13

The Melodrama

Perhaps it’s best to start this chapter with a bit of fact and fiction about melodrama. First the fiction.

Over the years, the term melodrama has increasingly taken on a negative implication. It is associated with soap opera, exclusively with romantic women’s stories, and with a dramatic device best characterized as exaggeration (as opposed to realism, or a story that is simply more believable). Although all of the above has a hint of truth, each is too narrow an approach to melodrama and keeps us away from the usefulness of melodrama as a form.

Turning to the “truth” about melodrama, what then do we mean by the term? A good starting point is to suggest that melodrama at its most basic concerns itself with stories that are essentially realistic. Within that general description, melodrama can be a story about ordinary people in ordinary situations as well as a domestic story about a king (Lear) or a prince (Hamlet). Melodrama can be a relationship story of the privileged (James Cameron’s Titanic) or of the famous (Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen). Melodramas can be presented in the form of a novel (Judith Guest’s Ordinary People), a play (Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge), or as a film (Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve). It can be a long film or a short one. Graham Justice’s A Children’s Story and Elke Rosthal’s My Name Is Rabbit are both short films that are melodramas. Both will be discussed later in this chapter.

General Characteristics of Melodrama

Realistic People in Realistic Situations

Melodramas, unlike fables, are stories that may have happened, or that at least in the mind of the audience, could have happened. That means that the supernatural and the fabulous are the subjects, or surroundings, of other genres. In the melodrama, the story is about you or me, or our grandparents, or about someone we believe exists or did exist. This recognizability affects every element of the melodrama—its characters, its shape, its tone. Although not all forms of drama are accurate renderings of reality (rather, they are exaggerated forms of reality), melodrama is essentially constrained by this notion of recognizability and consequently believability.

To get more concrete, melodramas on television such as ER and Chicago Hope focus on the lives of doctors and patients. Hospital bureaucracy, societal problems, love affairs, and the struggle for life are the story elements of these successful series. The characters are well defined, differentiated, and above all, very human. Hope, fear, passion, commitment, power, and powerlessness define the characters and their goals. But key to our involvement is that we in the audience know these people; they are you and me.

This quality of the melodrama is recognizable in the most highly acclaimed films—Titanic, Shine, The English Patient. The subject matter of these recent successes echoes the famous melodramas from the past. Ambition is at the heart of All About Eve. Family violence is the core issue of Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors. The consequences of divorce are the subject of Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer. Racism is the core of Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird, as it is of Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season.

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

The Dominance of Relationships as a Story Element

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

In George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1952), the main character deeply explores two love relationships, one with a working-class coworker, the other with a privileged debutante. These relationships dominate the story. In Peter Yates’s Breaking Away (1979), the main character explores his relationships with his peers (a group of working-class mates who do not go to college) and a relationship with a privileged college student. In order to pursue this latter relationship, he pretends to be a college student as well. To hide more deeply his true identity from her, he also pretends to be Italian. In Anthony Minghella’s Truly, Madly, Deeply, the main character struggles between loyalty to a dead lover and the life-affirming urge to form a relationship with a man who is alive and capable of a future. Her struggle is very much between remaining rooted in a tragic past and risking a viable future. The character in Graham Justice’s A Children’s Story is a 10-year-old from a broken family. Her mother doesn’t have time for her, and the bus driver who does have time for her is accused of sexually abusing her.

The Nature of the Main Character’s Struggle

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

A clearer example is the young child in a family drama. Relative to his adult parents, the child is powerless. So too is a woman in a culture where male dominance prevails. Thus, a story like Mike Nichols’s Working Girl is one of a bright woman trying to make her way in a workplace that is a male power structure. To complicate this story, Nichols places a high-status woman at the head of the company. The main character’s working-class roots make class the overlay to the female/male power grid. Consequently the female, working-class main character has two layers of the power structure to contend with.

