2008 Scott Higgins Suspenseful Situations Melodramatic Narrative

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Scott Higgins
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Cinema Journal, 47, Number 2, Winter 2008, pp. 165-170 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/cj.2008.0001
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Suspenseful Situations: Melodramatic Narrative
and the Contemporary Action Film
by Scott Higgins
Abstract: The concept of situational dramaturgy, a form of narrative construction
inherited from nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama, reveals continuities be-
tween classical narrative and the post-classical action film. This essay argues
that situations bridge spectacle and narrative, provide generative structures for ac-
tion plots, and are enmeshed in the contemporary three-act structure.
The action film has the double distinction of being both one of the most popular
and most popularly derided of contemporary genres. In mainstream discourse, the
genre is regularly lambasted for favoring spectacle over finely tuned narrative. As
the critic Annabelle Vilaneuva put it, action movies dont even feel like movies
anymore, theyre little more than two-hour trailers for action movies.
1
Nonetheless, every summer testifies to the genres pride of place in major
studio economics. Action films serve Hollywood well, displaying the production val-
ues that enable American movies to dominate world markets. Ten of the twenty-
five all-time, worldwide, top-grossing films are in the action genre; event films
often wear action clothing.
2
Critics and studio marketers have actually cooperated in defining the genres
popular reputation as a vehicle for sensation. The master metaphor for the action
film is the roller coaster ride, or more simply the ride, which promises to sweep
the viewer through a series of thrills. This might seem derogatory, but it can just
as easily be co-opted as a means of selling the films. Newspaper ads for Mission
Impossible II, for example, used Joel Siegels Good Morning America quip put
your mind on Cruise control and fasten your seatbelts. The blurb is hardly a ring-
ing endorsement of character complexity or nuanced drama, but it is an endorse-
ment nonetheless. This reputation has led a number of scholars to claim that the
creation of marketable thrills has replaced narrative coherence as the primary con-
cern of popular American cinema.
3
In this essay, I seek a more precise understanding of the action genre as a
particular kind of storytelling. Action films do appear to offer something distinct
from classical narrative as it is commonly defined, but they are not wholly divorced
from Hollywood tradition, nor are they necessarily anticlassical or nonnarrative.
74 Cinema Journal 47, No. 2, Winter 2008
2008 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819
Scott Higgins is an associate professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University. He is author
of Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow (University of Texas Press, 2007).
Higgins.qxp 1/29/08 8:48 AM Page 74
The roller coaster metaphor has descriptive value, but not necessarily at the ex-
pense of coherent and engaging narrative. Rather, I argue that the action genre
inherits a melodramatic narrative tradition that predated, and was absorbed by,
classical Hollywood cinema.
The commonly held view of narrative and spectacle as oppositional, and the
emphasis on the genres apparent subversion of classical qualities, have clouded our
historical understanding of the action film. In contrast, the concept of situational
dramaturgy helps bridge spectacle and narrative, and places the contemporary
action film in a tradition that stretches through the classical period from historical
adventures, to sound serials, to the James Bond franchise. In fact, in the action film,
we often find an elegant integration of classical and melodramatic narrative prac-
tice, and this helps account for the particular pleasure of the genre, for its power
to produce a ride. Melodrama may well inform other contemporary Hollywood
genres, but in the action film, it flourishes. The genre gives us privileged insight
into the interaction between melodramatic and classical dramaturgy, and should
help us rethink what we mean by nonclassical.
Rethinking the Spectacle/Narrative Divide. Any account of the action film
must confront the venerable question of spectacle and narrative. Most scholars
approaching the genre are occupied with the tension between the two terms, see-
ing them in opposition, with spectacle dominating. Spectacular moments figure
strongly as product differentiation within the genre.
4
In his essay Action Films:
The Serious, the Ironic and the Postmodern, James Welsh describes action films
as products designed by committees of writers and armies of technicians with
one goal in mind: building bigger spectacle in order to generate millions of box-
office dollars.
5
Classical Hollywood, the common argument goes, subordinated
spectacle to causal, character-driven narrative, while the contemporary action
genre privileges spectacle at the expense of storytelling. The film scholar Wheeler
Winston Dixon contrasts the economical style of classical cinema with the ex-
cess running time, excess budgeting, excess spectacle of contemporary features.
