Jun
27
Arcs and Endings (2)
Filed Under Article Series, Free Content
Should you write a happy ending?
Commercial common sense will tell you: yes, you should.
Robert McKee says: “Tell the truth.” (see the previous post)
McKee means: your story needs to reflect your worldview. If you contradict whatever you believe in for the sake of commerce, you will fail. During his Arthouse seminar, he gives the example of Bergman’s THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, where Bergman forced an ending upon the story in which he didn’t really believe. The story didn’t work, McKee says. Even the great Bergman couldn’t go against his instinct.
The discussion about happy endings is not exactly the same as the discussion about arcs. Protagonists without arcs have starred in films with tremendous success (see the reference to Mystery Man on Film in the previous post).
Although writers with a positive world may have more success in connecting with a large audience, I believe that talented and skilled screenwriters can create stories that work, irrespective of their worldview.
First-timers will have a harder time.
Here is the dilemma: to break in, you need to write something the market wants to see. Yet you’ll have a better chance if this first spec screenplay is written from the heart. You need to tell the truth.
My advice to beginning screenwriters: see how different genres allow to make different statements about the human condition without compromising the chances of success. Horror, crime and satire are darker genres than romance, adventure or kids movies.
Finally, to illustrate McKee’s point, below is a transcript of his introduction to THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY for British television.
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Robert McKee: I saw my first Bergman film in Detroit, Michigan when I was 15. It was The Virgin Spring, a tale of revenge for rape and murder. Next came a comedy, Smiles of a Summer Night. After that Brink of Life, a social drama set in a maternity ward, Monika: A Teenage Love Story, Hour of the Wolf, a psycho-horror film. Bergman was like a one-man film studio bringing a fresh eye to many genres and by word of mouth filling cinemas everywhere. But then in the sixties he became a creature of the critics. They treated his films as intellectual crossword puzzles and drove the audience back behind a barricade of critic-speak – symbology, metaphysics, alienation – until it was impossible to watch a Bergman film without the feeling that you were taking an exam. And that’s where he stands today, on a pedestal, intimidating, distant, watched only by a tiny circle of cineastes. I think that over the years we forgot what the early audiences instinctively knew – above all else, Ingmar Bergman was a master storyteller.
Bergman’s difficult. Not to understand, but emotionally tough. He shines light into the darkest corners of life. He asks us to empathise with complex characters who, although very human, are not particularly loveable. Then he spins his stories over an emotional rollercoaster, taking us on a quest for the truth, truth that explodes the little lies that make life comfortable. To watch a Bergman film you have to be willing to invest all your humanity, to open yourself up, to care about life so much you want to know the truth though heaven may fall. It is not intellect Bergman demands so much as courage.
Bergman’s also difficult because he explains nothing. He doesn’t force his ideas into the mouths of his characters. Like Hollywood he tells stories visually, writes naturalistic dialogue and layers his meaning in the subtext. Unlike Hollywood his films are not tales of wish fulfilment, telling seductive lies about how everything works out for the best.
1a: The Film
“for now we see through a glass, darkly:
but then face to face; now I know in part;
but then I shall know even as also I am known”
I Corinthians 13.12
RMK: In 1961 Bergman made a very personal film he called Through A Glass Darkly. When finished however it somehow embarrassed him. He was very reluctant to talk about it. Prior to THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY Bergman went through a crisis of faith. His father was a Lutheran minister, his mother an extremely pious woman and he was raised in a repressive home. Then as he reached middle age he realised he did not believe in God.
Professor Inga-Stina Ewbank, Leeds University: He was putting four people on an island and putting them on a couch as it were. I think he was trying to use these four people to work out some of his own problems with his faith. I do think it is very much a film of an autobiographical nature in that he is struggling to find reasons to believe and showing how difficult it is to believe.
RMK: For many thoughtful people the idea of a protective, all knowing God is a false hope, illusionary. And so they grapple with this question. How can one live in a world in which values are so appallingly subjective, a world that contains no religious or ethical certainty, a world where relativity has spread from physics to morality? When Bergman felt the bottom drop out he asked “if God doesn’t exist, on what do you base your life?” His answer was love, the human capacity to love. And so he set out to make a film that says love is a substitute for God.
