Working With Genre II: The Melodrama and the Thriller
The melodrama and the thriller represent two extremes of genre. Although both are genres whose tone is realistic, they are opposites in terms of their structure. Simply put, the melodrama is a character-driven genre, while the thriller is a plot-driven genre. In this chapter, we will explore these two story forms not only to highlight these differences, but also to illustrate the way they incorporate narrative characteristics from each other that enhance the power of both.
The Classic Melodrama
In profiling the classic melodrama, it is useful to look at its dominant qualities. They are as follows:
• The presentation of the main character.
• The deployment of plot (how it is used in the melodrama). To put it another way, there is a genre bias for character layer over plot in the structure of the melodrama.
• The dramatic arc.
• The amplitude of the dramatic arc (which determines whether the melodrama will be a soap opera or a tragedy).
• The relationship of the dramatic arc to an issue of the day.
• Voice (which will determine whether we empathize with the main character or feel contempt toward the main character).
Although we will fully discuss these qualities of the melodrama, it is worth noting that the dramatic level of the melodrama will correlate to the sources of conflict deployed. For example, the goal of the main character is directly opposed by the antagonist. The antagonist is the principal harmer. The vigor with which the main character pursues his or her goal in spite of the antagonist will also raise the energy level in the narrative. Now we turn to the first quality, the main character in the melodrama.
The Main Character’s Goal
The first notable quality of the melodrama, the main character, is that he or she is a powerless person in pursuit of power. The power resides in a prevailing power structure that wants to maintain the status quo, thereby excluding the main character. The profile of the powerless person might be a child in an adult world, a woman in a man’s world, a senior citizen in a society obsessed with youth, a minority character in a majority world. This latter characterization might mean an immigrant, an African-American in a white majority, an Asian character in a white majority, or, conversely, a Caucasian character in an Asian majority. The matrix might also profile a homosexual character in a heterosexual society. Whatever the main character’s age, status, class, or color, the key is that the character be a powerless person in a society where the power resides in a majority that differs, in age, status, class, and/or color, from the main character.
The second notable feature of the main character is that her goal is to acquire power. Beth in Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors wants a normal family life within the Maori culture of New Zealand; she must oppose a fractured, dysfunctional, destructive family in order to achieve her goal. In Steven Soderbergh’s King of the Hill, 10-year-old Aaron wants to believe he can overcome the hardships the Depression has placed on his family. In Mike Nichol’s Wolf, the middle-aged main character, Will Randall, is fired from his editorial position to make way for a younger, aggressive man. In Agnieska Holland’s Washington Square, the young woman, Catherine, is rejected by her father and manipulated by a handsome suitor, Morris Townsend. Although her goal is to find love, men’s motives, status, and privilege clash with her goal. In a man’s world, the limits on a woman are profound. This paradigm is explored in the adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, as well as in contemporary narratives such as Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, Deepa Mehta’s Fire, and Kimberly Pearce’s Boys Don’t Cry.
Again, the main character’s goal in the melodrama is to acquire power. Positioned as a powerless person, the main character can only assume power by challenging the prevailing social and political structures.
The Dominance of the Character Layer
Because melodrama so often concerns family issues of identity and life crises, the psychological or interior life of the main character prevails over issues of career, competition, and society. In this sense, the melodrama is far more concerned with the internal life of the main character than with that character’s external life. This doesn’t mean that melodramas are not set in schools, sports arenas, or corporate towers. What it does mean is that stories set in schools, like John Duigan’s Flirting or Tony Bill’s My Bodyguard, are stories of outsiders coping with that status in a school setting that cruelly excludes them. They are not so much stories of social adjustment as they are about the more psychological or interior issues of coming of age. Another alternative presents itself in Terrence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy. Here the story is about the loss of innocence. Rigid school roles are applied to a young boy. He is accused of a theft. Such conduct demands expulsion, an action that will blacklist the boy from society for life. Here the application of those rules tests the strength of the boy’s family and implies that the school, one of the pillars of societal power, will crush the individual or the family that challenges that power. From the point of view of the family, the matter becomes one of honor. If the boy is acting honorably, he is innocent. The father then acts to uphold that honor even if the legal fees bankrupt him. How far is the father willing to go to support the family honor? This is the journey shared by both father and son in The Winslow Boy.
The measure of commitment, the psychological risk—these issues work themselves out in the character layer of the melodrama. In the character layer, the main character will explore two significant relationships that imply opposite options for the main character. The full exploration of those relationships will determine the status of the main character at the end of the narrative. In Michael Mann’s The Insider, that means for both main characters, Jeff Wigand and Lowell Bergman, that exploration will mean professional integrity or personal self-interest (careerism and its material rewards). In Naomi Foner’s Running on Empty, it means Danny, the main character, will have to choose between two options, remaining a key supporter of his family or leaving the family to fulfill his own ambitions (to study music). This set of options is complicated by a plot in which the FBI pursues Danny’s parents for a political crime committed 15 years earlier. The character layer explores the two options by developing the relationship between Danny and his father, who represents the stay option, and Danny’s relationship with a young woman whose father is the local high school music teacher. The young woman represents the freedom or self-interest option. The story evolves along a coming-of-age arc, with Danny choosing at the end to leave his family to study music at Juilliard.
A third example of the importance of character layer in the melodrama is Mike Van Diem’s Character. Here the relationships that are explored are, on the one hand, Jacob’s relationship with his parents—both of whom are cold, withholding, and in a sense emotionally abusive—and, on the other hand, Jacob’s other relationships related to work—interestingly, one male, the other female. Both Dr. de Gaankelaar and Miss Te George offer what Jacob’s parents cannot or will not offer—acceptance and emotional support.
What is important about the exploration of the character in each of these cases is that, based on the outcome, the character will or will not survive. The main character’s very existence seems to depend upon the outcome. The reason is clear: issues of identity, personal growth, and emotional independence can make or break a character. They are real issues that are visceral for all of us. We recognize them and we easily relate to them. Because of this, character layers are critical to the melodrama’s effectiveness.
The Dramatic Arc and Its Amplitude
The dramatic arc of the melodrama is the journey the main character will make in the course of the narrative. That journey can be interior or exterior. If it is the latter, the journey is enhanced if it relates to the moral education of the main character. If no moral lesson is learned, we are in essence left with a journey of behavior without reflection. We experience this kind of journey as a soap opera. If the journey is a self-reflective journey or, at the very least, insight is gained at its end, we have an emotionalized experience that moves beyond soap opera. If the dramatic arc is internal and visceral, with the very existence of the main character at stake, we experience the melodrama as a tragedy. The greater the amplitude of the dramatic arc, the more intense the experience of the melodrama.
