A few words on the eternal war between plot and character in the movies.
A few years ago, Mel Gibson start in a movie entitled What Do Women Want? This was the movie that first made me feel as though the pace of the story with all its incidents and episodes had been crammed into a running time that was far too short. I got the sense of a clock that had been wound up far too tightly, so that its spring was forcing the mechanism to unwind in an overly hasty manner.
There was in short not a single pause or moment to reflect or draw breath – either for the characters or the audience.
Now, I could defend the practice of this movie by referring to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. In those times it was considered de rigueur for comedies to proceed at a frenetic, even frantic pace. The breathlessness of the pace was thought to enhance laughter in the audience, I suppose, but really underneath that lay the motive to stop the audience from thinking – because if we think about what’s going on in those movies, we will quickly realize how absurd the promise and motivations are of all concerned.
What Do Women Want? could be taken as an example of a screwball comedy, but it also wants to say something and examine the personalities of the characters involved. Also, the movie employs a central device out of fantasy and takes up valuable running time trying to explain or justify this device whereby Mel Gibson’s character is transformed into a woman. (I think this is one of my strongest objections to the movie – the idea is so fantastic, and the reason behind having this device work is so obvious, that we don’t need any more justification for it than its own result.)
The character Mel Gibson plays is certainly stressed out, but I don’t think that’s any reason to give the audience a headache.
I usually side with those who say that plot should predominate over character in the construction of stories. And here I seemed to be saying that plot has so overwhelmed the characters in the movie suffers from it. But I am also suggesting that the audience cannot be pushed too hard throughout the running time of any film.
Indeed, ever since George Lucas finished his first Star Wars trilogy, and he and Steven Spielberg teamed up to create the first of the Indiana Jones movies, there has been a dominant theory in a lot of Hollywood entertainment films – the idea that the film is not in fact a story, but works more like an amusement park ride – a roller coaster is the usual metaphor.
A roller coaster has built into the ride pauses between plunges. The cars slow down as they are dragged toward the top of the peaks and speed up as they descend. The riders get the stuffing scared out of them on the drops but they get a chance to breathe again on the ascents. So it would seem that a lot of filmmakers who profess to make their movies work like roller coasters don’t even understand how roller coasters work.
No audience can laugh full out without pausing for the entire running length of a feature length film. If we laugh too hard in the beginning, our diaphragm muscles begin to ache and get sore – it actually starts to hurt to laugh. We need a break in order to laugh again comfortably.
This is not entirely a modern day mistake, because I remember a similar reaction when I watched the Howard Hawks movie, I Was a Male War Bride.
But it does seem to be a distressingly frequent aspect of today’s Hollywood movies. Joel Silver, the famous producer, is said to have wanted an explosion every few pages in every script he was producing. Perhaps not a literal explosion, but some big action that would take place – in the case of a comedy like What Do Women Want? the ‘explosion’ would be a gag, pratfall, or some other laugh-inducing device.
The effect on me watching this movie was that I felt increasingly alienated from the – it seemed as though the movie were moving farther away from me, or I was moving farther away from it, so that I could see the clockwork spinning with all its wheels inside wheels – I wasn’t seeing characters and I wasn’t sympathizing, let alone empathizing, with any of them. This was a shame because the movie boasts a pretty good cast who were doing their best, and it’s certainly true that the movie had something to say.
When you watch movies (especially big budget action movies) be on the lookout for this ‘overwound clockwork’ phenomenon.
Ultimately I believe that this failing is a failing of the scripts involved. The writers of these films (along with the producers giving the writers notes) and not trying to include too many episodes, characters, and devices into the film script and then, faced with limits on running times, they try to pack everything in when they edit the movie. This invariably means that moments of quietude, reflection, reaction, and relief are the ones that are cut, because they are not strictly essential to understanding the plot, and the producers are reluctant to do away with any frame depicting one of the expensive, spectacular stunts or explosions (or potential gags).
This is a limitation of theater and movies and not, in theory at least, a limitation on novels, which can run as long as you want because the reader digests a story in a novel over the course of many sittings rather than a single sitting in which he digests a play or movie. And yet in practice even the novel has limits – every story has an ideal length (or rather I suppose a range of lengths) which it supports. If a story is told in too few words it will seem thin and of less consequence than it deserves. And if a story is told in too many words it will seem padded or even boring, all bluster and roar, and of greater consequence than it deserves.
(Composed by dictation Friday 26 September 2008)