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

In Breaking Away, the bicycle race that concludes the film offers the main character a chance to win the race, but in doing so he loses the college girl with whom he was infatuated. To win he has to drop his pretense. No longer a foreign student, no longer a college student, he acknowledges his working-class self. He wins the race (plot) but loses the girl (goal).

The Adaptability of Melodrama

Although melodrama tends to be a character-driven proceeding, whether without plot (Truly, Madly, Deeply) or with plot (A Place in the Sun), it is not rigidly so. The form can be adapted if the story benefits. Specific examples will illustrate.

George Miller’s Lorenzo’s Oil is a melodrama in which the mother and to an extent, the father, initially believe they are powerless when their son is afflicted with a fatal illness. Rather than accept his fate, they fight the medical establishment (power structure), which views their son as raw material for scientific experiments—experiments that will enhance the doctors’ reputations but not save the son. The parents decide to explore science for solutions to halt the disease, and in the end they are successful. Lorenzo’s Oil uses plot in the way the thriller does—to victimize. By eluding the victimization of the plot (the disease), mother and father are victorious, and they save their son (their goal). In Lorenzo’s Oil, the adaptation of the structure of the thriller makes this melodrama unusual and powerful.

The same adaptation of plot from the thriller form makes Christopher Morahan’s Paper Mask an unusual melodrama. The main character’s goal is to pretend that he is a doctor. The threat this poses to his patients, his friends, and to himself creates the tension that relentlessly moves us through this story.

Melodrama Explores Issues That Are More Psychologically Complex Than Other Genres

Because the melodrama is essentially character-driven, and because all stories require us to form a relationship with the main character, it is critical that we understand and identify with the issues that character faces. This means that the issue must be primal, not peripheral. Consequently, it has to be an issue that touches us quickly and deeply, one that is close to each of us.

Family relations are complex, and they are the key to many of the critical issues in melodrama. Acceptance and rejection within the family, particularly between parent and child, is at the heart of many of the great melodramas—Elia Kazan’s East of Eden, Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. The problems of commitment and autonomy are at the core of melodramas like these, which focus on problematic marriages: Irvin Kershner’s Loving, Paul Mazursky’s Enemies: A Love Story. An identity crisis is at the heart of Yates’s Breaking Away and of Steve Kloves’s The Fabulous Baker Boys. Conformity vs. individuality is the central issue in Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Issues of loss, gender, sexuality, ambition, jealousy, envy, all are prime subject matter for the melodrama.

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

Melodrama Is Adaptable to the Issues of the Day

One of the most notable qualities about melodrama is how the form can be used to embrace the key social, economic, and political issues of the day. When the downturn of coal mining was a central concern of British society, films such as John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley and Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down were produced. Today, sexual abuse and incest, particularly concerning children, is a powerful issue. Films like John Smith’s The Boys of St. Vincent, Angelica Huston’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Tod Solondz’s Happiness, all attest to the power of this issue in the public consciousness.

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

This impulse is most pronounced in television—both series television and TV movies. One of the reasons melodrama is so gripping for audiences is this very malleability.

Melodrama is the Fundamental Layer of Many Genres

A biography of T. E. Lawrence or Jake La Motta, or an epic screen treatment of the religious/secular struggle of Thomas More or of the political/personal struggle of Yuri Zhivago—each of these stories has a layer of melodrama. In fact, it is the layer of melodrama that humanizes and dramatizes the story.

To be more specific, the plot of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is the story of the Arab revolt against its Turkish rulers. Lawrence led the revolt, essentially a sideshow in the larger world war of 1914–18. The progress of that revolt and its outcome is the plot of Lawrence of Arabia. The melodrama layer is the story of T. E. Lawrence, bastard of a British nobleman, a man who sees himself as an outsider in British society. This outsider affiliates himself with a group of other outsiders, Bedouin tribesmen. He unites them and is united with them, one outsider leading other outsiders against the power structure (the Ottoman Turks and the British, two distinct empires). Of course, he wins the battle but loses the war: the Arabs merely change masters, from the Turks to the British, and Lawrence has been their instrument. In a sense the melodrama is the story of Lawrence’s search for a new identity. He finds a new identity, but sadly it lasts only for a short while. Once the revolt is over, there is no place for Lawrence. He must return to his own again, to be an outsider (and soon die).

