15

The Hyperdrama

Hyperdrama is in many ways far from both melodrama and docudrama. Although it maintains the basic structural elements and places a conflictual main character against a plot, hyperdrama is the opposite of the tonal realism and factual realism so central to the other two meta-genres. In this sense, excessive exaggeration and fantasy are both key ingredients of the hyperdrama. Although the analogy to the fairy tale is too restrictive, the parallels are there—the predominance of elemental moral struggle. In “Little Red Riding Hood,” the danger is known, the wolf, and the moral struggle concerns respect for one’s elders. How different is the story in the Star Wars trilogy, where respect for one’s elders is modernized? In the trilogy, the ultimate elder, the father, no longer deserves respect. What is a child, in this case a son, to do?

Although particular filmmakers have been affiliated with hyperdrama— Luis Buñuel throughout his career, from Spain to Mexico to France—the genre is more often affiliated with humorists, such as Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. Modern Times (1936) is a fable about industrialization and its explicit tendency to mechanize and dehumanize. The many set-pieces in the film have an internal logic, but they are so fabulist in their content that realism is actually beside the point. A similar quality infuses the majority of Chaplin’s work.

At the other extreme, the films of the Marx Brothers dwell on the anarchy that befalls characters beset by life problems—making a living, getting along, organizing action toward a goal. All the characters’ goals are subverted by the anarchy that allows individual will to reign supreme. In the Marx Brothers’ films, such as Duck Soup, the truly moral thing to do is take care of yourself at the expense of others—a modern moral interpretation that has made their films popular to this day.

Hyperdrama seems to have taken on new life since Star Wars. Although filmmakers from the past like Fellini occasionally drifted into hyperdrama (Satyricon), today there are numerous filmmakers whose careers are associated with it. They are notable filmmakers, too—Werner Herzog (Aguirre, Wrath of God), Steven Spielberg (E.T.), Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange), Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump), Emir Kusturica (Underground), Neil Jordan (Butcher Boy), and Lars Von Trier (Breaking the Waves). What is also notable is that particular genres—the action-adventure film, the horror film, and the melodrama—are all amended in hyperdrama to incorporate, above all, a moral lesson, which has been powerfully embraced by audiences. In order to understand why, we now turn to the general characteristics that distinguish hyperdrama from other genres.

General Characteristics

The Centrality of the Moral Lesson

At its heart, hyperdrama is a story told in service of a moral lesson. Character, plot, tone, all serve that overriding purpose. The moral lesson might be focused on personal behavior, for example. The main character in Buñuel’s The Criminal Mind of Archibald Cruz is convinced that he committed a crime (murder) as a child. We know that he did not. However, he conducts his life and relationships in an aura of guilt and in the expectation that if he becomes too close to anyone, in a love relationship for example, he will again become a murderer. The moral lesson of Buñuel’s film is that we are all prisoners of our childhood experiences, whether they are negative or positive. How useful or not this imprisonment is goes to the core of Buñuel’s goal in this film.

The moral lesson can be driven by social or community standards, as in the case of Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump. By community standards, Forrest Gump is slow intellectually, and does not quite comprehend events around him. He passes through the Hippie Revolution, the Vietnam War, the political upheavals of the 1970s, and the rising hopes of the 1980s in America. All the while he is a constant—running toward or away from his peers, ingenuous, a Candide in a shark-infested society. In his naivete, in his faith in people, and in his constancy he actually becomes “the one good person” who can change the lives of others. Here the moral lesson is that communities sometimes are too quick to label their members and thereby limit them and their contributions. The moral lesson is to back away from labeling and limiting.

The moral lesson can also be driven by political goals. The young boy who decides to stop growing, as a political protest to Nazism, in Volker Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum, is making a political statement. The immorality of the regime and its influence on personal codes of conduct is so pervasive that the young boy’s moral decision about his own physical stature is both pragmatic and metaphorical. The ideology of Nazism, with its racism and its celebration of Aryanism, is visually assaulted by the main character’s stature. He is German, he is imperfect, and yet more moral than his peers.