He singles out Godzilla (1998) as a typical construct of noise and spectacle, pre-
sented in thunderous digital sound, in a desperate attempt to mask the lack of con-
tent.
6
Spectacle is considered in opposition to narrative, with explosions and
stunts pausing or breaching the story, or covering for its absence.
A more sophisticated and productive approach to this duality in contemporary
cinema has been proposed by scholars who draw on the concept of the attraction.
Geoff King, in his book on Hollywood blockbusters, keeps spectacle and narrative
opposed, but sees them in a dialectical interchange in which films attempt to
play on the appeal of each and to go some way at least towards resolving some of
their contradictory imperatives.
7
For King, narrative is associated with order and
coherence, while moments of spectacle may offer an alternative, the illusion of
a more direct emotional and experiential impact.
8
This definition of spectacle
comes from the film historian Tom Gunnings idea of the cinema of attractions,
Cinema Journal 47, No. 2, Winter 2008 75
which has become the most pervasive model for thinking about films powers of
stimulation. Indeed, Gunnings analogy of film before 1907 to fairground attractions
makes it more than a little tempting to view roller coaster action cinema as a con-
tinuation of that tradition. Jose Arroyo, for example, opens his anthology Action/
Spectacle Cinema by positing that action films lack coherence, balance, internal
consistency and depth in their attempt to provide The Ride they belong to
a long history of the cinema of attractions. Elsewhere, Arroyo parallels Lumires
Workers Leaving a Factory (1895) to The Matrix (1999), and Mission Impossible
(1996) to Georges Mliss trick films.
9
Applying the attractions concept to contemporary cinema is a tricky business.
Attractions involve a direct, exhibitionist address to the audience, while narrative
cinema connotes the sealed and unified diegetic absorption of the viewer. Attempts
to follow the cinema of attractions into the classical era inevitably stumble over the
contradictory natures of narrative and attraction. As Gunning noted in his original
formulation, with the rise of narrative the attraction goes underground, confined
to specific genres such as the musical. Here attractions are allowed to remain, but
as separate intrusions into or breaks in the narrative. Furthermore, Gunning sug-
gests that spectacular films of the 1980s reaffirm cinemas roots in stimulus and
carnival rides, in what might be called the Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of ef-
fects. But effects are tamed attractions.
10
While the attractions model does capture something of the visceral power of
an effective action sequence, it fails to track viewing experience. Spectacular mo-
ments do not always appear distinct from story, nor is our relationship to the spe-
cial effect necessarily one of diegetic rupture. When Neo stops bullets in The
Matrix, we do not abandon the narrative world to be confronted by direct address,
as in early cinema or, arguably, certain musicals. Rather, the effect accompanies our
highest point of engagement with the story, as the hero extricates himself from an
impossible predicament. Scholars responding to arguments about post-classicism
have touched on the action film, pointing toward the avenue I am considering.
In this context, Murray Smiths observation, in his broad discussion of contempo-
rary Hollywood, seems particularly practical. He notes: in action films, the plot
advances through spectacle; the spectacular elements are, generally speaking, as
narrativized as are the less ostentatious spaces of other genres.
11
One might add
that action films do not require special effects of such power that they instill awe
or experiential impact in excess of narrative appeals. Godzilla, Armageddon, and
Twister might strive for attraction-grade spectacle, but films like Dirty Harry, Man
on Fire, and The Bourne Identity do not. In the final analysis, posing spectacle as
opposed to narrative has tended to distract scholars from a clear formulation of the
genre and its pleasures.
12
Suspenseful Situations. A more compelling model for comprehending the dis-
tinctiveness of the action film is found in the concept of situational dramaturgy, a
mode of plot construction rooted in blood and thunder melodrama. The concept
comes from Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs study of feature filmmaking in the 1910s,
From Theater to Cinema. Brewster and Jacobs chart the close relationship between
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century stage melodrama and the development of
the feature film. Theatrical melodrama, a form they describe as dominated by the
aesthetics of spectacle, provided the terrain on which early feature filmmakers
would work. Part of that terrain was characterized by a model of narrative as a
series of pictorial, sensational moments, or situations. Situational dramaturgy, ac-
cording to Brewster and Jacobs, was a critically disreputable, but extremely popu-
lar and practical, way of generating plots from stock elements. Situations tended
to be discrete moments, often moments of suspense or deadlock when characters
are arranged in seemingly inescapable dilemmas. It was the playwrights charge to
arrange, motivate, and resolve stock situations, a method that could yield plots of
rather loose plausibility and with relatively broad latitude for coincidence.