This same pattern shapes David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago. The plot is the Russian Revolution of 1917 and how its success was the ruination of the individual and of the family unit. The melodramatic layer of the film centers around Yuri Zhivago’s relationships; the Revolution always undermines the only thing he truly values, love—embodied in an intimate relationship first with his wife, then with Lara. In the end the personal losses and sacrifices are so great that Yuri is literally heartsick. Does he die of a heart attack or of a broken heart? Choose whichever interpretation you wish. The key issue here is that melodrama is the fundamental layer in biographical, sports, war, gangster, and epic films.

Motifs

To talk more specifically about melodrama, it is useful to look at eight motifs that characterize the genre. Those motifs are1

Main character and goal

Antagonist

Catalytic event

Resolution

Dramatic arc

Narrative style

Narrative shape

Tone

In order to illustrate how the motifs operate, we will look at two case studies— Antonia Bird’s Priest (1995), and Mike Van Diem’s Character (1994).

Priest

The main character and his dramatic action or goal. The main character is a young priest, new to a poor parish. His goal is to be the spiritual leader of the community. What he does not realize is that in a poor community, life is practical and difficult. There is little room here for spirituality.

The antagonist. The young priest is his own antagonist. He struggles with his issues as a man—sexuality and gender. As a gay man he struggles not only with the issue of celibacy but also with anti-gay sentiment.

The catalytic event. The young priest comes to this new community.

The dramatic arc. The dramatic arc in a melodrama is always an interior journey. The young priest learns how to be a better priest by acknowledging that he is also a man. The resolution. The priest accepts himself, and the community accepts him.

The narrative style. This particular story has both a plot (foreground story) and a character layer (background story). The background story gravitates around the issue of the priest as spiritual leader and of the man as a sexual being. The presence of another “sexual” priest in the same parish suggests sexuality is a problem for more than one Catholic priest in the Parish. The other priest, however, is heterosexual. That priest is also socially and politically active in the community, whereas the main character is concerned with the 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 powerful 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 character 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 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 followed 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 passive 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 helpful in giving amplitude to a story is the mechanical device of triangulation.

Triangulation

Triangulation is a device whereby the main character explores two opposing relationships. 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 relationship 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 unfaithful, 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 journey 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, 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 character in the melodrama is to maintain his life situation and status. His mistress 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 comedy. 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 character 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 resolution has been the end point of the story. However, a number of storytellers have begun to opt for no resolution—or to put it another way, for an 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 conclusion. 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 melodrama, 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 introduced 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 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 characterization. A choice must be made quickly in the short film. Consequently, characterizations 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 resolution 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 catalytic 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 presentation 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 to a resolution and generally implies a diminished role for characterization. In short, if you use plot, the likelihood is that it will play a dominant role in the script. There are short films, such as The Lady in Waiting (see Appendix B), where a very modest plot is used; the New York blackout is more a plot device than plot proper, but it is nevertheless the plot of The Lady in Waiting. More often, however, when a plot is used it dominates the short script. Because it does so, it bears down on the main character and his or her goal with particular intensity. If that plot does not oppose the main character’s goal, the script as a whole softens under the intensity of a character’s pursuit, with too little resistance offered to that pursuit. The result is a loss of credibility in the character. This is true for melodrama.

