The Concept of Drama.

An Idiot commenter got me thinking about drama recently.  It was on an AV Club article about how Attorney General Eric Holder wants there to be more episodes of The Wire.  Someone commented that they couldn't sit through the pilot because it didn't have enough action.  It got me to thinking, have the action movies of our day diluted people's views of drama?




Our concept of "drama" originates from Aristotle's work Poetics, which is to drama what Rhetoric is to politics and law.  It was Aristotle who first laid out the structure of well executed drama, which consisted of rising action, a climax, and a resolution.  Playwrights and dramatists have since expanded on his 3 part theory to come up with a 5 part drama, but the Influence is still there.  Even back in Aristotle's time, they understood you needed rising action to preclude the climax for multiple reasons.  First of all, the rising action lays the groundwork for character development and the more the characters develop, the more we sympathize with them.  Secondly, the rising action adds to the suspense of the climax.


To me, the Rising action is often the biggest and most important part of a drama and its very hard to have well executed drama/theater/film without some rising action before the climax.  Some movies like to play around with time and bend the rules (500 days of summer, Pulp Fiction) and don't often have a distinct climax, but they are generally the exception to the rule.  The reason suspense works is because of rising action.  One of the most suspenseful movies I've ever seen is Rear Window.  I admit, the first time seeing it, I was bored for half of it.  The next time I saw it (thankfully, forgot the ending), I let myself get sucked in.  Slow rising action builds suspense better than anything, something Alfred Hitchcock knew.  Its the same reason why the roller coasters that slowly take you to the top of a hill are have a more exciting drop than one where you are taken quickly up (why Millennium Force is great but Top Thrill Dragster sucks).


So where does this fit in with the commenter?  The Wire is a Serial style show.  Each episode builds on the storyline of the previous one (like Breaking Bad or The Sopranos).  Because of their style, you cannot look at each episode as its own independent story with its own rising action, climax, and denouement.  Each one does have small climaxes near the end, but overall they build towards something bigger.  Each "plot" for these episodes essentially is either part of the bigger plot, or its own subplot and these plots take 10+ episodes to reach their climax.  That is why it is very satisfying drama to watch a Serial all the way through after close to 10 hours and get to the climax.


I think this person may have been expecting the Procedural form of a NCIS or Law & Order (each episode functions independently and there are no huge overarching plots).  They are 2 completely different types of drama and while one is more immediately satisfying with its conclusion, the other has a much more powerful conclusion.

And to the major complaint it was slow?  What great movie starts out fast.  When you look at some of the greatest movies ever made (Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Seventh Seal), they are very plodding throughout the whole movie, but plodding with a purpose.  They have great storytelling needed to set up the climax and they have satisfying climaxes partly because of how drawn out they are.


There is a reason we still use the basic structure Aristotle invented.  Its satisfying and its gratifying to the human mind.