Ib: The Story
RMK: Until I saw THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY I thought that for a film to go to the end of the line, to reach the limits of human experience it had to go ‘out there’, into the world surrounding the characters. With this film I discovered you don’t have to go ‘out there’ if you know how to go ‘down here’. Bergman invented a family spending a holiday at a cottage on a Baltic island. The story of Karin, her father, her brother, her husband. When we meet the family they seem affectionate, cheerful but we quickly see they are in crisis. The father’s a novelist – this man is so repressed he cannot live life, rather he cannibalises it for his art. In fact he is secretly studying his schizophrenic daughter for material for a novel. All the while this tormented woman craves understanding and acceptance yet finds herself with a patronising husband who treats her like a child while pestering her for sex. As she clings to her sanity by her fingernails she is surrounded by weak, troubled men who turn to her for support. But her sanity gives way to hallucinations and she becomes convinced that God will appear to her from behind an attic wall. Humiliated by her husband, she seeks help from her brother, telling him of the miracle she waits for in the attic room. He tries to help but he is so driven by his adolescent sexuality that when in her madness she reaches out to him, they fall into incest. When the father discovers what happened he feels crushed – by self pity. Karin feels sorry for him, and knowing that his only interest in her is for her insanity, gives him that gift. She kneels on the attic floor in prayer and as her father watches goes through living hell when God appears as a grotesque spider with a snarling human face that crawls up her leg and tries to enter her. After this family’s been ripped inside out father and son come face to face and finally manage to bridge the great distance between them. The father comforts his son with an idea: although God may not exist, the love they have for each other gives their lives meaning.
II : Crafts
RMK: Depth I think is a word we sometimes use too easily when we talk about deep meaning, deep character, but with Bergman I don’t know any other. THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY has haunted me for years and made me ask how does he do it? How does he take us on this plunge to rock bottom?
IIa: Exposition
RMK: To begin with after more than two dozen films Bergman had accumulated an extraordinary level of screenwriting craft. He could for example make his exposition invisible. As we watch the film we absorb a great density of biographical information but we are never aware of it. We land in a story that unfolds rapidly and yet indirectly, invisibly, we learn. And the key to this is that Bergman converts his exposition to ammunition. His characters of course know themselves, they know their world, their history, so he lets them use what they know as ammunition in their struggle to get what they want. For example, when the son-in-law Mark competes with David the father for control of Karin’s life Martin says he sent a letter to David in Switzerland. Martin stings David and wins a point in their struggle but indirectly we just learned that David’s an artist so obsessed with his work that others are afraid to bother him even with news of his daughter’s mental illness.
Later (on the shipwreck) David begs Karin for forgiveness. We learn how he lost his wife and get a deep insight into the guilt and essential weakness of the man. What’s even more amazing with Bergman is how little facts he gives us in relationship to our deepening comprehension. All we actually know about their histories is the professions of the men, the hospitalisation of the daughter, the boarding school for the son, the death of the mother, little else. But these few facts are carefully selected so that we feel that we know everything. This is what I mean by ‘treats us like adults’. Bergman knows that an intelligent audience can take an implication and fill in the gaps.
ISE: One thing that doesn’t necessarily come over in the subtitles I think is an extraordinary sense for a kind of slightly ritualised language and listening to it without reading the subtitles you do realise how he doesn’t have a Shakespearean verbal imagination but he does have an imagination for cutting down the language again and making it sound as if you can hear the reverberations all the time behind it of that I Corinthians 13 where the title comes from – it’s that kind of simple language.