13
This practice was supported by playwriting manuals that listed the various
kinds of situations available for assemblage. Perhaps the most influential, and cer-
tainly the most accessible, is Georges Poltis 1895 book The Thirty-Six Dramatic
Situations. Polti challenged playwrights to construct more original plots, a project
he undertook not by stressing creation of original scenarios, but by laying out a
taxonomy of situations to foster the Art of Combination.
14
For example, under
situation 36, entitled Loss of Loved Ones, Polti offers variation A1, Witnessing
the Slaying of Kinsmen While Powerless to Prevent It, which might well lead to
situation 3, Crime Pursued by Vengeance, or situation 2, Deliverance, subset
A, the Appearance of a Rescuer to the Condemned. Alternatively, the slaying of
kinsmen might be interrupted by situation 6, Disaster, a Natural Catastrophe.
Situations can lead into one another successively, be presented as two options in a
dilemma, be deployed among different groups of characters, or be set one within
another. In all, Polti declares that there are 1,332 possible combinations.
15
In a classical narrative, moments such as these might be cast as obstacles in a
character-motivated path of cause and effect. Brewster and Jacobs differentiate
the situational approach thusly:
An obstacle is precisely understood in relation to the heros goals and narrative trajec-
tory and is therefore clearly bound to the sequential logic of the plot. To think of a
story in terms of situations, as opposed to a series of obstacles, grants a certain auton-
omy to each discrete state of affairs. Situations can be thought of independently of the
particular plots and characters which motivate them. A weakening or even disre-
gard of narrative continuity and logic is thus implicit in the concept.
16
This seems at odds with Aristotelian unity, so playwriting manuals encouraged
making situations acceptable by motivating and resolving them.
17
In nineteenth-
century melodrama, situations were both the building blocks of plot and occasions
for spectacle. Situations, which tended to be laid at the end of an act, were vehi-
cles for elaborate stage effects depicting burning buildings, train crashes, horse
races, earthquakes, and floods. Two of the best-known examples cited by Brewster
and Jacobs include a scene from the 1867 play Under the Gaslight, in which the
hero, bound to railroad tracks by the villain, is threatened by an approaching loco-
motive; and the sequence from Uncle Toms Cabin (1853), which offers the raging
snowstorm and treacherous ice flow that prevent Eliza and little Harry from cross-
ing the Ohio River to safety as they are pursued by slave catchers. By the end of
the nineteenth century, the emphasis on sensational situations was such that plays
would be built around the effects that a theater could stage. A new method for
staging an earthquake might occasion the development of a plot that featured a
natural catastrophe. Rather than posing a conflict between spectacle and narra-
tive, the situation acts as a bridge, a narrative element conceived independently as
visually sensational. As Brewster and Jacobs explain: situation should not be as-
similated to either narrative or spectacle as these concepts are currently invoked.
Rather the term crosses this divide.
18
Such was the approach that early feature
filmmakers inherited in the 1910s, and that led George Polti to proclaim in his
conclusion the Dramatic [is] a language not of words but of thrills.
19
Film scholars such as Yvonne Tasker, Jennifer Bean, and Steve Neale have
suggested a relationship between silent-film melodrama and the action-adventure
genre, pointing especially to serial production in the 1910s as a predecessor to clas-
sical and contemporary trends.
20
Significantly too, recent scholarship on film melo-
drama has gestured toward the action film. Linda Williams draws on work by Peter
Brooks and Christine Gledhill to argue that melodrama should be considered a
cross-genre intermedial mode of popular American culture. For Williams, melo-
drama elicits sympathy for the virtues of beset victims and rehearses the retrieval
and staging of virtue through adversity and suffering.
21
The mode is further de-
fined by a mixture of pathos and action, though weight can be thrown either toward
sentimental (feminine) drama or action-oriented (masculine) genres. On the ac-
tion side of the melodramatic mode, Williams cites westerns, gangster films, Clint
Eastwood films, and Rambo. Following Brooks, Williams finds the mode is popu-
lar and culturally important because of its ability to offer moral legibility that can
fill the void opened up by the loss of religious certainty.