Issues of career (Boiler Room, by Ben Younger) and significant relationships (The Best Intentions, by Bille August) can be presented along a very steep arc. Although these issues may be intense, they may not carry the impact of more interior narratives—stories of identity such as Kimberly Pearce’s Boy’s Don’t Cry, or stories of personal morality such as Horton Foote’s To Kill a Mockingbird, or stories of loss such as Lasse Hallstrom’s My Life as a Dog, or stories of limited parental acceptance such as Robert Anderson’s I Never Sang for My Father, or stories about aging such as Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, or stories about life crises such as John Sayles’s Passion Fish. These latter stories essentially address life crises and test the resolve of their characters. How the characters manage these crises is the dramatic arc of the narratives. In each case, the quality of the character’s life is at stake.
Four examples of relationship stories illustrate the point. Pamela Gray’s A Walk on the Moon tells the story of Pearl, a thirtysomething married woman in 1969. Pearl has two children and a hard-working husband, and she feels she has given up her dreams. That summer, sequestered from her husband by cottage life, Pearl falls into an affair with an itinerant, handsome young man. Will she give it all up, or will she face her life as it is—responsibilities, dour husband, etc.? These are the choices for Pearl. In the end, she opts to return to her husband. In A Walk on the Moon, the dramatic arc is gradual rather than steep.
In Diane Kurys’s Entre Nous, the main character, a young Jewish woman, marries the man who rescues her from the Nazis. The time is 1943 and the place is southern France. After the war, the main character has two children. Increasingly unhappy—or rather unfulfilled—in her marriage, the main character turns to a fun-loving female friend. These two relationships, the husband and the friend, are the two choices for the main character. Choosing her friend, the main character leaves the marriage, with bittersweet consequences for her and her daughters. In Entre Nous, the dramatic arc is more elevated than that in A Walk on the Moon. Because of this, the main character’s final choice makes for a more powerful emotional experience.
In Mogens Rukov and Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, a parent–child relationship, rather than a marriage, is explored. Christian, Helene, and Michael are the surviving adult children of Helge, a 60-year-old patriarch. Materially successful, Helge celebrates his sixtieth birthday with all of the members of his extended family. The day of the celebration and its immediate aftermath set the time frame for the narrative. The dramatic arc here, although presented in this brief time frame, is very steep. The question for Christian is whether he will accept the status quo (successful father, emotionally unsuccessful children) or whether he will challenge the myth of his father, the power of his father, and share the truth about his father—that his father raped him and his now-dead twin sister when they were children. If Christian succeeds, he and his siblings may be able to move on and be more emotionally complete adults (and consequently successful). Indeed, the challenge is effective, and, in the end, both of his siblings and even his socially graceful and superficial mother turn against Helge. In The Celebration, the dramatic arc is steep because, for a child, even if adult, challenging the father represents the ultimate power struggle; much can be gained but everything must be put at risk.
The fourth example is Emir Kusterica’s The Time of the Gypsies. The main character, Perhan, is reared by his grandmother. He helps care for his crippled sister, and his unemployed uncle lives with the family as well. The relationships that are critical in the narrative are Perhan’s relationship with women (his grandmother, his sister, and his fiancée) and his relationship with men (his uncle, his criminal patron). The issue is what kind of man Perhan will be—will he be deceitful, manipulative, and destructive like his uncle and his patron, or will he be responsible and nurturing like his grandmother? Unfortunately, Perhan opts to emulate the other gypsy men; consequently, in the end, he destroys himself. Although the dramatic arc follows the course of his relationships from young man to husband, from son to father, the dramatic arc actually becomes a life cycle, or, rather, a life circle. Perhan will come full circle as do the other gypsy men in the film; each destroys himself before his time.
Key to understanding the importance of the dramatic arc of the main character is the notion of journey for the main character. Will the journey be external, such as career advancement, or will it be internal, such as a coming of age or an adjustment to a life crisis? And will there be a measure of self-reflection in this journey? And finally, to what extent is the journey about personal values—morality—and to what extent is the journey an existential journey, concerning itself with the quality of the character’s existence? The nature of the arc will determine the depth to which we experience the melodrama.
Issues of the day are typically a reflection of clashing social and political values. These clashes are magnified by the media, thereby capturing the public consciousness. Understandably, the media’s subsequent obsession with these issues is particularly amenable to the melodrama. Issues such as the relations between men and women, the position of children in society, the newfound power of the youth culture, the mythical appeal of material culture, and the struggle for spiritual values each serve as fertile ground for the melodrama. Issues of the day change. Fifty years ago, women’s rights were viewed as a radical issue, the melting pot overshadowed minorities, there was no youth culture, and old age was an esteemed status. The melodrama adapted accordingly.
Seventy years ago, a woman who wanted too much would experience a tragic fate. She would end her life loveless, abandoned even by her children. This is Stella’s fate in Henry Wagstaff Gribble and Gertrude Purcell’s Stella Dallas. For her hubris, for her spiritual independence, Stella loses everything that she values. She’s a woman who wanted too much. Such is not the fate of ambitious women in Marlene Gorris’s Antonia’s Line or in Callie Khouri’s Thelma & Louise, or, for that matter, in Emma Thompson’s modern treatment of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. In these films from the 1990s and in those of today, the fate of the ambitious woman is vastly different from what it was in the 1930s. This is reflected in the films of each period.
These changes in societal perspective are nicely illustrated in melodramas about postwar adjustment. Melodramas about the aftermath of World War II differ profoundly from melodramas set in the post-Vietnam war period. Robert Sherwood’s Best Years of Our Lives and Nancy Dowd, Robert C. Jones, and Waldo Salt’s Coming Home make the point. In both narratives, there are characters who manage to make the adjustment and there are characters who don’t. But it is the public’s attitude toward the war that infuses all characters. And in both cases, it is that attitude partnered with the issue of postwar adjustment that makes these films gripping but so very different from one another.
Turning to issues that capture our attention today, if we look at stories about relationships, the issue is whether an individual’s rights are more important than the collective rights of the family. To put it another way, is a family a destructive trap, or is it a refuge? This is the subject matter of Alan Ball’s American Beauty, Tod Solondz’s Happiness, and Ethan and Joel Coen’s Fargo. Although each of these narratives adds a layer of satire, each also has a layer of melodrama.
Another issue today is the contemporary obsession with the material world. This is the subject of Ben Younger’s Boiler Room and of Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men. Corporate life and material wealth and their influences on relationships within families and within male–female relationships, as well as within male–male relationships, form the dramatic arcs of these narratives.
And, of course, the melodrama is an apt form to explore the contemporary obsession with celebrity. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights focuses on a young man’s career as a porn star. Michael Mann and Eric Roth’s The Insider works with the subject of a “60 Minutes” episode. Jacques Audrard’s A Self-Made Hero deals with a real-life character who recreated a more heroic army life for himself. And he succeeded!