IIb: Angles and Edits
RMK: Bergman also knows how to stage a scene, he’s directed as much theatre as film. Then as a filmmaker he brings the camera to the staged work, composing, shooting and editing shots that express the inner life. When David and Martin talk on the boat they are openly hostile, arguing about who loves Karin the most, but in the end they reach an understanding. Bergman starts the scene with them at opposite ends of the boat shot in singles, then he brings them together into a two shot but never face to face. Then he ends with David touching Martin’s arm. The surface of the scene portrays a rational communication that brings about trust but the angles and the editing make us feel that these sympathies are very tentative and shallow. In the next scene brother and sister are in fierce conflict and confusion. Karin takes Minus to the attic and shares her secret of the whispering voices and the coming of God. Poor Minus is lost and can’t grasp what she means and yet Bergman shoots them in tight two shots so that we feel that although they don’t rationally understand each other, emotionally they are in deep communication. Bergman’s camera isn’t there simply to record what is said and done but to take us into the inner life of what is thought and said.
IIc: Using coincidence
Bergman’s films create tight knit universes in which there are no accidents. Looking back on that scene in the boat, David tells a story about a recent suicide attempt in Switzerland in which he was saved when his car by coincidence stalled with its two front wheels hanging over a cliff. Out of this experience he says he was reborn with a new love for his family. The style of dialogue is in sharp contrast with the rest of the film, it sounds like a bad novel, making us suspect that David has just concocted an outrageous lie, but that’s Bergman’s only clue and now we have to go to work. Why would David lie about such a thing? Perhaps he fantasised about suicide and thinks that makes him a deep feeling, interesting man. Confessing this private pain makes him sincere even if it never happened. One complex twist of thought after another that leads us into the depths of this hollow man’s self obsession. Later Bergman does something even more fascinating with coincidence. When Karin is on her knees praying she says the door will open and God will appear. In the corner of the room is a closed, empty closet. The moment is electric with emotion. Suddenly the closet door of its own accord slowly swings open. Karin explodes in a frenzy of terror as if something was attacking her. Now the miracles arrives at the very moment Karin needs it – how? Their cottage is on an island so the ambulance is a helicopter and it descends, thunderingly loud, casting a spider-like shadow on the wall. If we thought about it I guess we’d say it was the vibrations of the helicopter that swung open the close door, but that’s just an explanation. It’s still pure coincidence that just when Karin was praying for a miracle, helicopter and door joined forces to give it to her. In the hands of another filmmaker that twist would be jeered at as a deus ex machina, a favourite device of hack writers, the use of coincidence to get ending. But Bergman pulls it off. Starting with the whisperings from behind the wall, Karin’s acute sensitivity to nature, her deep belief in and need for a miracle – Bergman has urged us to hope for a supernatural happening. Her passion is at such a fever pitch that it becomes a synchronistic event – meaningful coincidence around a centre of tremendous emotion. He takes us to the underside of reality and give us a sense of the meaningfulness of absurdity.
IId: Imagery
RMK: For THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY he designed an image system which I think is magnificent, a design to poetically express opposing worlds. Compare these two scenes: David and Martin on their boat have a cool, rational discussion under a bright sky in which they lie and evade the truth but manage to touch each other with understanding. Then a storm drives Karin and Minus into the dark belly of a shipwreck where they meet in mad, animal passion, then silence. After the incest, Minus waits with Karin but his thoughts are worlds away. When David arrives to talk to Karin, Bergman moves them back into the light under the hatch. So in the storylines involving tragic experiences the image systems are darkness, nature and the supernatural, closed faces, sexuality and isolation. In the positive plotlines the scenes are dominated by light, intellect, open spaces, verbal communication and togetherness.
IIe: Structure and pattern
RMK: Bergman called this a chamber film and the structure is very like chamber music in which a few instruments state a theme then break off into duets, solos, back to ensemble. In Bergman’s treatment however the orchestration of the ensemble scenes is one of slow disintegration. He opens the film with a four shot and laughter, then goes off into duets and solos to create the various plotlines but each time he tries to bring back a family scene we see it falling to pieces. The father’s betrayal breaks the group, Minus runs off, Karin escapes into madness. Now when we pull back and survey the grand design of this film, we see six plotlines that begin, progress and climax:
- Karin rejects her insensitive husband
- Commits incest with her brother
- Suffers the rape of the spider God
- David reconciles first with his son-in-law
- then daughter
- then son
The three Karin stories end negatively and the three David stories positively, but the Karin and David climaxes alternate in this order: Karin, David – negative, positive, negative, positive, negative, positive. It’s a design conceived to use story structure as rhetoric so it argues the point. Not this, but this; not darkness but light; not animality but intellect; not isolation but community; not sexuality but communication; not selfishness but love.