The engine at the heart of the hyperdrama is the moral lesson. This quality distinguishes the form from other genres.

Realism Is not Important

Although moral tales can be presented realistically, if hyperdrama is to be dramatically acceptable, realism actually gets in the way. Perhaps a more inclusive description of hyperdrama requires that the fantastic, positive or negative, be integral to the genre. This might mean the monster within, as in John Frankenheimer’s Seconds; it might mean the existence of magic, as in John Boorman’s Excalibur. It certainly embraces the active imagination, as in Jean Claude Lauzon’s Leolo and Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz.

Skirting around the issue of realism is the notion that hyperdrama films are really children’s films, like The Lion King et al. This is not actually the case. Although the main character in Jordan’s The Company of Wolves is a teenager, the presentation is too violent for children. The film is more a cautionary tale for adults. The same is true for Boorman’s treatment of the Arthurian legend in Excalibur. Hyperdrama may include a film for children, such as The Wizard of Oz, but often the subject matter or its treatment is far too extreme or sophisticated for children. The key issue here is that realism plays no part in hyperdrama, whether the intended audience is children or adults. Perhaps it might be more accurate to consider hyperdrama as the genre that speaks to the child in all of us.

Character Is the Vehicle

In melodrama, the main character provides the direct means to identify with the outcome of the narrative. In hyperdrama, identification with the main character is less important. The main character is only the means or vehicle for the narrative. Consequently, we experience the character more as an observer rather than the stronger role of participant. We view the main character’s alienation and depression in Frankenheimer’s Seconds, but do we feel deeply about his fate? In a melodrama we would; here we do not. We remain detached from Lauzon’s Leolo, a young boy so alienated from his family that he creates a new identity (Italian instead of French-Canadian) rather than be identified with it. As he says, “I dream and therefore I am not [a member of this family].” He is detached, and so too are we.

In Boorman’s Excalibur we observe Arthur, the idealistic and cuckolded king, but we do not identify with him. We position ourselves far more easily with Merlin the magician, a man above the worldly and otherworldly goings-on of Excalibur. We understand, and even like, the character of Forrest Gump, but do we identify with him? I think not. In hyperdrama, the main character is the important vehicle for the story, but no more than that.

Plot Is Critical

Consider the plot in hyperdrama as a lengthy journey wherein the main character will encounter many obstacles. The characters may succeed, or they may fail, but in one way or another, they will be transformed by the journey. In the Star Wars trilogy, the galaxy is the path that will take a son into a confrontation with his father. In Excalibur, the journey for Arthur is from a warring, barbaric origin (his birth) to an attempt to establish a just society (Camelot), where nobility and honor will supplant cruelty and betrayal. In Forrest Gump the journey is from childhood to parenthood, the twist here being the childlike (simple and pure) quality of the main character. In Kusturica’s Underground, the journey is from the violence of World War II Yugoslavia to the violence and irrationality, even madness, of the dissolution of the country in the late 1980s—a 40-year descent from hell to a deeper hell.

The journey is substantial, and therefore the amount of plot tends to be considerable. In a sense, the degree of plot in hyperdrama is so great that it makes the main character either a superhero or a “supervictim.”

The Structure of the Plot Is Rife with Ritual

Plot in hyperdrama tends to differ from the deployment of plot in the war film, which is typically realistic. Indeed, the plot in hyperdrama has a very different rhythm from plot in other genres; it is ritualistic and formal rather than realistic or familiar. Some examples will illustrate the point. Battles between good and evil, whether in Star Wars or Excalibur, tend to be formal—in Excalibur, they are orchestrated to the music of Wagner. Those battles, in their details, veer from realism into a formalistic, archetypal struggle analogous to the gunfight in the classic Western and the concluding series of executions in The Godfather Part I. These ritualized events make these plot points metaphors more than “historical” points in a narrative. It is those rituals that make the character a symbol, a superhero, or a supervictim, rather than a mere mortal. Ritual is very important in transforming the plot from realism to a symbolic journey—more complex, with meaning yielded from what the journey represents, rather than its more literal meaning.