22
Whether we agree that
the action film is defined by Williamss social function, it would seem to accord
well with her account. The genre regularly stakes out obvious moral oppositions
between heroes and villains, it trades in culturally disreputable but thoroughly
popular sensational material, and its films almost inevitably feature the suspense-
ful races depicted through parallel editing that Williams describes as the spectac-
ular essence of melodrama in which in the nick of time defies too late.
23
In his groundbreaking study of the silent serial, Ben Singer offers a less total-
izing definition of melodrama that can be convincingly applied to the action film.
For Singer, melodrama is best considered a cluster concept involving five basic
features: pathos, emotional intensification, moral polarization, sensationalism, and
what he calls nonclassical narrative structure.
24
These constitutive elements are
not all necessary for melodrama, but a combination of two or more will tend to be
sufficient. The cluster concept allows Singer to reconcile such seemingly disparate
melodramatic forms as Hollywood family melodrama (which combines pathos and
overwrought emotion) and action serials (which can combine all five), while still
delineating melodrama as a historically grounded, highly variable but not utterly
amorphous genre.
25
James Bond films, according to Singer, lack an emphasis on
pathos, but like the serial, these films still exhibit moral polarization, emotional in-
tensification, and sensationalism. Arguably, the contemporary action film can draw
on all five constitutive elements, harkening back to theatrical tradition. Films like
Aliens ( James Cameron, 1986), Swordfish (Dominic Sena, 2001), Man on Fire
(Tony Scott, 2004), and V for Vendetta (James McTeigue, 2006) court pathos by
placing young girls in jeopardy, and thus easily qualify as melodrama on all five
counts. Singers conceptualization may be especially helpful in tracing the histori-
cal development of the action genre from other cinematic forms that emphasize
different combinations of elements. My emphasis here, however, involves what he
terms sensationalism and nonclassical narrative structures.
In their strong emotions and implicit autonomy, situations are firmly aligned
with these two qualities of melodrama. Moreover, situational dramaturgy tracks
closely the particular alignment of sensation and narrative that the action film can
offer. Joel Siegels command to put our brains on cruise control seems the contem-
porary equivalent of Harry James Smiths complaint in 1907 that to feel the real
spell of the play, you must slough off sophistication and let logic go, allowing your-
self to be concerned exclusively with the situation of the moment.
26
Like a stage
melodrama, the action film knits together strong pictorial moments, sometimes fa-
voring situation over strict plausibility or even character motivation.
What is more, Poltis book appears to have currency as a point of reference in
contemporary screenwriting manuals. The 36 Dramatic Situations was republished
in paperback in 2003 and on CD-ROM in 2005. In Screenwriting from the Heart,
James Ryan pays tribute to Poltis association of situations with corresponding
emotional conflicts.
27
Michael Rabinger reproduces Poltis list as an aid to story
development in his book Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics.
28
Screenwrit-
ing guru Jeff Kitchen has based his entire approach around Poltis list in his 2003
books Script Analysis and Writing a Great Movie, as well as a DVD entitled Brain-
storming with the 36 Dramatic Situations (2005). Perhaps most interesting from
the standpoint of contemporary media is the reproduction of Poltis list on the pre-
miere professional Web site for the video game industry, Gamedev.net. The site
offers the situations as a tool to fire the imagination of the writer, indicating
some resemblance between melodrama and the episodic structure of a game nar-
rative. In each case, Polti is presented as something of a revered authority whose
categories can be adapted to generate new ideas. Without overstating the influ-
ence of Poltis version of situational dramaturgy on film today, his continued pop-
ularity at least suggests an affinity between contemporary popular narrative and
the general tradition of melodramatic plotting.
Standoffs, Races, and Hostages: Action Situations. Consider a situation
that seems directly inherited from nineteenth-century melodramathe standoff
between heroes and villains, arranged as a deadlock such that neither party can
strike. Brewster and Jacobs invoke Sheridans parody of this warhorse of situations
in his 1779 play The Critic. Sheridan mocks melodramatic convention by having a
fictional playwright concoct a scene in which two women hold the man they both
love at daggers point; the man, in turn, draws two daggers and holds them on the
women, at which point their two uncles enter and draw their swords against the
lover. The standoff is resolved when, unexpectedly, a Beefeater enters and orders
In the Queens Name, I charge you all to drop your swords and Daggers.