The melodrama meshes easily with issues of the day. From a character point of view as well as from an identification point of view, the issues of the day intensify our interest in, and our relationship with, the main character. The consequence is a more intense experience of the melodrama.
Voice and the Melodrama
Voice in the melodrama tends, for the most part, to be realistic. Consequently, Joe Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, a melodrama set in the theater world, conforms to the behavior and atmosphere we expect from that world. So, too, does the presentation of the Los Angeles porno scene in Anderson’s Boogie Nights. There have, however, been challenges to this expectation of realism. The dark claustrophobia of Alan Ball’s American Beauty creates irony in most of the narrative, an irony that distances us from the main character until the last act. Irony and distancing is in play in Tod Solondz’s Happiness. The result is a stylized, almost MTV presentation of each member of a family, which prompts us to criticize the family rather than advocate the individual members.
A somewhat different experience is available in Paul Auster’s Smoke, a melodrama about a group of people who come together in a Brooklyn smoke shop. Each character comes to realize that friendship is important; it can save lives and it can save relationships; it can resurrect abandoned families and it can yield a sense of belonging in the midst of excessive transience. Friendship crosses gender, racial, age, class, and status boundaries. This modest but critical dramatic arc is facilitated by a highly stylized voice that accelerates realism and heightens the reaction of each of the characters in the narrative. In every sense, Smoke is the opposite of Happiness; however, each is far from realism.
Finally, Erick Zonca’s melodrama The Dreamlife of Angels is the story of two marginalized young women. As in the work of his Belgian contemporaries, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (Rosetta) and Frederic Fonteyne (An Affair of Love), Zonca uses a hyperrealism to involve us with these two marginalized young women, Isa and Marie. They are on a path to nowhere. We follow Isa in a relationship with a young girl in a coma. The relationship is impossible, and yet the young girl comes out of her coma. Isa, spiritually sound, also survives, and we suspect she will thrive. Marie, on the other hand, is an angry young woman who always makes poor choices. Self-destruction in relationships leads to personal self-destruction. In the end, she has broken with her only true friend, Isa, and invested herself in a relationship with a rich young man whose only desire is to amuse himself with Marie. He uses her sexually and predictably discards her. Abandoned, Marie commits suicide.
What is critical about the voice in Zonca’s melodrama is that he deeply respects, indeed loves, these two characters. As a result, we move into a close relationship with them. We move so close to Isa and Marie that the experience of the narrative is both spiritual and emotional, to the point of almost being unbearable. The same can be said of Rosetta and of An Affair of Love. This new intimacy is the voice of Zonca and the Dardennes and of Fonteyne; it differs significantly from the genre expectation of melodrama.
To pull together all of these characteristics of the classic melodrama we now turn to the analysis of a single melodrama, Deepa Mehta’s Earth.
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A Case Study of Classic Melodrama: Deepa Mehta’s Earth |
Earth takes place in Lahore, India, in 1947. The British will soon leave India, and the film covers the Muslim–Hindi conflict that preceded partition into Pakistan and India. The main character is Lenny, an 8-year-old Parsi girl. Although hindered by polio, forced to use leg braces, she is a spirited, curious young girl. The principal secondary characters are Shanta, her beautiful Hindu nanny, her parents, privileged and trying to stay neutral, and Shanta’s two suitors, both Muslim. The plot focuses on the political situation in Lahore, beginning with the British intention to leave, and ending with the Muslim slaughter of Hindus and Sikhs. The character layer is driven by the love triangle between the Muslim Ice Candy Man, the Muslim Hasan, and the Hindu Shanta. In Act Three, Ice Candy Man will be responsible for the death of his fellow Muslim Hasan after Shanta has committed to him. Ice Candy Man will also initiate the destruction of Shanta with the aid of Lenny.
Earth is a loss-of-innocence story focusing on Lenny. She begins hopeful, curious about the world. She particularly relies on a vicarious sexual relationship with Shanta. She is showered with attention by the men who admire Shanta. Because Shanta always looks after Lenny, Lenny enjoys the attention she is accorded by the two handsome suitors. Lenny is also privy to the conversations of all the young handsome friends, Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu. She hears of the politics but all she sees is attractive adults arguing with affection and happiness because they are together. Lenny also witnesses the marriage of a young, less privileged friend. For women in this culture, marriage is the obligation and the apogee of their lives. This reality, too, fans Lenny’s curiosity. To this point, life is good; Lenny is budding sexually and continues to experience new things. But then the dark side of events and personal behavior begins. Ice Candy Man’s relatives are massacred on a train.
Both Ice Candy Man and Lenny witness Hasan’s sexual success with Shanta, who commits to marry Hasan, who will convert and become Hindu. But events accelerate. Hasan is killed, and a mob led by Ice Candy Man invades Lenny’s home, whose parents have now hidden Shanta. But Ice Candy Man uses his charm and invites Lenny to tell him where Shanta is. Lenny does. Shanta is taken away by the mob, in all likelihood to be brutalized and killed. The narrative moves forward 40 years. Lenny is now an adult. She tells us that she never recovered from the loss—the personal loss and the loss of innocence—that day. The death of Shanta ended Lenny’s childhood.
Lenny, as a child in an adult world, is the powerless main character. She has as her goal to make her way in the world and to understand that her curiosity will be rewarded with knowledge and security. She does gain knowledge, but her sense of security about the world is totally altered by her experience. What she learns about tolerance, specifically religious tolerance, is challenged by her relationships with Shanta and the Ice Candy Man. Ice Candy Man turns to hatred and violence when his personal desires are thwarted, and Lenny becomes an accomplice in the destruction of Shanta when her desire, albeit immature, for special attention from the Ice Candy Man leads her to tell him where Shanta is hiding. This act and the consequent destruction of Shanta alter Lenny’s sense of security in the world. Anxiety and guilt supplant curiosity and openness. Lenny, as she tells us, is changed forever.
In terms of an issue of the day, religion and racial and tribal differences are an ongoing problem worldwide. At its heart, Earth is as much about tolerance of difference as it is about the Muslim–Hindu–Sikh schism that led to the partition of colonial India in 1947. Appropriately telling the story from a child’s hopeful and optimistic point of view, Deepa Mehta mixes realism with romantic warmth. It’s as if childhood is about seeing the world in this romantic hue. Because she doesn’t show us the change but rather implies it, the romantic story dominates Lenny’s narrative.
The Classic Thriller
If the dominant quality of the melodrama is essentially determined by the inner life of the main character, the dominant quality of the thriller is the opposite—the existence of the main character out in the world. The focus on externalities doesn’t make the thriller superficial or devoid of psychology—it simply means that the thriller will be primarily plot driven. Time will be important, often becoming the equivalent of the antagonist in the screen story. Time is not on the side of the main character.