The need to seek out ritualized events also moves the story away from the individual, empathic course of events to the symbolic level, where the character is the means rather than the end.

Tone Is Formal and Fantastic

The tone of hyperdrama has to embrace both the ritualistic and the fantastic—the opposite of realism. Even the poetic tone of the Western is insufficient to capture the tone in hyperdrama. Hyperdrama is a form that simulates the children’s fairy tale, and as such it has to be filled with an excess (without the pejorative connotations of the word) that embraces the fantastic. “Operatic” is a description that comes to mind; “florid” is another. The key is essentially an over-the-top tone that allows a story to seem plausible in which anything goes. Ridley Scott’s Legend is a good example of this “anything goes” tone, and so are Boorman’s Excalibur, Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum, and Frankenheimer’s Seconds.

In a sense, the tone of hyperdrama is as far from the realism of melodrama as you can imagine, plus a bit farther. Even the more formal examples of the style are over the top; they have a greater aura of ritual than of anarchy. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves exemplify this dimension of tone in hyperdrama.

The Authorial Voice

The authorial voice is quite muted in melodrama and overarching in docu-drama, but in hyperdrama it is powerful and passionate. After all, the goal of hyperdrama is the moral lesson, with the main character the vehicle for that lesson. In fact, the goal of the writer in hyperdrama is to convey that voice despite the viewer’s involvement with the story. That is not to say we do not care for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Rather we are much more aware of the writer’s views on childhood, play, and the importance of the imagination. At its heart, the film is about the importance of hope in a child’s life; this is what we take away from the experience of The Wizard of Oz.

The writer views himself or herself as a moralist, exploring moral choices and issuing cautions or recommendations for how we the audience should proceed in the world. This is above all the goal of the writer in hyperdrama. In order to do so, the writer looks for the most elemental means—simplicity of character, a basic conflict, and an imaginative journey, which together will make the point for the audience.

Although on one level this may seem pompous (when it does not work), in fact it signals the seriousness of the writer. Given the elemental nature of the lesson, the struggle must be imaginative to convey the moral lesson and to make the vivid connection so necessary for the child in all of us to relate to the story.

Issues of the Day

Because of the serious intent of the writer in hyperdrama, issues of the day have to be used in a particular way.

An effective treatment is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Heaven and angels seemed out of place in the immediate postwar period. But today, after 50 years, the Capra film is shown continually and celebrated.

What the film suggests is that hyperdrama has to treat issues of the day in a more urgent manner than does melodrama. The treatment implies that meaning would be lost with a superficial concern with current questions. The result is the introduction of an active, positive deity in It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s as if only the interventions of the gods can prevent the society, community, or individual from drowning in the challenges of the day—in It’s a Wonderful Life, the cause being George Bailey’s overwhelming sense of responsibility to the community and his willingness to sacrifice his goals, even his life, in service of that sense of responsibility.

Motifs—Case Studies

As in the case of the earlier genres, it is useful to look at a few case studies in order to understand hyperdrama in a fuller sense. The two case studies we will use are Volker Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum (1929) and John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1964).

The Tin Drum

The Main Character and His Goal

Oscar is a young boy born at the end of World War I in the contested Baltic area of Danzig. Part German and part Polish, the zone is neither and both. These national tensions are represented in Oscar’s paternity. His mother loves two men, one Polish and the other German. One of the two is his real father, but Oscar doesn’t know which.