29
In its
structure, Sheridans parody is not far from a situation in Michael Bays The Rock
(1996). Here, the renegade but secretly humane villain Major Hummel (Ed Harris)
holds Mason (Sean Connery), a former British spy, at gunpoint. At the same time,
Hummels mercenary soldiers hold a pistol to the head of an innocent hostage,
planning to kill him if Mason refuses to talk. The situation is a deadlock because
Hummel, secretly, has no intention of taking the innocents life and Mason is, in
effect, calling his bluff. Either Hummel executes both Mason and the innocent in
cold blood, abandoning his code of honor, or he backs down, signaling his true in-
tentions to his men and risking certain mutiny. The tension is compounded by the
fact that Mason is our hero, and the only one capable of guiding Stan (Nicholas
Cages biowarfare expert) to the chemical weapons that Hummel has poised to
strike San Francisco. This variation on the standoff is resolved when the sound of
gunfire momentarily distracts Hummel and motivates a crosscut to Stan being
captured. This felicitous interruption leads directly into an ellipsis. We never re-
turn to the Hummel/Mason standoff. Instead, we rejoin the story with both Mason
and Stan alive, locked in cells. Later, we learn that none of the innocent hostages
have been killed. As with the nineteenth-century melodrama, such situations are
the stock and trade of the contemporary action film. Innovation lies in motivating
and resolving them. The Rock, though not as bald as Sheridans parody, flirts with
arbitrary coincidence as a means of solving an otherwise nicely wrought standoff.
As suggested earlier, per Polti, playwrights are able to motivate situations,
making them more or less well integrated into a causal narrative. Action film fol-
lows suit. For example, Mission Impossible II (John Woo, 2000) handles the clas-
sic standoff with less coincidence. In this case, renegade agent Sean Ambrose
(Dougray Scott) and Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) hold one another at gunpoint, while
on the floor between them lays a prized hypo of top-secret super-virus. To recover
the hypo, Ambrose sends Nyah (Thandie Newton) to pick it up. Hunt dares not
shoot the innocent Nyah because he is in love with her, and she dares not run be-
cause Ambrose and his men have their guns trained on her. In this case, the situ-
ations resolution appears less arbitrary because it rests on a characters choice.
Nyah injects herself with the virus, ensuring that Ambrose will not kill her (her
blood now contains the last traces of the prized super-virus) and enabling Hunt to
trigger a bomb that distracts Ambroses men long enough for him to execute a dar-
ing escape. Here, the standoff works in the way that Polti recommends. The res-
olution of one situation leads into the next. Hunt must now race to the rescue,
obtaining the antivirus before Nyah passes the point of no return. Moreover, the
situation is an occasion for spectacle, its resolution leading to the green-screened
sensation scene of Ethan parachuting from a burning building. The scene presents
a variation on a standard structure, a building block from a melodrama encyclope-
dia. Though we are certainly following the overarching plot, our pleasure is in the
moment, in the way that the text sets up and resolves the situation. This kind of
narrative structure might account for the distinctive feel of the contemporary ac-
tion film, for the forms roller coaster pulse.
The action genre does not reenact the entire complement of nineteenth-
century melodramatic situations; rather, it has developed its own quite specific set
which is open to combination and modification. While Poltis taxonomy covers a
wealth of emotions and dramatic tones, such as those conjured by Adultery, Mis-
taken Jealousy, and Falling Prey to Cruelty or Misfortune, the action film almost
invariably favors those situations that generate suspense in the face of physical dan-
ger. These tend to be embellishments of fundamental suspense structures that were
already well developed in D. W. Griffiths one-reel action melodramas of the 1910s.
They include the taking and freeing of hostages, the standoff, and the chase.
The sine-qua-non situation of the action film must be the race against time,
Williamss spectacular essence of melodrama, in which the hero must accomplish
a seemingly impossible task to save an innocent or group of innocents before a
firmly emphasized deadline. When the situation occurs in the final act, contempo-
rary action films often refine the race against time by imposing a double deadline;
two threats converge on one timeline. The screenwriters challenge is to set up a
race that appears entirely unwinnable, and yet still resolve the situation.