III: Meaning
RMK: And yet after experiencing the flowing force of this film I ask myself: do I believe it? Does the design of a negative climax always followed by a positive really convince me that love can quell the dark forces of human nature, that love will substitute for God? Is the overall feeling of this film positive? I think not. I think on balance this film leaves us with a sense of bitter irony, where the quest for absolute ideals leads to tragedy, and my reasons for feeling this are simple: Bergman gives three times as much screen time to his negative ending stories as the positive. His imagery surrounding the positive stories is pleasant but the imagery expressing the negative is far, far more powerful. The negative stories turn on actions – hallucinatory rape, incest, sexual rejection. The positive stories turn on internalised experiences expressed in talk. The external actions seem deep and true because they bring terrible consequences. All that is positive is dry, cerebral, tainted with self deception, white lies and ultimately swept aside by the passion, pain and honesty of the negative.
Michael Tanner, Philosopher: It does seem to me to be gruelling, really gruelling, but one has the fascination of seeing very serious issues debated among character organised by somebody with an extraordinarily acute feeling and intelligence. It’s done in a way that seem to me exemplary, especially for us now when we have to have a kind of smirk on our faces before we can say anything serious.
RMK: What the male characters have done through their actions and neglect is destroy Karin, the only selfless, loving person in the film. They can say she is surrounded by love but she’s the one going back to the asylum and the electric shock treatments. If in the final scene between David and Minus the father had said “I’m cancelling my trip to Yugoslavia and staying here with you, son”, if David could find it in his heart to take action on his beliefs and sacrifice something he wants for his child then maybe I’d be convinced. But Bergman’s too honest – he knows that men like David can give advice but never take action, he knows that most people will not sacrifice their little trips to Yugoslavia even if their children just went through the most horrific experience imaginable.
Professor Inga-Stina Ewbank: I think what Bergman has given us, if you like, is a twofold ending, sending us away weighing against each other the dark ending of the girl descending forever into her incurable illness on the one hand, God having proved to be a spider; and on the other hand a ray of hope that comes from the kind of humanism of father and son. The father telling his son that God is love, the son discovering the miracle that his father has actually spoken to him “Papa talked!”. I think that the second, the upbeat, can easily seem somewhat sentimental but I do think that there is enough pressure and sincerity behind it for us to take it seriously, but I do not think that it can predominate at least with the two of them together.
RMK: And so I take no comfort from the film, but it does inspire me in this sense: although God may not exist and love will not substitute for Him there is one idea expressed here and that is the truth, or better the pursuit of the truth. What I see is a great artist drawn to find the truth and coming to realise that truth is far more that intellectual invention. Truth is not merely in the head, but in the heart. Ultimately, Bergman listened to his instincts, his innate sense of honesty and let that guide the work. The result is a film so rich in irony, so complex yet clear that out of the gloom and darkness something shines like a diamond: the beautiful struggle between intellect and integrity. He’s a brilliant man who went through a shattering emotional experience and decided to base a film on that. He set out to prove what he desperately wanted to believe and carefully designed this film as a rhetorical argument in dramatic form to make his point. But then his instincts, his integrity, his sense of truth overwhelmed his intellectual ambitions and somehow all the scenes that say the opposite of what he believed overwhelmed the other and as a result the film says that rather than love showing the way to happiness, the more likely fate is that you will end up alone, desperate, blinded with self deception. That intellectualising about love, all this talk about love is pitifully meek in the face of the great destructive forces that inhabit human nature.
A Fulmar TV Production for Channel 4, 1992.
Directed by Gary Johnstone.
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