It’s useful to look for a moment at the situation comedy, which is the “positive” (in photographic terms) of the melodrama. This means that elements such as plot will be used in the opposite way to how they’re used in the melodrama. In Matthew Huffman’s film Secret Santa, it is Christmas time. The seven-year-old main character simply wants not to be bullied and belittled by a larger classmate. That’s his goal. The plot enables him to achieve that goal as follows: A bank robbery is carried out by six men wearing Santa Claus outfits. One escapes, but is injured in his hurry to get away. He is found by the seven-year-old, who believes he has found Santa Claus. He takes him home, where the robber hides in the basement. This is the catalytic event. In the second act, the boy befriends “Santa” and convinces him to have words with the bully. “Santa” tells the bully to be good—or no presents this year. The bully complies: the main character achieves his goal. (“Santa” is caught climbing out of the basement window.). Here the plot—robbery and its aftermath—enables the main character to achieve his goal.

Tone

Generally, the tone of the long-form melodrama is realistic. The short film has a much greater tolerance for moving away from realism. Because of the urgency of the character and his goal, or conversely, because of the intensity of the plot, subjectivity and irony both have a place in the melodrama. In this sense, the short film more readily offers the writer the option to enlist his or her voice directly in the script.

Case Studies

These case studies will illustrate how short films that are melodramas use character, structure, and tone.

Case Studies in Character

In Elke Rosthal’s My Name Is Rabbit, a young woman returns to visit the father she has not seen since she was a child. As a child, she had been a witness to her mother’s death in a car accident; her father had been driving. The current visit does not go well. Her father, an alcoholic, is inappropriately affectionate with her. He’s sexually jealous of a friend she has made at work. In fact, the visit is a disaster, but it does prompt her to recall her early life. She remembers his temper and his possessiveness toward her mother. As the story ends, she is left with a conscious feeling of her guilt for her mother’s death. She felt guilty because the accident occurred when her father swerved to avoid hitting a rabbit. He had always called her Rabbit.

In My Name Is Rabbit, the character pursues her goal of a relationship with a father who is a mystery to her. Although she discovers that a relationship is impossible, her pursuit is understandable and earnest. Because she is modest, her father’s over-the-top drinking and salaciousness is all the more shocking. By the end of the film, we understand that it is the father, rather than Rabbit, who bears the responsibility for the family tragedy.

Case Studies in Structure

Christian Taylor’s The Lady in Waiting (see Appendix B) proceeds in an Act I–Act II structure, essentially resulting in an open-ended conclusion.

In this film, the main character is asked to take a letter to New York. This event—taking the letter to New York—is not the same as the catalytic event, or turning point between acts. The turning point here is when the elevator stops as a result of the power outage. Act II is dominated by the exploration of the relationship between Miss Peach and Scarlett. From the elevator, to the apartment, to the parting of their ways, the focus is on how Scarlett influences Miss Peach. The story is character-driven; it has little plot (the power outage). The end is open, leaving us hopeful that Miss Peach will feel better about herself. She remains, however, marginalized.

Graham Justice’s A Children’s Story exemplifies the Act I–Act III structure. The main character is a six-year-old girl. The film opens with children being very playful on a school bus. The driver tells them to settle down, not to show each other their underwear. The driver seems to be a genuine friend to the main character. In the following scene, a school psychologist looks into a parallel incident, where the driver was inappropriately friendly with the children. The act ends with the driver being arrested for molesting the main character. In the next act, the investigation continues. We learn that the main character has had “numerous fathers.” The community is pressing for conviction of the driver. This requires the testimony of the main character. As the psychologist tries to learn more via play therapy, the main character is fearful about releasing a secret. Ultimately, though, she inadvertently reveals that it is the mother’s current lover who has been molesting her. The script ends with the driver freed, once again presented as a true and caring friend to the main character.

In A Children’s Story, the discovery of the true antagonist and his consequent arrest brings the story to resolution. In this sense, the long act resembles Act III of a feature film.