In order to fully flesh out our portrait of the classic thriller, we turn once again to the role of the main character and his goal, the role of the antagonist, the structural dominance of plot over the character layer, the dramatic arc, the role of the antagonist in the shape of that arc, the issues of the day, and the voice of the writer or writer/director.
The Main Character’s Goal
The main characters in the thriller tend to be ordinary people with recognizable traits. This is necessary because the structure of the thriller puts them in extraordinary circumstances and forces them to fashion an escape. The character may be a charming advertising executive, such as Roger Thorndike in Ernest Lehman’s North by Northwest, or an awkward computer whiz such as Angela Bennett in Irwin Winkler’s The Net. In both cases, the character is initially no match for the antagonist. The antagonist is a professional spy or killer and the main character is an amateur. This makes the main character’s victimization all the more likely, confounding the odds for survival and success.
Although the majority of main characters resemble Richard Kimble in The Fugitive—a man accused of murdering his wife, and who, although innocent and not a detective, must find the killer in order to survive—some thrillers involve characters who are experts in a particular field. Sergeant John Gallagher in Andrew Davis’s The Package helps an assassin infiltrate a U.S. government agency and then must stop the military plot to assassinate the head of the Soviet Union; the main character and the antagonists are professional soldiers. Similarly, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Johnny is a professional detective, just as the antagonists are criminals, albeit not professional criminals. In this sense, the main character in Vertigo should have an advantage. Another Hitchcock irony in this film is that Johnny is emotionally disadvantaged: he is an acrophobic, a man afraid of heights. In both The Package and Vertigo, the professionalism of the main character doesn’t detract from the effectiveness of the narrative. The main character, professional or amateur, is put in the position of victim by the plot. Whether he or she will survive is the substance of the thriller.
The goal of the main character in the thriller is to survive. To do so, the main character must first understand what he or she is up against and then must stop the antagonist from fulfilling his or her goal. By doing so, the main character will save himself and simultaneously be transformed from a potential victim into a hero.
The Role of the Antagonist
There are various aspects about the antagonist that are critical if the thriller is to work. First and most important, the antagonist operates with a clear goal that is in fact the key to the plot. The murder of Richard Kimble’s wife in The Fugitive was a horrible accident. The killer had meant to kill Kimble, but Kimble wasn’t at home. To know this and to know the why of it is the key to Kimble’s dilemma. This discovery is made by the main character at the end of the second act. Until then, he is pursued by the antagonist.
Second, the antagonist is powerful. He represents a force, political or economic, that empowers the antagonist and dwarfs the main character. Richard Hannay in Hitchcock’s Thirty-nine Steps has only his wits and his survival instinct to thwart the antagonist, who has “a foreign power” supporting him. In The Package, the antagonistic force is the CIA and its Russian equivalent. In William Goldman’s Misery, it’s not so much powerful institutions as it is a powerful will—Annie, a fan obsessed with novelist Paul Sheldon. Beginning as his rescuer and nurse, she devolves into his “would-be editor,” and then eventually his kidnapper. Since he is injured in the accident, Paul Sheldon is seemingly helpless in the face of her demands and her threats.
The antagonist essentially seeks the destruction of the main character, and the main character understands that fact. But, coupled with this goal, there is often an admiration, even love, between the protagonist and the antagonist: consider Madeleine in Vertigo or Annie Wilkes in Misery. And although it’s not love in The Package, the antagonist–protagonist relationship has similarities to those in Vertigo and Misery. The Henke imposter, Boyette (Tommy Lee Jones), is more like Gallagher (Gene Hackman), as compared to the antagonist–protagonist in Davis’s The Fugitive. Although Jones’s character is aligned with the real antagonist, the CIA colonel, the mutual admiration between Henke (Boyette) and Gallagher is unexpected and analogous to that between Madeleine and Johnny in Vertigo. This admiring obsession may lead to love or obsession or both, but it complicates the relationship of the antagonist to the main character in a powerful fashion.
The Dominance of Plot
Think of the plot of the thriller as a chase. The main character’s goal is to prevail, but along the way he or she must figure out the why of it and then the how of it, all while being pursued. Numerous genres are dominated by plot and have as their dramatic arc a chase. The horror film is certainly one. A Western such as David Peoples’s Unforgiven also uses a chase as its arc, as does Waldo Salt’s The Wild Bunch. What differentiates the thriller from these other genres, however, is its realism. The events of the plot have to be not only plausible, they also have to echo real-life events. A second feature of the dominance of the plot is that there is very little character in the thriller. Although Irwin Winkler deploys a character layer in Act One of The Net, it simply slows down the film rather than deepening it. More often, plot simply steamrollers the efforts at character layering. Jonathan Mostow’s Breakdown and Andrew Marlowe’s Air Force One illustrate the primacy of plot. The focus shifts to the twists and turns of plot and what is at stake if the main character fails to survive. The audience understands all too well the meaning of the main character’s failure, as in the president failing to achieve his goal in Air Force One.
One of the few films to manage a successful incorporation of character layering in this genre is Alex Lasker and Bill Rubenstein’s Beyond Rangoon. Here, the east–west meditation on loss (the main character’s son and husband are murdered in Boston) is as well articulated in the character layer of the narrative as are the challenges to the main character as she attempts to flee the threat to her life (the plot) in Myanmar. But Beyond Rangoon is the exception.
One last point: Plot can dominate because so often the character doesn’t have an internal conflict as in the case of the main character in Beyond Rangoon. The main character can then devote his or her energies and intelligence to survival, the ultimate goal of the main character in most thrillers.
The Dramatic Arc
The dramatic arc of the thriller ranges from political to personal to existential. Andrew Marlowe’s Air Force One and Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Rayfiel’s Three Days of the Condor are about political values. Which political system will prevail? Will power move to more authoritarian hands? This is also the core issue in The Package, The Net, and Enemy of the State. In each of these stories—whether the main character is the president of the United States, a CIA operative, or an ordinary lawyer, the values of the free world are riding on his or her success.
More personal issues, such as survival and quality of life, are at stake in The Fugitive, Breakdown, and Misery. But the arc can deepen when the quality of that survival is spun out with a spiritual dimension, such as in Beyond Rangoon or in the Carl Schultz thriller The Seventh Sign. No modern thriller has more effectively added an existential layer to the dramatic arc than has M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. Clearly, there is an ample set of options in the thriller genre to give the dramatic arc amplitude, ranging from the political to the deeply psychological. Most important to the operation of the dramatic arc is the urgency of the main character. Not to act with urgency would invite the character’s destruction, the very outcome the main character seeks to avoid.