The preponderance of this narrative device recommends that it be viewed as
the genres staple situation. In Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988), John McClane
(Bruce Willis) must evacuate hostages from the roof before Hans (Alan Rickman)
blows it up, and before FBI gunships begin firing on the crowd. At the cusp of this
Figure 1. The standoff situation in Michael Bays The Rock (Buena Vista,
1996).
double deadline, McClane saves himself by leaping from the roof of the exploding
Nakatomi tower, anchored only by a fire hose. The situation terminates in a spec-
tacular special-effects display. In Aliens (1986), Ellen Ripley has fourteen minutes
(rendered in real time) to enter the queen aliens lair and rescue Newt (Carrie
Henn) before she is cocooned, and before the entire planet self-destructs. In The
Rock, Stan must disarm Hummels missiles before the remaining renegades launch
them, and before a squadron of fighter jets incinerates the island. The Matrix (Andy
and Larry Wachowski, 1999) engages this situation with brio. Trinity (Carrie-Anne
Moss), Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), and Tank (Marcus Chong) must recall
Neo (Keanu Reeves) from the computer program before he is destroyed by agents,
but they face an additional deadline imposed by approaching sentinel robots, who
can be disabled only by an Electro-Magnetic-Pulse that will disrupt their ability to
rescue Neo. In this case, the seemingly inescapable situation is resolved, in true
melodramatic fashion, by cupid-ex-machina. Trinity admits her true love for Neo
and, with a kiss, resurrects him from death, granting him the power to control the
matrix. Like the standoff, the race against time provides a well-defined formula for
launching and elaborating spectacle. The exploding buildings, islands, and planets
are not attractions distinct from narrative, but pictorial punctuations of last-
minute reversals and resolutions; spectacle is part and parcel of a kind of narrative
construction that favors sensational situations.
As Polti explained, situations are flexible units; they can be local or overarch-
ing, repeated, varied, and embedded within one another, and there is no situation
which may not be combined with any one of its neighbors, nay with two, three,
four, five, six of them and more!
30
The 1994 hit Speed, directed by Die Hards
cinematographer Jan de Bont, illustrates one extreme of this principle. It shows
how a single kind of situation can be modified and stretched to support an entire
Figure 2. Ambrose (Dougray Scott) and Hunt (Tom Cruise) in a deadlock
over Nyah (Thandie Newton) and the super-virus in John Woos Mission
Impossible II (Paramount, 2000).
feature. The film is constructed around the replaying of a hostage situation, a
variation on what Polti calls Deliverance and Crime Pursued by Vengeance
(his situations 2 and 3). The action film has specified the parameters of this situa-
tion as involving an innocent or a group of innocents whose lives are held at the
whim of a madman, whom the hero must defeat. Speed, of course, draws on famous
versions of this situation, most notably the climax of Dirty Harry (Don Siegel,
1971), which finds Clint Eastwoods character rescuing a school bus full of chil-
dren from the gun-wielding sociopath and serial killer Scorpio (Andrew Robinson);
and Die Hard, which transfers the action to a modern skyscraper. Most remark-
able about Speed, however, is that it is a veritable meditation on this situation,
playing it out in multiple passes. First L.A. police officers Jack (Keanu Reeves) and
Harry (Jeff Daniels) must save an elevator full of office workers before mad
bomber Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) triggers an explosion that will send them
crashing to their deaths. That situation is spectacularly resolved by connecting the
elevator car to the winch of a conveniently positioned crane, preventing its fall (a
development of the fire hose gag from Die Hard). Immediately afterward, Harry
is taken hostage by Howard, leading to a standoff with Jack. This situation is re-
solved when Jack shoots the hostage, encumbering Howards escape and leading
the terrorist to detonate his vest-bomb, creating a massive explosion.
The central portion of the film extends the hostage situation by lengthening
the deadline. Now Jack and Harry have three hours to find Howard and disarm a
bomb aboard a Santa Monica public bus. This situation comes with a variant of
the double deadline, since the bus will explode if its speed drops below 50 miles
per hour. Within this larger situation, akin to the locomotive speeding toward the
hero tied to the tracks, are embedded briefer, more punctual suspense structures.
Most famously, when the bus is heading toward a gap in an unfinished highway
Figure 3. As Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Neo (Keanu Reeves) kiss, true
love wins out in The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, Warner Brothers,
1999).
overpass, the situation is rather implausibly resolved by accelerating so that the
city bus leaps across the void to the cheers of its passenger hostages. Speeds final
situation depends on some coincidence to set up. Having rescued the passengers
of the bus (which explodes on an LAX runway), Jack sets about capturing Howard.