Growing up in this confused familial and national environment, Oscar decides at age three to stop growing. He only gives up this goal after the end of World War II, with his parents dead and the fate of Danzig decided (it is captured by the Russians and becomes part of Soviet-occupied Poland). Now 20, Oscar begins to grow again. The goal is made more plausible by giving Oscar other eccentricities and characteristics. For instance, he always carries his drum. The drum, and his scream, which shatters glass, are the two means Oscar chooses to use to communicate his feelings.

The Antagonist

There is no single antagonist in The Tin Drum. If there is any force that plays this role it would be nationalism, specifically the Nazi form, which in its aggressiveness destroyed countless people, relationships, and communities. The focus in The Tin Drum is on one family, on its destruction in the period when its progeny, Oscar, chose stunted growth as a defense against Nazism.

Oscar is not a political character, and his story unfolds in a reactive, emotional, and visceral fashion. Consequently, the antagonist—nationalism— manifests itself only in the relationships within Oscar’s family and in the fate of those who have been kind to him—a Jew, a female Italian dwarf—and of course in the fate of the three people who he considers to be his parents. In this sense the antagonist is an atmosphere, a distant political entity, rather than a single person.

The Catalytic Event

Oscar’s birth is the catalytic event of the narrative. In the birth canal, he appears already fully formed, with knowing eyes, the same size he will be when he makes his fateful decision to stop growing. He is thus presented at birth with a sense of seeing and knowing that one does not associate with a newborn child. This presentation makes credible the act of will that marks the end of his growth. It also positions Oscar as the perennial observer rather than participant in the events that shape his life. Also, because he is presented as a passive observer—in essence the position of the child in society— we observe events as he does, with an unusual detachment given the nature of the events that will follow.

The Resolution

The war ends. His German father chokes on his Nazi Party pin while trying to hide it from a Russian. At the burial, Oscar consciously decides that he will resume physical growth. His stepbrother throws a stone, which strikes him. He falls on his father’s grave, and he begins to grow once more.

The Dramatic Arc

The journey that Oscar travels spans the 20-year history following World War I. It is a political history wherein Danzig is made a free state, neither German nor Polish. It is an uneasy state, because each minority identifies with its ethnic parent, whether it be Germany or Poland. As events shift and German nationalism becomes a force, brownshirts and swastikas begin to proliferate, and brutality toward Jews grows. War comes on September 1, 1939; the battle for the post office becomes the microcosm for German aggression and Polish resistance. The town is quickly occupied. The Germanization of Danzig is rapid, and the rise and fall of German fortunes of war chronicle the history of the town. Finally, the Russians overrun the city, and the war is over. This is the plot of The Tin Drum.

The background story is the chronicle of Oscar’s relationships with his grandmother, his mother, the two fathers, a housekeeper, and finally a troupe of midgets and dwarfs. Only among the dwarfs does Oscar have anything approximating a peer, an adult relationship. In all other cases, he is the child reacting against the cruelty and unsettling qualities of the adult world. The relationships never progress very far; they are always inhibited or ended by the progress of the plot.

The Narrative Style

The Tin Drum has a great deal of plot, as one would expect in a hyperdrama. But it also has many character scenes. The character layer, however, is never developmental. Oscar is principally the child, and the adults seem transient in his world; they exit, or they die. Only the grandmother provides any continuity for Oscar.

The Narrative Shape

Time is not a critical factor in this story. Because the character is resistant to the passage of time (he stops his own physical growth), physical time is in fact suspended as an element in his life. The story itself follows 45 years of the history of one family in this Baltic region.

Tone

“Fantastic” is the first observation one makes about the tone of this film. Events are extreme. A woman hides a man from the police beneath her expansive four skirts. While she is being questioned by the police in the middle of a potato field, he impregnates her. Later a birth canal is observed by the child who is to be born. Three years later, the main character decides to grow no longer. All these events are fantastic, beyond belief, and yet together they set the moral parameters of this story.