Issues of the Day
Because issues of the day play such an important role in realistic genres, their role is also important in the thriller. During the Cold War, the subject of espionage was at the core, as illustrated by Three Days of the Condor and Robert Garland’s No Way Out. In the 1990s, the issue of terrorism became a prominent concern within the United States, as portrayed in Andrew Marlowe’s Air Force One and in Erin Krueger’s Arlington Road. Although the 30-year-old adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel Black Sunday was about foreign terrorism within the United States, the later examples of films from the 1990s can be attributed to the heightened sense of the threat of national terrorism of that time—as evidenced by the World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing. Terrorism is no longer theoretical or distant, as it was in the 1970s; it’s very much an issue of both social and political concern today.
More personal but no less a concern today is the safety of one’s children. Few films have exploited this fear more effectively than Amanda Silver’s The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense dwells on a similar issue. The key here is that there are public or political issues of the day, and there are personal issues that grip the public. When these issues become paramount, they, too, become ideal subject matter for the thriller. Any issue that threatens the well being of the central character is potential material for the thriller.
Tone
As expected, the tone of the thriller is realistic in order to harness believability in the character and in the situation the character finds himself in. A good baseline thriller to illustrate realism is Bill Wittliff’s A Perfect Storm. The natural challenge to the characters and the storm that takes their lives is that it must appear to be the most powerful storm ever recorded. Believability is the key to the effectiveness of this narrative.
Having suggested A Perfect Storm as the baseline for the genre, we move back to the work of the primary creator of the genre, Alfred Hitchcock. The first thing we notice is that he broadens the definition of realism in the genre. The original The Man Who Knew Too Much focuses on the inner state of the main character, who suffers guilt from a childhood trauma; this internal conflict is as realistically presented as is the external reality of murder.
To illustrate how liberal Hitchcock felt with tone, we need only look at how varied the tone could be when he worked with different screenwriters. When Hitchcock worked with a very serious writer, such as Brian Moore on Torn Curtain, the work tended to be almost weighted down by that seriousness; it became less believable. On the other hand, when he worked with Ben Hecht on Spellbound and Notorious, the romantic dimension of the story (the character layer) seemed to dominate the realism of the plot; consequently, the plot seemed farfetched. When Hitchcock worked with Ernest Lehman on North by Northwest, comic characters, together with the irony of the main character, made the plot playful and fun—anything but realistic. The sense of self-deprecation together with a sense of indignation about fate is also found in the main characters in Thirty-nine Steps and the Lady Vanishes. In a sense, we could say that Hitchcock, the master of the thriller, felt quite free to shift tone from light (The Trouble with Harry) to realism (The Wrong Man) to horror (Psycho).
Few filmmakers proceed as confidently as does Hitchcock. Consequently, a vast majority conform to the realist genre expectation. Even in cases where the supernatural plays a role, as in W.W. Wicket and George Kaplan’s The Seventh Sign and in William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, the narrative is carefully balanced to enhance believability in the behavior of the main character, in the antagonist (the devil), and in the struggle to survive. Physical and emotional credibility are at the tone’s core in both of these films. A more conventional thriller, Jonathan Mostow’s Breakdown, reconfirms the commitment of this genre to the expected tone, realism. Only Europeans such as George Sluizer (The Vanishing) and Claude Chabrol (La Femme Infidèle) implement the irony and the tonal variety found in the work of the genre’s master, Hitchcock.
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A Case Study of the Classic Thriller: Amanda Silver’s The Hand that Rocks the Cradle |
The Hand that Rocks the Cradle takes place in Seattle. The main character, Claire Bartel, has a 5-year-old daughter, a wonderful husband, and is pregnant. She is part of the perfect family. The catalytic event occurs when she visits a new obstetrician. He gives her a medical examination that she feels crosses the boundary of professional behavior into sexual assault. She files a complaint. Other patients step forward to file complaints, and the doctor kills himself.
The action shifts to the doctor’s wife. She is pregnant. The death of her husband and the imminence of legal action against his estate leave her bereft of emotional and financial support. She miscarries and the resulting procedure results in a hysterectomy to save her life; she will never be able to have children. The story moves to 6 months later. Claire Bartel has had her baby, and she has been advertising for a nanny. Peyton Flanders, the doctor’s wife, presents herself as the prospective nanny, and Claire hires her. Petyon proceeds to ingratiate herself to all the members of the Bartel family. Unbeknownst to Claire, Peyton begins breastfeeding the new baby. Peyton is attempting to take ownership of the family; in a sense, her first goal is to take over the children. After doing so, her next goal will be to get rid of the real parents. In Peyton’s mind, Claire destroyed her life, and this will be Peyton’s revenge.
In the thriller, the dramatic arc is a pursuit. The catalytic event begins the chain of events that can lead to the destruction of the main character. In The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, the turning point in Act One is Peyton’s entry into the Bartel household. Although Claire, the main character, doesn’t know it, the chase has begun, and it is only at the end of Act Two that Claire realizes the dangerous dynamic at play. At that point, she takes action to save herself and, in this case, to restore the rightful familial line. This will mean overcoming Peyton, the antagonist, and, as is the case in the classic thriller, the main character rises to the occasion and heroically survives. The antagonist dies in the struggle and the family is restored.
The thriller unfolds within the personal domain, the home. Other films, such as Air Force One, unfold on a personal and political level. There are not set criteria for the classic thriller. Whether political or personal, both follow the arc of an “ordinary person” caught in extraordinary circumstances. Whether president or housewife, the dramatic arc is a pursuit, and in the end, the main character moves from danger to insight to victory over the antagonist. This is the arc that typifies the classic thriller. And the tone is, of course, realistic.
Although the melodrama and the thriller are distinct genres, the similarity in tone and the notion of trading structural characteristics has enhanced individual stories. Essentially, there is a swap—the melodrama borrows the plot layer from the thriller, and the thriller borrows the character layer from the melodrama. The result is an interesting hybrid. Three case studies will exemplify this variation.
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A Case Study of Thriller–Melodrama Hybrid: Sudden Fear |
Lenore Coffee and Robert Smith’s Sudden Fear is a thriller about a spinster (Myra Hudson) who is a successful playwright, but not lucky in love. She falls in love with a younger man, Lester Blaine, whom she fired from an acting job in her current play. Returning from New York to her home in San Francisco, she takes to this younger man, who will marry her, but with a goal that differs from her own. His revenge for the firing will be to kill his new wife, Myra, and steal her money. If this were a film noir, he would succeed. But as a thriller, Myra, in order to save herself, has to reverse the situation by exposing and undermining Lester’s goal. And she does.
