Lipton on Narrative and Excess

Narrative and Its Excesses
By Gordie Lipton

Two people, on a mission to find the long lost Mayan treasure or wherever-in-Mexico, stop during their journey and look longingly at each other.  After a series of smoldering glances, they embrace, partaking in a passionate kiss.  And then, you wonder: what the hell is going here?  What does this have to do with anything?  And man, she’s not even that good-looking!  He could so do better.  And so begins narrative and its excesses.

Backtrack a bit: what is narrative, and therefore what is excess?

Narrative causality is one of the principal concepts that pervades Hollywood classicism.  It is, according to David Bordwell, “the dominant” in the cinema of the “golden age” of Hollywood, so to speak.  Narrative causality could be reduced to the clichéd idea that the fastest way from point A to point B is a straight line; the plot is laid out explained, and a conclusion is reached with very little to delineate from in the text.  In the classical Hollywood tradition, there are several key elements that relate to narrative causality: as we discussed in class, there are goal-oriented characters that set out to accomplish their goal, there is a cause-and-effect structure that guides the story from beginning to end, and there is often character consistency that gives each lead a set of main traits.  Character consistency, on the whole, can be linked to the Hollywood “star system” (14) that was so prevalent during the classical period.  It is a highly unlikely occurrence, or even an impossible one, that you would see John Wayne playing the dandy schoolboy. 

However, if a story were to stick directly to the straightforward narrative storyline, I imagine it would get quite boring and uneventful.  And therein lies the twist: excess.  The presence of excess in Hollywood classicism, as we discussed in class and gleamed from Rick Altman, leads us to believe that perhaps Hollywood classicism is quite as “classical” as some film historians might like to think.  For instance, many films in the classical canon are musicals, such as Singin’ in the Rain. It would be against the judgment of someone like Bordwell, though, to say that Gene Kelly breaking into an elaborate song and dance number sticks directly to narrative causality.  In the strict notion of cause-and-effect storyline and such, is a musical number really part of the story or something else?  Perhaps, something excessive?

For Altman, the classical Hollywood film draws mostly from the great novels of people such as Dickens and Balzac, along with the added influence of the stage plays of the same age.  However, there is a element to these works, for instance with Dickens, that doesn’t quite ring true with “classicism,” Hollywood of Victorian.  Dickens’s novels, along with those of Balzac and the popular stage adaptations such novels, draw not only from the elements of classical narrative but also from what is popular; in many societies, what is popular is what is melodramatic.  In Le Pere Goriot, for instance, the characters of Vautrin and Goriot are divided into the melodramatic dichotomies of bad guy and good guy, respectively.  These black-and-white dichotomizing elements owe more to melodramatic binaries and simplification than to classical narrative.  As we mentioned in class, due to the influence of what was not just “classical” but also popular in the day (the works of Dickens and Balzac, for instance), we must recognize that indeed, the classical Hollywood cinema has its roots firmly entrenched in popular culture.  And since melodrama underlies those works, then it can be said that melodrama is the “underneath,” so to speak, of classical film.  We enjoy the excess that film gives us, from car chases to love scenes to grand musical numbers; after all, narrative isn’t the only pleasure we need get out of film. 

Comments

[Megan Vig]

Gordie Lipton provides a solid overview of narrative causality in Hollywood classicism and the excess that lies within in his posting, “Narrative and its Excesses.” In his overview of Hollywood classicism, he notes many of the key elements of narrative causality. They are goal-oriented characters, cause-and-effect structure, and character consistency. While all of that is well and good, Lipton left out a major aspect of the classical cinema; he failed to mention the importance of motivation. Traditionally, everything within the diagesis of a classical Hollywood film needs to be motivated. Everything is there for a reason and nothing is out of place. Bordwell, et. al. in their book, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, discuss four different types of motivation. First, there is compositional motivation. This means that certain elements in the story must be present for the story to proceed. Second is realistic motivation, where “many elements are justified on grounds of verisimilitude.” Third, there is intertextual motivation, in which “the story is justified on the grounds of the conventions of certain classes of art works” (Bordwell, et. al., 19). Finally, there is artistic motivation, which “can emphasize the artificiality of other art works;” usually through the venerable practice of parody. Bordwell, et. al., have such a broad definition of what can fit in the motivation parameters of classical Hollywood cinema, that virtually nothing lands outside the broad scope of what they see as Classical Hollywood Cinema. Their model seems to preclude any possibility of excess.

That being said, one of the authors of the Bordwell, et. al. piece mentioned above, Kristin Thompson, did write about the possibility of excess. However, she had to look outside of the Classical Hollywood system and at the Russian cinema to find excess. Excess in film is typically thought of as a film that has aspects that are not diagetically motivated. However, Kristin Thompson, in her essay “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” highlights four ways in which material of a film can be in excess, even with motivation. First, the narrative may justify a device, but not the form that the device takes; thus, the device itself (color, size, etc.) could be excessive. Second, how long a device is on screen is insufficient for motivation to determine, thus becoming excessive. Third, a single bit of narrative can motivate certain functions almost indefinitely, justifying many devices that all have the same connotations but that have completely different forms, and therefore being excessive. Fourth, “a single motivation may serve to justify a device which is then repeated and varied many times,” but that repetition is not necessary for the narrative to be understood, and therefore results in excess (Thompson, 517-518). Furthermore, she writes that “an understanding of the plot…is only a limited understanding of one portion of the film. But if one looks beyond narrative, at both the unified and the excessive elements at work on other levels, the underlying principles of the film…become apparent” (Thompson, 523).

This idea that even though something is motivated, it can still be in excess, raises some questions about the parameters that have surrounded Classical Hollywood Cinema for almost a century. Is it possible for a movie to be in excess and yet be a Classical Hollywood film? Are the Classical Hollywood parameters too broad so that they include every film of that era, and perhaps a poor measuring stick for Classical Hollywood films? Is a Classical Hollywood film really that Classical?

Works Cited

Bordwell, David, et.al. “Story causality and motivation.” The Classical Hollywood Cinema (Columbia, 1985).

Thompson, Kristin. “The Concept of Cinematic Excess.” Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.