Later the fantastic is joined by the macabre. Oscar’s parents observe eels being caught in the sea. A dead horse’s head yields the fresh eels that will be dinner. The wife is revolted, and yet later she kills herself by overeating fish. Even later, the father is killed by choking on his Nazi Party pin—he had tried to hide it from a Russian by swallowing it. All these events are symbols of the relationship of life to death in the period of the Third Reich. In the end, all the death symbols—the swastika, the bodies of men and animals—prove to be toxic. They kill all of Oscar’s parents.

Seconds

The Main Character and His Goal

The main character in the film Seconds is Arthur Hamilton, a 55-year-old banker who no longer finds meaning in his life. Although married, father of a married daughter and a bank vice president, Arthur Hamilton has no enthusiasm for life. As he says about his wife, “We get along.” That statement captures his sense of his life. His goal is to change, to be “reborn.”

The Antagonist

The company that promises to recreate Arthur Hamilton and to totally alter his life is the antagonist. Although it undertakes extensive plastic surgery and physically relocates him from Westchester to Malibu, the company in fact completely controls his life.

The Catalytic Event

Arthur receives a call from an old friend, who has himself been reborn. This contact begins the process of Arthur’s rebirth.

The Resolution

Arthur decides he wants to go back to his old life and so informs the company. Furthermore, he will not cooperate with them to find a replacement for himself. The company destroys Arthur, now called Tony Wilson, using his body to help another reborn client.

The Dramatic Arc

The journey that Arthur Hamilton, 55-year-old banker, will take is to be transformed into a 35-year-old artist, Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), living in Malibu. Much effort is put into acclimatizing Arthur/Tony to his new life. Many company employees and other “reborns” participate. When Arthur/Tony finally feels comfortable in his new life (he has the love of a woman, a relationship), a drunken indiscretion about who he really is breaks the facade. His lover in fact is an employee of the company. His neighbors are all linked to the company. Totally disillusioned, Arthur/Tony returns to Westchester. There he visits his wife under the pretext of securing one of her husband’s paintings. There he discovers what his wife thought of her husband—that he had been dead long before he was the victim of a hotel fire (the ruse to cover his transformation from Arthur Hamilton to Tony Wilson). Now he understands—it was not his age; it was his attitude toward life. He wants to go back. He is returned to the company in New York, but he is noncooperative. He does not know it, but his fate is sealed—he no longer has any value for the company. It kills him.

The Narrative Style

Seconds is plot-driven, focusing on Arthur Hamilton’s transformation into Tony Wilson and then his desire to become Arthur Hamilton again. Throughout, he is a victim of his own alienation and his unhappiness. When he wakes up, it’s too late.

The character layer of this story is principally the failed relationship with his wife and the developed relationship with a younger woman in Malibu. Only later does he discover she is an employee of the company. The two male relationships that are explored are with his college friend Charlie, the reborn who brings him to the company, and with the paternalistic head of the company. In both cases, Arthur is naive enough to believe what they say.

The character layer throughout demonstrates Arthur’s poor judgment. He keeps making bad choices. Only his wife seems genuine, strong, and nonmanipulative—and he walks away from that relationship in order to be reborn.

Together these two layers portray how alienation can promote poor judgment, and in the end, self-destruction.

Tone

The tone of Seconds is extreme. Both the urban and rural settings focus on isolation and separateness. Also there is paranoia. Arthur is pursued in Grand Central Station by a faceless man. When he first visits the company, he finds himself in a slaughterhouse. Critical moments are ritualized— the operation, the grape-crushing sequence in Santa Barbara where Arthur/Tony loses his inhibitions, the drunken scene at his home in Malibu. All these scenes are rituals, meant to mark Arthur/Tony’s rites of passage. Key in both environments (his past life setting and his new life setting), is the fact that the tone is excessive and far from realism.

Writing Devices

There are many stories that can be framed in terms of a moral tale, but not every story can carry the excessive elements of hyperdrama. Stories that are factual, or too recent in terms of their relationship to a specific historical or cultural event, are difficult to render as hyperdrama.

