrative device that distances us from character and plot is the tonal shifts in hyperdrama. Whether it is the over-the-top narrative elements of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), which shifts from the excessive, stylized violence of the first half of the film to the realistic melodrama approach taken to the conditioning of Alex in the second half, it is the degree of the shift that pushes us toward what Kubrick is trying to say in his fable—that government control over the individual requires a big stick. The orchestration of violence in the society creates a condition of receptivity to the power of government.
In Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996), it is the excessive tone of realism that permeates the major part of the narrative until it gives way to the fantastic last section of the screen story. The transition from ascetic realism to an almost spiritual fantasy results in our questioning what the story seemed to be about. An unusual couple marries; Bess is mentally limited, Jan is an emotionally high-spirited foreigner. An oil rig accident quickly cripples Jan, and he puts her love through a series of tests that in the end costs her her life. But in her sacrifice, in the aura of such love, he is resurrected: the cripple is no longer crippled. This narrative transition, this tonal shift, implies something new about the story—that love can overcome even physical limitations, if it is powerful enough.
The final narrative quality that is notable and necessary in hyperdrama is that as a genre it is not only plot-intensive, it is plot-excessive. Hyperdrama has far more plot than the traditional narrative. Recall the amount of plot in Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump (1992)—forty years in a man's life. The moral of the fable is that even a limited man hke Forrest Gump can have enormous impact upon those whom he encounters, personally and casually. This, of course, is an absurd idea from a rational point of view, but hyperdrama is not rational, and the moral, because of the level of the plot (and the tone) is powerful.
Another film that exhibits this plot characteristic is Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939). A great deal happens to Dorothy on her journey. The purpose here is to echo the idea that imagination is a positive escape from loneliness, a notion initially directed toward children but no less relevant for adults.
To recap all of these characteristics, I turn to the example of Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum (1979), a screen story based on the Günter Grass novel of the same name. Here the moral is that Nazism (politics) is unhealthy for growing children. Oscar, the main character, is born in Danzig, a town that has shifted in national affiliation from German to Polish and back to German and on and on. The time is the early 1920s and Oscar's mother has a German husband and a Polish lover. Who Oscar's father is remains an open question. But because of what he sees and hears, Oscar, an eccentric five-year-old, decides to stop growing. He throws himself down a set of stairs and he stops. Twenty years later, at the very end of World War II, he decides to resume growing. His brother throws a stone that injures his head and Oscar rapidly regains a more normal size.
Such a tale brings with it attendant narrative exaggerations: Oscar can yell at such a high pitch that glass shatters; his mother commits suicide by overeating eels; his father chokes to death when he swallows his Nazi party pin. These events, all of which are part of the plot, are absurdist on one level, but cumulatively contribute to the moral of the story—that Nazism isn't healthy for its people, particularly children.
Although these events contribute to the tone, the other aspect of the tone is an earthiness, a life force in the midst of all this death. Here the visual details— the birth of Oscar's mother, the fate of his grandfather, the first Nazi rally he observes—all contribute to an almost ritual sense of people and events. It's all part of a grand design, and Oscar is our guide and our interpreter. Because our interpretation remains so distant from people and events, we do as well. Consequently, it is through the voice of Schlondorff interpreting the Günter Grass novel that we see and hear.
The Case of Docudrama
Docudrama, unlike the examples of hyperdrama and satire, does not rely on shifts in tone to help distance us from character and plot. In fact, docudrama has a realistic tone and adheres to that tone in a very orthodox fashion. Indeed, realism, credibility, and the notion that this narrative actually happened and that the characters in it are real, goes to the core of docudrama.
The other notable quality that in which docudrama differs from hyperdrama and satire is that the dramatic arc resembles a case that is being presented to us, the audience. The dramatic arc in both hyperdrama and satire resembles a journey. In terms of character, docudrama, like the other two genres, uses character to deliver the moral or the message. In this sense, the main character may be an observer or the victim of the plot. And like satire, docudrama can proceed without a main character if that is a desired choice.
Docudrama is a genre powerfully associated with British filmmakers such as Peter Watkins and Ken Loach. But as a story form, it has been emulated wherever there is a strong documentary tradition. Because documentary as a form quite often has educational, social, and political goals, here is the heart of the issue of voice in the docudrama. The purpose of voice is, with a sense of authenticity, to alter the audience's view on an issue. In Ken Loach's Land and Freedom (1995), his goal was to demythologize the Left's participation in the Spanish Civil War. In Edvard Munch (1974), Peter Watkins wanted to point out how conformity, societal conformity in particular, is the enemy of art. And in his film Culloden (1964), Watkins wanted to attack British imperialism. The film focuses on the last battle fought on British soil: the quashing of the eighteenth-century Scottish rebellion.
Whether the issue is poverty or royalty or alcoholism or mental illness, the docudrama takes a position on the issue and makes its case using character and plot, as well as a veracity that derives from a preservation that stresses actual people and actual events.
An early and powerful example of docudrama is Ken Loach's Family Life (1972), a film to which we now turn. Family Life is the story of Janice Blaidon, a young woman who lives with her parents. It's a story of her descent into mental illness. We follow her from being troubled at the outset to the resolution, when she has become, now mute, a case study in schizophrenia in a medical classroom and probably hospitalized for life. How did this happen? Should it have happened? Loach thinks not, and he uses the narrative to take a position that Janice is destroyed by controlling parents, her own too-needy nature, and a medical system that is insensitive to the tension between generational autonomy and generational continuity.
In Family Life, Janice is certainly presented as a victim. Loach's case is made principally by showing two conflictual areas—home and hospital. At home, Janice's parents force her to have an abortion against her will and have her hospitalized against her will. When her older sister, Barbara, tries to help Janice by offering to have her live with her, the parents aggressively attack the ungrateful sister, her husband, her values, and isolate Janice. They also forbid her from seeing or being with her boyfriend. Home is the portrait of a hell that imposes illness on Janice, the only defense she has against powerful parents.
In the hospital, Janice is initially treated by an “unconventional” psychiatrist under whose care she begins to improve, but when he is replaced by a more traditional “shock and pill” man, she is more isolated than ever and she deteriorates. The last straw is that parents and hospital conspire to have Janice committed. At last she is sacrificed to the powerful, controlling, insensitive power structure, represented by her parents and by the hospital staff.
Loach makes his case emotionally and powerfully. If society doesn't change its attitude about childrearing, about psychiatry, and tolerate the next generation and its need to be different from the prior generation, society will be in deep trouble. This is the voice of Ken Loach. Character and plot, incident and a particular case, all of which are put together with an air of authenticity, these are the strengths of docudrama as a vehicle for voice.