A Case Study in Plot

Graham Justice’s A Children’s Story also provides us with an example of the deployment of plot in the short film. In the classic sense of melodrama, plot works in opposition to the main character’s goal. In this film, the goal of the main character is to keep the family secret of sexual abuse. She does so out of fear of losing her mother’s love. The plot—the investigation into the case of sexual abuse—puts continual pressure (via the school psychologist) on the main character. As the investigation progresses, so does the pressure to reveal the secret.

As expected in a melodrama with plot, there will be resolution and, accordingly, an Act I-Act III structure. There also will be twists and turns— thus the catalytic event, the arrest of the driver; and the resolution, the arrest of the mother’s lover. What also needs to be mentioned is that the presence of plot diminishes the level of characterization in the screenplay as well as the screenplay’s dependence on the dialogue for energy. In plot-driven melodramas, the characterizations are often stereotypes, and the energy in the screenplay derives instead from the twists and turns of plot.

Case Studies in Tone

The tone of the short melodrama is usually realistic. Christian Taylor’s The Lady in Waiting and Graham Justice’s A Children’s Story are each presented realistically. This means recognizable characters in recognizable situations. The result is a dramatic arc for the main character that does not veer from the expected.

Having confirmed the expected tone of the genre, it’s important to reaffirm that tone in the short film has a wider latitude than does tone in the long-form melodrama. Two examples will illustrate the point. Ayanna Elliot’s Tough is a story of a teenager. The story is simple, “a day in the life.” But it’s a special day—the first day she menstruates. She is on the verge of womanhood. Also, her father (divorced from her mother) is to take her out for the day. The incidents in the story are as follows: She has a vicious argument with her mother. Her mother is more attentive to her female lover than she is to her daughter’s anxiety about menstruation. The main character decides to move out. Her father does not realize it, but the main character is now planning to be with him for more than the day. The main character insists on bringing a friend along. The father insists on bringing his new lover along. Needless to say, parenting is not the order of the day—rather, who can be more childish, the adults or the children, is the goal.

In order to make her point about “who is the parent here,” Ayanna Elliot uses humor and irony. If there is a consistent tone to Tough, it is irony. The tone is effective in making her point about parenting.

Emily Weissman’s Pocketful of Stones offers a very different tone. This film opens with the admission of the main character, in her late teens, into a hospital. She has attempted suicide; a failed relationship has driven her to the act. The story focuses on her hospital stay. Will she get better or worse? The story ends with her more withdrawn than ever and confined to the hospital. In between, we learn that her goal is to get out of the hospital. Although rebellious toward authority (the nurse), she is nevertheless fairly reality based. She develops a relationship with a young man, also a patient. Through his influence and control, she is coaxed into self-mutilating behavior, and she becomes increasingly withdrawn, then aggressive. She goes from talking with the psychiatrist about a release plan, to behavior troubling enough to preclude release. At the end of the story, she is worse off than she had been at the beginning.

The tone in Pocketful of Stones is expressionistic, even nightmarish, emphasizing the main character’s emotional, subjective state. By doing so, Emily Weissman puts us in her place—time is obliterated, authority figures are monsters, the hospital is a war zone. By resorting to an exceedingly subjective tone, Emily Weissman avoids the case-study approach and takes us inside mental illness. The result is very powerful. Here again, moving away from the expected tone creates a powerful and fresh experience. Here tone makes the short film quite an original experience.

Summation

The key issue in writing melodrama in the short film is that there are classic commonalties between the long and short forms—the nature of the main character’s struggle, his or her powerless against the power structure, the recognizability of character and situation, the characters living the lives that we do, and of course the narrative approach, which is essentially realist.

But the differences between long and short films are considerable. Compression of time means faster characterization and fewer characters and plot. It also means a structural choice—for an Act I–II approach or an Act I–III approach. The short film also allows the writer latitude in the area of tone. Like the short story, metaphor and poetics can work in the short melodrama in a way that the need for greater characterization and plot tends to disallow in the long film. The key in all your considerations about the short film is to be aware of these similarities and differences.

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

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
52.90.40.84