This, however, still leaves many options. Stories about children often lend themselves to the moral tale. They also lend themselves to excess and fantasy. A good example here is Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies. Novels such as Orwell’s Animal Farm have their filmic equivalent in George Miller’s Babe in the City. Stories about animals, such as the above mentioned, are naturals for hyperdrama. So too are stories set as fables. Even a film like Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait becomes hyperdrama when issues of birth, rebirth, angels, and Heaven become active elements of the narrative. Finally, stories about mythical figures or periods, such as Vincent Ward’s The Navigator, work well as hyperdrama. In these stories, the characters are either archetypal or they are metaphors serving the moral tale that is at the heart of the narrative.

The Use of Character and a Goal

Character in hyperdrama has to be a vehicle for the story rather than a source of identification for the viewer. We have to stand apart from the character. Consequently, it’s not important that we care deeply about the character. But it is important for us to understand the character and why the individual does what he or she chooses to do.

The vigor of the character’s striving toward a goal is very important in hyperdrama. If Little Red Riding Hood is not eager to go through that forest, her story and its moral will simply have no impact. The characters and their goals in hyperdrama are internally far more complex than they seem to be on the surface. That passion, that commitment to a goal, is vital. Without it, the resistance to that goal offered by the plot will not be enough to qualify the main character as a superhero or a supervictim. The goal is key, but again, identification—recognizability as we find it in melodrama—is not necessary and may even prove counterproductive in hyperdrama.

The Use of Plot to Create a Superhero

Moral tales and fables function on a mythic level. In this respect, writers and teachers of scriptwriting who ascribe to Joseph Campbell’s ideas about storytelling are right.1 A main character goes on a mythic journey. He or she faces many challenges and setbacks. The journey, once completed, makes him or her a hero. In hyperdrama, this heroic position is in the end a byproduct of the scale of the plot. Whether that plot is a war, a difficult journey, or other challenge, the ritualization of the confrontations with the opposing forces makes the character a hero. Think of Mad Max in George Miller’s three “Mad Max” films.2 Think also of the everyman coffee salesman in Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man (1974).

The larger the scale of the plot, the more likely we will experience the main character in a way that is in keeping with the genre’s expectations.

The Proximity of Hyperdrama to Children’s Fairy Tales

If you think of the story form of the fairy tale, it will help you fashion your story as hyperdrama.

The story is narrated by someone. It is told as a cautionary tale, a life lesson, so that the child will see in the fate of the character a warning to him or herself. But that tale has to be told in such a way as to grip the child’s imagination. Also, the resolution has to contain the message, the moral, and the reason for the telling. Always, the teller, the narrator, is outside the story (as we are), looking in. This is the approach so often used in children’s fairy tales, and it is useful in conceptualizing a story in the hyperdrama form.

Think for a moment of children’s fairy tales—the stories of the Brothers Grimm, of Hans Christian Andersen, of noses that grow long when lies are told, of children too innocent or naive not to follow a pied piper—and you have the driving force behind the hyperdrama. The fairy tale is a life lesson, a moral tale wherein the moral is the driving force for the telling of the story. A narrator or storyteller takes us through the cautionary tale.

The Structure

The search for structure finds a shape in the moral lesson that is being taught. The story of Excalibur, the Arthur–Guinevere–Lancelot story, has been told quite often. The same story has been told as a love story (Cornel Wilde’s The Sword of Lancelot), as an action-adventure (David Zucker’s First Knight), and as a musical (Joshua Logan’s Camelot). John Boorman’s treatment of the story as hyperdrama arises out of a structural choice to make the story a cautionary tale of idealism (of what might be in the future, and of more primitive values—vanity, violence, impulse). Here Camelot is an ideal, albeit temporary, created by King Arthur. His ideal kingdom is destroyed by his rage and jealousy at Lancelot and Guinevere, and his consequent loss of faith in his original goals. The story is really about the importance of an ideal in the forging of a more secure future. It is also about the importance of leadership. As first Merlin and later Parsifal remind Arthur, the king and the land are one. If the king is strong, idealistic, and wise, the land will flourish. If he is lost, the land will be lost. The moral lesson to be conveyed will help you form the structure for your story.