Sudden Fear varies from the usual thriller because the plot layer is less pronounced; it’s offset by a big character layer where Myra’s relationship with Lester is fully explored. The alternative relationship for Myra is one with her devoted lawyer, a man of her own age and status. This character layer results in a far more complex set of characters than is usually found in a thriller. The extreme stereotypes, or at least weaker characterizations of the conventional thriller, are offset by the level of characterization more typical of the melodrama. Although the dramatic arc follows the course of the relationship, it isn’t as interior as it would be in a melodrama. Because Lester’s intent is murder, the plot is, in fact, an external cat-and-mouse arc more typical of the thriller. In this sense, we could call Sudden Fear a thriller with a significant melodramatic character layer.
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The Case of Lorenzo’s Oil |
Nick Enright and George Miller’s Lorenzo’s Oil is a melodrama that has taken on the structure of a thriller. The main characters are Augusto and Michaela Odone. They are the powerless characters who challenge the medical power structure. Their 5-year-old son Lorenzo is diagnosed with a fatal illness. The plot focuses on their decision to fight the disease, which is said to have no cure. In a melodrama, the main characters would struggle with an internal issue, such as ambition, identity, or class. But there is no internal conflict, only a refusal to accept their son’s cruel fate.
The plot, in essence, takes them on a search, first within the medical establishment and then beyond it. They are looking for a way to overcome a terminal disease. In a sense, the plot has the time element of a thriller (time is against them), and it has the chase dimension (trying to find a cure). In the end, Lorenzo’s parents find a cure and do halt the progress of the disease. Here, a large plot layer replaces the large character layer of the melodrama. Since the narrative is based on a real-life event rather than a fiction, the plot layer gives the film more believability, a sense of psychological and physical realism that is heightened by this reliance on the thriller characteristics. In this case, the melodrama looks more like a thriller.
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The Case of The Insider |
Eric Roth and Michael Mann’s The Insider is a melodrama with two main characters, Jeffrey Wigand and Lowell Bergman. Wigand is a scientist who was fired from his research position at a large tobacco company. Bergman is a CBS producer for “60 Minutes,” and he wants to tell the story of the tobacco industry’s cover-up regarding the health hazards of smoking. Wigand will be the subject. Each man is cast as a powerless person trying to fight the power structure of corporate America (tobacco and the television industry). It’s a David vs. Goliath story, with Wigand and Bergman sharing the role of David.
What differentiates The Insider from most melodramas is that it presents itself as a thriller. The plot is the investigation, production, and distribution (airing) of the “60 Minutes” segment on Jeffrey Wigand. At every step, corporate muscle is used to bribe, gag, and finally intimidate, first Wigand and eventually Bergman. The initial antagonist, Big Tobacco, gives way to CBS, a second antagonist. Here, corporate strength is used to represent ruthlessness and immorality, crushing anyone who stands in the way—in this case Wigand and Bergman. In the end, Wigand and Bergman succeed (the “60 Minutes” segment is aired), but at a cost: Wigand has lost his family and his economic well being, and Bergman has quit his job.
The Insider uses plot as the thriller does—the pursuit of the broadcast. As in William Goldman’s All the President’s Men, the plot implies that far more than a television program is at stake —in this case the integrity of broadcast journalism, the immorality of corporate advertising, and the issue of personal ethics in the 1990s. Unlike Lorenzo’s Oil, which eschews the usual character layer of the melodrama, The Insider retains its character layer. In this case, we have complex characters and interpersonal relationships, as well as a riveting plot. The Insider uses plot and character layer equally, as opposed to the primacy of character over plot in the traditional melodramas.
Recent Trends in Melodrama
There is little question that writers are striving to make the melodrama look more modern. Whether this means adapting a surprising tone, as in Alan Ball’s American Beauty or in Tod Solondz’s Happiness, or using multiple main characters, as in Happiness, Eric Zonca’s The Dream-life of Angels, or Paul T. Anderson’s Magnolia, the search for novelty is no where more pronounced than in the mixed-genre melodrama. Melodrama has been effectively mixed with most of the key genres. A strong example of this tendency is illustrated in Silence of the Lambs. Although the plot layer of Silence of the Lambs follows the classical arc of the detective genre (FBI agent Clarice Starling’s hunt for the serial killer, Buffalo Bill), the character layer of the film is melodramatic. In essence, the question is: Can a powerless main character, a woman, make her way in a man’s world, the FBI? If Clarice can’t, she will fall victim to the power of men. The key helpful relationships that are explored are those with her boss, Jack Crawford, and, ironically, with a notorious serial killer, Dr. Hannibal Lector. Other powerful men, Dr. Frederick Chilton and Buffalo Bill, try to victimize her. Silence of the Lambs has an unusually significant layer of melodrama, quite possibly because the film revolves around a woman in a traditionally male world. This issue of the day makes the plot-driven police story more compelling and more meaningful to the audience.
Steve Zaillian’s Schindler’s List is another realist genre film (in this case, war) that benefits from a significant melodramatic layer—an industrialist making his way in the Nazi power structure. Schindler’s goal, to save Jews, directly opposes the progression of the plot layer, which is aimed toward killing the Jews. Arif Aliev, Sergei Bodrov, and Boris Geller’s Prisoner of the Mountains, also a war story, uses a Tolstoy novel as its base to explore the Chechnyan conflict in the 1990s. The plot is the progress of the Russian Chechnyan war.
Will Vania, a young army recruit, survive? The melodramatic layer explores Vania’s relationships with his captors and with his fellow Russians (his fellow captive Sacha and his mother). Is the relationship with family more important than national identity, honor, history—the factors that have led to the war? This is the emotional core of the narrative for the viewer. Again, it is the layer of melodrama that strengthens the emotional core of the narrative.
James Gray’s The Yards is a gangster film whose career-oriented plot gives way to a melodrama about family relationships. Much more modest than the character layer in Coppola’s The Godfather, the character layer in The Yards focuses on a paroled ex-convict, Leo (Mark Wahlberg). Leo returns home to a sick mother and a successful aunt who is married to the head of a subway repair company. Although the uncle’s business dealings have been corrupt (bribery is the entrepreneurial grease, political connections its tracks), he is successful—he has a big house and a big car. Exploring these relationships and his own values, Leo is the classic melodrama character, a victim of the power structure of family and of business. And, as in the earlier examples, it is the character layer of melodrama that emotionalizes the narrative.
In the examples discussed so far, there is a compatibility in the mix; both plot and character layers proceed on a realistic basis, and they work well for one another. But writers have also mixed melodrama with genres of wish fulfillment, creating a plot tone that is romantic and poetic. Here, the mix is more challenging. In the Ballad of Little Jo, Maggie Greenwald mixes a Western plot with a melodrama character layer. The main character, Josephine, goes West, into a man’s world. To survive, she pretends to be a man. Greenwald succeeds in linking the story to an issue of the day—the role of women in society, the inequity of the sexes. By doing so, she brings this Western to a modern audience. The link to an issue of the day makes the melodrama more powerful for its audience. It simultaneously disappoints those who expected more of a Western.
Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark is a musical and a melodrama. The melodrama layer is the story of a foreigner in the United States. She is a woman, a laborer with a congenital disease that will make her blind, trying to raise a son who has the same genes but doesn’t know his prognosis; this is an ideal melodrama character—she is powerless. Her fascination with singing adds the musical layer. The result is a powerful dose of realism in a genre where wish fulfillment has always prevailed. In contrast to the tragic arc of the melodrama, the arc in the musical has traditionally concluded with the main character finding success on both a personal and professional level. Von Trier reverses the course in this musical.
Recent Trends in the Thriller
As already noted, the thriller tends to be a plot-driven, realistic narrative where the ordinary main character is caught in extraordinary circumstances. Whether the narrative functions on a personal or a political level, the arc of the story essentially looks like a chase, which dominates Act Two. Act Two ends with the newfound understanding by the main character. Once the characters know why they are being pursued, they can formulate a defense for Act Three. In Act Three, they are transformed from would-be victims to heroes. This is the classical thriller.
Recent thrillers have taken their cue from filmmakers such as Hitchcock and Chabrol. They have become less orthodox about the balance between plot layer and character layer, and some have loosened up with regard to tone. Most of the interesting work within the thriller genre has come out of Europe. Regis Wargnier and Sergei Bodorov’s East/West is a thriller with a very significant character layer. After World War II, Marie, a Frenchwoman, and her son and her Russian-born husband return to his native Russia. They are idealistic about helping restore the new Russia (a country that suffered 50 million fatalities in World War II). The catalytic event comes once they are in Russia. Marie is abused and accused of being a spy, and then has her passport destroyed. Instead of being in a new, altruistic adventure, she finds herself in a prison. While her husband, a doctor, is valued, she is under constant suspicion; she is a foreigner. Language, expectations, and history separate her from her Russian neighbors. The family is given a room in a formerly grand apartment. All are watched, under suspicion. Her goal from this point on is to escape from Russia, to return to her native France, and thus freedom. The balance of the narrative is devoted to the escape. The price of escape is, at its most basic, the marriage, and it takes years to plan. Marie will be helped by a famous French actress known for her left-wing causes, by her first landlord’s grandson, by a competitive swimmer, and, unknown to her, by her husband. Other than these people, all the power of Stalinist Russia stands in her way.
The character layer explores two relationships—Marie and her husband, and Marie and the swimmer. The first, her marriage, crumbles under the pressure of staying. As her determination grows, her husband’s concern for her is replaced by a survivalist mentality. The marriage fails. The swimmer moves into Marie’s room upon the imprisonment of his grandmother. The young man represents passion, rebellion, hope, and a will to support and join Marie in escape. Because he can travel abroad for swimming competitions, he becomes an important conduit for the escape plan. He also becomes Marie’s lover. East/West employs a significant character layer to amplify Marie’s passion for freedom. It is everything for her, and in the end, this character layer enhances the thriller plot, her escape from Russia.
Kristian Levring’s The King Is Alive goes even further in elevating the character layer and in downplaying the plot layer. Levring also alters the nature of the antagonist. A group of British, American, and French tourists is in transit on a bus in sub-Saharan Africa. Unbeknownst to them, the bus’s compass is broken and they end up lost. They arrive at an abandoned mining site. One of the members must walk for 5 days to the nearest town to try to effect a rescue. The others must organize to capture rainwater to survive. They have only canned carrots to eat; they will have to find ways to keep their spirits positive. At the end, the surviving members will be rescued, but not before the experienced member is found dead in the desert, another has died from food poisoning, and yet another has hanged himself.
By making the antagonist inanimate, the thriller shifts in meaning. Instead of an external meaning, this thriller takes on an interior and existential meaning. Specifically, The King Is Alive joins a cadre of narratives in which nature itself plays antagonist. Nature and nitroglycerin combine as antagonist in Clouzat’s Wages of Fear and in the remake, Friedkin’s Sorcerer. The desert is also a formidable antagonist in Robert Aldrich’s Flight of the Phoenix. As in all of the above-mentioned films, it is human nature that is as formidable an antagonist as nature in The King Is Alive. Levring proceeds to explore the relationships within marriage, between men and women, and between Caucasians and the black bus driver, and few come out of the exploration unscathed. The very existence of the characters—its quality—becomes the subject of The King is Alive.
Under the guise of filling time, one of the men, a writer and former actor, decides to stage King Lear. The characters from the play and the actual characters of the movie fuse as Levring exposes human nature at its worst. There is no theatrical nobility here, only power seeking exploitation of the other. The will to power is as important as is the will to survive. Plot gives way to character in Levring’s intriguing thriller. Plot provides the frame for a narrative theme more often found in the melodrama. Dominik Moll and writer Gilles Marchand’s With a Friend Like Harry echoes the tone of Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry. Of course, the issue in Hitchcock’s story is that at the outset Harry is dead. What to do with the body becomes a narrative thread. In With a Friend Like Harry, Harry is very much alive and, although the main character begins to wish him dead by the end of Act Two, it takes all of Act Three to achieve the goal. Harry is the antagonist to the main character, a high-school idol of Harry’s but whose current life is beset by the economic limits of being a teacher with three kids, a wife, a mortgage, and an old car. On top of that, he has irritating parents who are generous but controlling. He and Harry bump into each other in a gas station restroom while traveling south for vacation. Harry drives a big Mercedes, has a beautiful fawning fiancée, and is flattering, even obsessed, with his memories of the main character. Independently wealthy, Harry begins to weave himself into the main character’s life. As the antagonist, Harry is very much driving the story. He buys the main character a big, new SUV, and he flatters him until he begins writing again.
For the first half of the narrative, it’s all character layer, with Harry’s motives still ambiguous. In the second half of the narrative, the plot kicks in. Harry must eliminate all of the barriers to the main character’s creative potential. In short order, he kills the parents, the brother, and even his own fiancée. It is only when Harry suggests killing the main character’s wife and three children that the main character acts. He kills Harry. And he has found his muse. His wife feels that the latest story he has written is brilliant.
The tone of With a Friend Like Harry is ironic, verging on farce, but never fully becoming farce. It is a tone Hitchcock used in The Trouble with Harry, and Marchand and Moll have captured it very well. With a Friend Like Harry has a significant character layer, but it is the unusual tone that engages us in the narrative.