Once again, the film tests plausibility when Jack brings Annie (Sandra Bullock), his
newfound love interest and a hostage called on to drive the bus, to the site of the
ambush designed to snare Howard. Instead, Howard happens across Annie and
takes her hostage aboard a speeding subway train. Once again, the familiar struc-
ture plays through. This time, Jack dispatches Howard in a fight on top of the
speeding train, only to find that Annie has been handcuffed to the inside of the
now-runaway train (its brakes burned out), which is headed toward an area of un-
finished track. This ultimate situation is again resolved by acceleration. The train
leaps the track and explodes onto Hollywood Boulevard, where it skids to a halt in
front of Graumans Chinese Theater, heroes intact.
Situational Classicism? Speed is an instructive, albeit extreme, example of an
action film built by combining variations on a single situation. It illustrates well the
kinship between melodrama and action. But it also raises important questions. For,
though the film seems situational, it also accords with many standards attributed
to classical Hollywood narrative. It is coherent, centered on character action and
reaction, and does follow a chain of cause and effect, even if some of the causes
hinge on coincidence. Moreover, the screenplay is unified through the development
of motifs and repetitions, like Jacks decision to shoot the hostage, or the theme
of speeding transportation. Indeed, David Bordwell cites Speed as an example of
how classical methods of plot construction flourish in contemporary Hollywood.
Bordwell aptly notes that, across the film, Jacks character develops from being
Figure 4. The mad bomber Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) gets the drop
on Detective Harry Temple (Jeff Daniels) as the films hero, Jack Traven
(Keanu Reeves), tries to defuse the situation in Jan de Bonts Speed (20th
Century Fox, 1994).
merely reactive and bold to more strategic and prudent: not a moral education
worthy of Henry James but its enough to bind the suspense and stunts into a re-
markably well contoured whole.
31
Several other scholars, including Geoff King, Warren Buckland, and Kristen
Thompson, have discussed action films in relation to the classical Hollywood para-
digm. Buckland, for example, demonstrates that Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), a
foundational text for the genre, depends on a play of fluctuating audience knowl-
edge, a mark of savvy narrative construction.
32
Similarly, Thompson finds that
classical standards and patterns of narrative construction persist for the bulk of
contemporary Hollywood film. In Storytelling in the New Hollywood, she con-
cludes that there are undoubtedly relatively incoherent blockbusters (such as
Stargate, 1994) but these are not part of some systematic new practice.
33
By re-
ducing the distance between the action film and its classical counterparts, these
studies offer a sobering corrective to generalizations about post-classicism and
the fragmentation of Hollywood storytelling. But need we view melodramatic and
classical construction as fundamentally at odds?
One way to address the issue is to return to Brewster and Jacobs, who note
that situational plot constructions can be strongly or weakly motivated, or Polti, who
warns against relying on obvious coincidence to resolve situations. Polti rejects con-
trivances that are overly familiar to contemporary audiences. For instance, accord-
ing to Polti, the public quickly grew weary of situation 35, Recovery of a Lost
One, because of the fortuitous coincidences with which it has too generously
been interlarded.
34
In other words, a well-motivated, tightly woven situational
narrative might have the look and feel of classical narrative, save for the fact that
it is constructed from preexisting moments that carry with them spectacular po-
tentials. Brewster and Jacobs end their book by leaving open the issue of situa-
tional dramaturgy after the rise of classical Hollywood cinema.
Figure 5. The standoff (depicted in Figure 4) is resolved with an explosion
in Jan de Bonts Speed (20th Century Fox, 1994).
Noting that both causal and situational accounts can be given for many nar-
ratives, Brewster and Jacobs ask:
Effective situations certainly remained crucial to classical Hollywood cinema; does the
undoubtedly widespread demand for causal consistency and character-centeredness
found in manuals and the cinematic trade press in the classical period represent a shift
away from pictorialism, or is it a further instance of the discrepancy between intellec-
tuals commentary (obliged to bow to classical dramaturgy) and actual filmmaking
practice?
35
The action film offers a partial answer to this question, as a testament to the
longevity of popular but disreputable melodramatic plotting as a source for Ameri-
can cinema.
In her essay Classical Hollywood Cinema and Classical Narrative, Elizabeth
Cowie makes a similar observation. She quotes Frank Borzages 1922 observation
that we have the old melodramatic situations fitted out decently with true char-
acterizations in order to suggest that we rethink the apparent unity of narrative in
classical Hollywood cinema.