The Catalytic Event

Where you start your story will help you elevate your main character to the status the genre needs. The intervention of angels and Heaven in George Bailey’s attempted suicide is the catalytic event that elevates Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life to the importance and meaning the genre requires. In Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, the wedding of a character disdained by the entire community sets the boundaries for the meaning of sacrificial love the wife has for her crippled husband. The main character is a limited, low-status person, and yet her love heals her husband.

The catalytic event provides the narrative with the elasticity it needs to make the moral lesson effective. Without it, the narrative would flatten or be too realistic for hyperdrama.

Tone

There is no question, you need to create an over-the-top tone for this form or genre. In this form, the authorial voice is not gentle; it screams a warning to the viewer. Therefore, the tone you should seek is one of excess; naturalism is what you should work against. Zemeckis uses irony in Forrest Gump, Kusterica uses absurdity in Underground, and Bunuel uses both absurdity and irony in The Criminal Mind of Archibald Cruz. This is where you have to take your story if it is to take advantage of the strengths of hyperdrama.

The Short Film

The short film is actually a more natural form for hyperdrama. The long film, with its complexity of character and relationships, is more immediately compatible with realism. The short film, with its relationship to the short story, the poem, the photograph, and the painting, is a more metaphorical form, and thus it adapts easily to hyperdrama.

Style in the Short Film

There is simplicity in a moral tale. All elements—character, plot, and tone— put the unfolding of a narrative in the service of the moral. Metaphor, exaggeration, unnatural events and characters can all be brought to bear on the moral purpose of the story. Even a filmmaker as grounded in realism as Bergman found in The Seventh Seal (1956), for example, that he had to move away from realism. The moral tale—no man can escape mortality—is his subject, and so death and a plot specifically about the spread of Bubonic Plague, the “Black Death,” are his instruments.

The purpose of the narrative, a moral tale, dictates an imaginative, non-naturalistic treatment of the subject. This is the first observation we can make about hyperdrama and the short film.

The Main Character and His or Her Goal

As in the long film, the main character and his or her goal serve the moral rather than inviting identification. The character tends to be a vehicle, even in stories where he becomes a superhero (Star Wars). The voice of the writer-director, his or her affiliation to the moral rather than to the character, distances us from character. Nevertheless, the main character does have a well-defined goal, and it carries him or her forward into the narrative.

The Role of Plot

Plot is very important in hyperdrama. It provides the scale of the story. Unlike in other genres, it is critical to the success of the narrative. In the short film, the plot will have far more effect than character. The resulting sketchiness of the characters helps the metaphorical presentation of the narrative.

The Structure

The first important element to the structure is the presence of a narrator, someone who will tell the story. In Lisa Shapiro’s Another Story, it is the grandmother. In Juan Carlos Martinez-Zaldivar’s The Story of a Red Rose, it is a narrator-storyteller who is not visible but acts as the aural guide to the story.

A second observation about structure is that there is very rapid characterization, and the plot is introduced quickly. The plot is presented in the form of a journey—a journey whose purpose is to illustrate the moral.

Tone

As in the long film, the tone is far from realistic and in fact is quite free—it can be fantastic, or it can be very dark. In both cases, the tone has to make credible events and characters that do not exist in our everyday lives. The presentation of the material should sharpen the passion the author feels regarding the moral tale that underlies the narrative.