What has happened in the Hollywood thriller is more modest. Although the plot-driven thrillers such as Clear and Present Danger and Air Force One have dominated, there have been variations. An interesting character-driven thriller with a political plot and an effort to personalize the issue of the day for its audience is Rod Lurie’s The Contender. Focused on the issue of choosing a vice president and the effort to undermine the president’s choice—who is a woman—The Contender is a powerful character-driven thriller. Lurie has focused on power and how it is wielded by elected officials. The president, his chief of staff, a senator who wants to gain power by undermining the president and his choice, an ambitious congressman who sees the hearings for the new vice president as an opportunity to move ahead in the political pecking order, a governor who believes he is the best vice presidential nominee, and the female senator who is the nominee—all are participants in the game. Person or politician, power broker or effective social and moral leader, these are the choices each character faces and must make. The Contender effectively raises the character issue while not giving up on plot. It represents a balanced approach to the thriller, borrowing heavily from the melodrama.
Erin Krueger’s Arlington Road is a classic thriller that borrows heavily from film noir and an issue of the day to capture the audience’s attention. The context for Arlington Road is the Oklahoma City bombing. The narrative implies that if we were more attuned to the warnings, such a tragedy wouldn’t occur. The main character, Professor Farraday, is a specialist in terrorism. However, the impact of terrorism isn’t strictly academic. His wife, an FBI agent, died during a raid on suspected terrorists. He raises his son on his own. He is a traumatized main character obsessed with preventing a repeat of this kind of tragedy in his life. But that’s exactly what happens in Arlington Road.
The narrative begins when Michael Farraday saves a young boy, dazed, walking in the middle of the road, bleeding profusely. He takes the boy to the hospital. Later he discovers that the wound was caused by an explosion and that the boy is a neighbor who moved in recently. The boy’s parents, Oliver and Cheryl Lang, are very grateful, and the focus of Act One will be the budding relationship between these neighbors. Since his wife’s death, Farraday has been isolated, and he welcomes a friend in the neighborhood. His own son quickly becomes friends with the injured boy. But small bits of information—a letter from an eastern alma mater, architectural plans that look suspect—raise a suspicion in the main character’s mind: Oliver Lang isn’t who he claims to be.
Act Two is taken up with Farraday trying to prove that Lang isn’t who he claims to be. In fact, Farraday suspects that Lang is actually a terrorist with a plan. Farraday’s girlfriend is totally skeptical, but it is her death that ends Act Two. Act Three, the act of resolution, is taken up with the main character trying to prevent Lang from bombing a federal facility. To slow down Farraday, the antagonist kidnaps Farraday’s son. Now he has a very personal stake in what is to occur. He follows the antagonist and believes he has stopped him, but in fact, he has been used. The explosives have been planted in his own car. He has driven the car into the FBI garage, and as he realizes where the explosives are in fact located, the bomb goes off, killing many, including the main character. The narrative ends with the accusation that the main character was the mad bomber, that he carried out the bombing against the FBI as revenge for the death of his wife. The antagonist and his family move on, presumably to the next attack on the federal government.
In Arlington Road, the antagonist is victorious and the main character has been the ultimate victim, a fate we associate with film noir rather than with the thriller. By adapting the resolution of film noir, Krueger is issuing a caution—be careful. Your neighbors may not be who you think they are. Or to put it another way, the mad bombers are among us—they are us. This dark vision may be appropriate given the turn of terrorism in the 1990s, but it is an adaptation that alters the traditional genre expectation—that the main character in the thriller will survive and by doing so will be a hero.
Different Reading, Different Genre
Patricia Highsmith, the novelist responsible for such misanthropic thrillers as Strangers on a Train, is also the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley. The novel has been filmed twice, in 1962 by Rene Clement and in 2000 by Anthony Minghella. The first version was called Purple Noon; the second appeared as The Talented Mr. Ripley. The two versions are intriguing because they provide very different versions of the same source material. To be more specific and to put it in the context of this chapter, the first version is presented as a thriller with a character layer; the second is presented as a melodrama with a plot layer. What is instructive about the two versions is that they illustrate how important the story frame or genre can be to the experience of the story. Indeed, this narrative decision determines how we experience the story.
Tom Ripley is a young man from the wrong side of the tracks. His talent is his ambition and his amorality. His initial assignment was to convince Dick Greenleaf (Phillip in the first version), a spoiled, rich young man traveling in Europe, to return home. He fails, falling under the spell of the money and the aesthetic opportunity wealth offers. There are no rules for the rich. Ripley likes that. He kills Greenleaf and assumes his identity. He develops a friendship with his girlfriend. He taps his bank account. Will he be found out? Will he get away with it?
Rene Clement and Paul Gegauff’s Purple Noon (Plein Soleil) follows the thriller structure. In Act One, Ripley is supposed to encourage Phillip to return home. He admires Phillip, but he is very much a parasite. He tries on his clothes but is caught. He watches Phillip make love to his girlfriend Marge and imagines what it would be like for him. Phillip has a sadistic personality. He torments Tom, eventually putting him in a small boat attached to the larger sailboat. Tom suffers burns and dehydration. This torment will be useful in gaining our empathy for Tom. They put the girlfriend on shore. Tom has been instrumental in promoting an argument between the two. Phillip intends to beach the main character. He pushes him. The abusiveness is palpable and Tom kills his idol. He returns to shore and begins to create the illusion that he is Phillip. To the girlfriend he remains an empathic friend.
The killing marks the end of Act One. From this point on, the narrative turns to plot. Will Tom be caught? A friend who can give Tom away shows up. Tom has to kill him. The police inquire about the disappearance of Phillip. Acts Two and Three follow Tom’s efforts to get away with murder. The narrative ends with Tom being caught. The body has washed up on shore. The mystery is solved. Acts Two and Three in Purple Noon are tense with the requisite twists and turns of the plot-driven thriller. In the end, the amoral main character of this thriller is caught.
Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley makes one element of the earlier narrative more overt—that Ripley’s attraction to Dick Greenleaf is not entirely based on class distinction or on privilege. In this version, Ripley is gay and clearly has a homoerotic attraction to Dick. Act One concerns itself with the melodrama frame of the powerless Ripley wanting power. He is not abused by Dick Greenleaf but rather admires the young man so much that he wants to be at one with him. The killing is more an assertive action of desire rather than retribution, as it was in Purple Noon. Consequently, the desire to become Dick Greenleaf is far more a character issue than a plot issue. It is more psychological than material. As a result, it is the relationships that Minghella explores—the girlfriend Marge in this version is very suspicious of Ripley (rather than trusting). And in this version, the second killing, Teddy, is an act of self-defense, a protection from a predator, rather than an act to preserve material well being. Indeed, at each step, murder is an act of self-defense. By framing The Talented Mr. Ripley as a melodrama, Minghella has told the story as a reaction to being a gay, poor man, marginalized because of his sexual preferences and his economic circumstances. As one would expect, plot becomes secondary in this version, whereas plot dominates in the thriller reading of Purple Noon.