SELF-SACRIFICE: the giving up of one’s own interests or wishes in order to help others or advance a cause.
EXAMPLES:
On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)
A dock worker (Marlon Brando) becomes politicised when he observes the injustice and corruption of the union, and refuses to toe the line despite being aware of the brutal consequences of his actions.
The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999)
A research chemist decides to expose the harmful effects of cigarette smoking.
Note: both of these examples also use (8) REVOLT.
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The first of a group of situations to deal with dramatic death, as opposed to death from old age or illness.
Central to this situation is the concept of idealism, the strong belief in a cause, principles, faith. We are dealing with characters who either:
(a) have an unshakeable belief in the idea of a God, one they have held over a long period; or
(b) in the course of the drama have arrived at a belief with the zeal of the convert and are prepared to undergo self-sacrifice for this passionate discovery.
Which gives us two very different psychologies:
(1) A strong character whose beliefs will be put to the test in a situation of conflict. For example, a religious situation, one belief against another, Catholic versus Protestant; or a war situation, where a character is captured and tortured to betray his comrades, but is ultimately prepared to die for his beliefs. All religious histories (the Bible) use this situation. The more intense the pain, the more absolute the belief; the martyr who dies for the greater good of the people.
(2) A weak character who may have led a life of hedonism and waste, but who, later in life, finds something to believe in and is prepared to die for this new passion. At last their life seems to amount to something of value, something ‘worth dying for’. Audiences relate strongly to these moral examples; they seem to illuminate life with a ray of meaning – it is never too late to clean up the mess of your life. Thus we often create messed-up characters purely so that later we can sacrifice them for the greater good of the drama, arriving at a kind of redemption. We need to remind ourselves constantly that drama is based on a series of moral tales, moral dilemmas.
It is also true that audiences like to test themselves through these situations; they can easily empathise with the conflict and wonder how they themselves would fare in similar circumstances.
The difference between the two psychological states is subtle but it allows the writer a choice of where to place the emphasis. It is a story about the testing of character: will they succeed or fail the test of pain and loss.
What is perhaps more interesting is the character who almost succeeds but, at the last moment, can endure no more and is defeated, and then has to live with this failure. If we start a narrative with this idea, then the story that follows could be about how the character copes with this failure.
EXAMPLE:
Silence (Martin Scorsese, 2016)
The Christian religion has been banned in Japan. A young priest has been sent undercover to minister to the Christians. He is arrested and tortured so that he will give up his faith.
Inevitably, as storytellers we would want to give the character a second chance, to create another situation in which they are tested again. I do not know of one dramatic scenario in which this second test results in failure. And while the idea of a second failure is almost unthinkable in drama – which is perhaps understandable – it’s also unrealistic, as we are constantly confronted by failure after failure in our everyday lives.
The concept of love is a fundamental element in drama. It is a powerful force that can induce madness, irrational impulses, rivalry, jealousy, etc., but it can also lead us to salvation. Therefore, the idea of love sacrificed for an ideal puts it almost on a par with death. In some ways it is even more powerful because it involves another person (the loved one), who will suffer because of this decision, not knowing why they have been cast aside and probably reasoning that it is because of an absence of love on the part of other. In drama we love to torture ourselves with misunderstanding.
This is a much-loved device in romantic fiction.
EXAMPLE:
Camille (George Cukor, 1936)
A Parisian courtesan must give up her true love so that his life will not be contaminated by his relationship with her.
As with all of the situations, the choice of where to place this one is crucial. If we were to place it in the middle of a drama, then we would wait in anticipation for some kind of resolution: the loved one finds out about the sacrifice through a third party or a coincidence and the lovers are finally united, stronger than ever; or he/she finds out, but it is too late and the other has died as a result of the sacrifice.
If we place the situation towards the end of the drama, it has an entirely different result. The audience would sense that it is too late to expect a romantic resolution, that the loved one will not find out about the sacrifice; therefore, the action can be seen as more genuine and less of a dramatic device.
What is interesting here is as much to do with the audience’s relationship with the drama as with the devices of the drama itself. We go to a cinema to see a film, knowing that it will be between 90 and 120 minutes long. The placing of specific dramatic situations within that time frame (at the beginning, middle or end) will automatically elicit pre-conditioned responses from the audience, based upon their accumulated memories of the countless films they will have seen. As we create stories we need to constantly ask ourselves, ‘What does the audience expect to happen here?’ Any good magician will tell you the same thing: ‘Appear to give them what they expect and then reveal something new that they did not anticipate.’ But always remind yourself that the audience has been here many times before. It is a well-worn path.
Career advancement is synonymous with the concept of understanding rules. Success comes as a result of the ability to use the rules to one’s advantage, to anticipate opportunities before they occur, even to create opportunities with the idea of personal success. Large corporations and political parties are based upon these intricate rules, as well as on concepts of loyalty to the body politic.