A Case Study in Character

Lisa Shapiro’s Another Story, reprinted in Appendix B, is a cautionary tale about individual differences and how those in power treat those who are different. A grandmother tells a story to her two granddaughters. In an undefined place in the past, there are two young girls (the age of the two hearers of their grandmother’s story). The period seems medieval. The small girls do not like wearing mittens over their black fingernails. One day they are arrested by the knights of the king—because they have black fingernails. They are imprisoned. In prison, one sister saves the other. The story ends with the epilogue: the evil king is overthrown and those with black fingernails no longer have to be afraid. Back in the present, the question is asked whether the story is real and where the grandmother heard it. The film ends with an image of the concentration camp numbers tattooed onto the grandmother’s arm; we realize that the story was a fable based on her Holocaust experience.

The characterizations here are simple: the grandmother and the two girls are the principals. There are knights and parents, but all of their characterizations remain on the level of symbol. The grandmother exudes warmth, and the children exude energy and curiosity. Beyond that, everyone is a symbol serving the plot.

Case Study in the Role of the Antagonist

Dead Letters Don’t Die, by Anais Granofsky and Michael Swanhaus, is a modern fable about hope and hopelessness. The main character, a postal worker, is always hopeful. His boss, the woman he loves from her letters, and the Santa Claus character all represent urban cynicism. They fulfill the role of antagonist, not in the sense that the main character hates them, but rather in terms of the social and psychological attitude they represent. They have given up hope. The plot, the effort to save the world by throwing money from the top of the Empire State Building, is not a success. So Fupper’s conversion of Amanda, the effort to rescue her, to offer her his love, becomes his offer of hope. To save one person without hope is to save the world. This is the moral of the Granofsky/Swanhaus screenplay. It is unusual in that we care about the fate of those who represent hopelessness, the antagonists in the narrative.

Case Study in Plot and Tone

Juan Carlos Martinez-Zaldivar’s The Story of the Red Rose is based on a fairy tale by Oscar Wilde. Every effort is made to be faithful to the fairy tale. This is the story of how red roses came to be, and it depends on the interplay of humans with creatures who are partially human, partially nymphlike, called “nighting birds.” The time is the distant past. A scientific human pursues the Infanta (princess). She asks of him a red rose to match her dress at the ball where they will dance together (if her request is met). But red roses do not exist. She has set him an impossible task.

He captures a female nighting bird, Sirah, and kills another, a male. He studies them anatomically. Rather than sacrifice the female nighting bird, he frees her. She loves him for it and tries to be more human, but he is consumed by the Infanta.

Sirah approaches first the yellow rose bush and then the white rose bush in her quest to create a red rose. The white rose bush tells her that there is only one way. It gives her a white rose that she must plunge deep into her heart, and her blood will dye the white rose red. The white rose bush asks if it is for a human. She acknowledges it and sacrifices her life to create the necessary rose.

The human finds the rose and her body. He buries her. He rushes with the rose to the Infanta, but he is rebuffed. Someone else has offered her rubies. The scientist is crushed, but red roses grow from Sirah’s grave, and this is how red roses began to grow.

The plot of The Story of the Red Rose is Sirah’s search for a way to create a red rose. It involves a journey that leads her from love to self-sacrifice and death. The moral is implied that only through self-sacrifice and love can true beauty (the red rose) be created. As we expect in hyperdrama, the plot far outweighs the characterizations of Sirah, the scientist-human, and the Infanta.

In terms of tone, this fairy tale is marked by beauty, violence, grace, and sacrifice. Its characters are paradoxical—the humans are not graceful, but the half-humans (the nighting birds) and the white bush are honest and filled with grace. Naturalness is nowhere to be seen. A formal, ritualistic quality shapes the nonnaturalistic tone and fills the story with beauty and horror, as suits the moral.

Hyperdrama requires such excess to assure the foregrounding of the moral (the voice of the author) over any identification with the character in the narrative.

Notes

1. J. Campbell, Hero With 1000 Faces (New York: World, 1965).

2. Mad Max, Road Warrior, Beyond Thunderdome.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
3.88.254.50