36
Certainly, situational models persisted into the clas-
sical era in antecedents of the contemporary action film, including the historical
adventures and the sound serials so beloved by Lucas and Spielberg. Ben Singer
has traced the development of the cliff-hanger plot structure to the 1910s, noting
that by late 1914 or early 1915, virtually all serial episodes ended at a point of nar-
rative suspense, with the protagonist facing apparently certain demise.
37
The format
survived well into the 1940s and 1950s in the sound serials produced for juvenile
audiences by Republic, Universal, Columbia, and Mascot. Episodes with names
like Death Takes the Wheel, or The Lightning Chamber, leave the hero deadlocked
with death in a runaway car or an electrical trap, priming the viewer to return for
next weeks last-minute reversal of fortune. These are situations at their most bald,
and they are resolved through coincidence and hidden ellipsis. In The Time Bomb,
Figure 6. The standoff is reprised at the end of Speed (Jan de Bont, 20th
Century Fox, 1994); Howard (Dennis Hopper, right) holds Annie (Sandra
Bullock) hostage as Jack (Keanu Reeves, left) must sort things out.
episode number three of Adventures of Captain Marvel (Republic, 1941), Billy
Batsons (Frank Coghlan Jr.) airplane explodes in midair as his assistants try desper-
ately to warn him of the Scorpions (Harry Worth) bomb, but Billys radio has been
sabotaged by the Scorpions henchman. Episode number four replays the situa-
tion, revealing a previously elided action, in which Billy chances upon a cut wire,
repairs his radio, receives the warning, and transforms into Captain Marvel (Tom
Tyler), who flies away from the doomed airplane just before the blast. The causally
oriented viewer would rightly feel cheated by such contrivances, which are as ran-
dom as Sheridans Beefeater who orders all participants in the standoff to drop their
swords and daggers. For a fan of situational narrative, however, the moment con-
stitutes a requisite climax that, once reached, can be abandoned to clear the way for
the next sensation. The sound serials may rely on an especially narrow set of situ-
ations, and they may offer the same solutions again and again (they are, after all, de-
signed for children); but in their very obviousness, these films can help us see how
situational plot construction might work in the action genre. Although a marginal
enterprise in the classical era, the sound serial proved highly influential on the two
foundational event films directed by movie-brats nostalgic for old Hollywood:
Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
We might trace a similar path from situation to action in the historical adven-
ture genre. Borrowing from pulp adventure stories, just as the serials borrowed
from comic strips and radio programs, these films tended to privilege spectacularly
executed rescues and races against time. Albert Parker, director of the Douglas
Fairbanks vehicle The Black Pirate (1926), described the films screenplay as a
story of situations rather than plot, the main narrative being a bare thread.
38
Warner Brothers 1935 hit Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz) relishes in situation,
though with a tongue-in-cheek posture. On the eve of his planned escape from
slavery on a colonial island, Blood (Errol Flynn) is captured, bound, and about to
be executed by Captain Bishop (Lionel Atwell). As the slave master raises his whip
and proclaims Nothing Can Save You Now! the sound of unexpected cannon fire
halts the lash. Relieved, Blood announces, this is what I call a timely interrup-
tion! and moments later, over images of a tall ship firing upon the island, a title
appears: The Timely Interruption. A Spanish ship turned pirate under the pro-
tection of the gold and crimson flag of King Philip of Spain. The film buys the
right to solve Bloods situation with guileless coincidence by offering the viewer
the spectacle of the towns decimation by the pirate ships guns, and by the films
characteristically light touch of having the hero comment on his rare luck.
39
In
Poltis terms, Captain Blood presents something akin to situation 22, Rivalry of
Superior and Inferior, interrupted by situation 6, Disaster, and spurring situa-
tion 9, Daring Enterprise, subset D1, Adventurous Expeditions. Like the serial,
the adventure film had melodramatic roots and was based in low-culture popular
narrative, but could be raised in budget to the level of prestige production by
movie stars like Fairbanks and Flynn. The James Bond series that began in the
1960s clearly builds on this tradition.
Such historical trajectories might give credence to Cowiess suggestion that
unhooking classical narrative and classical Hollywood as equivalents is an im-
portant step in enabling the difference between classical and post-classical
American cinema to be properly assessed.
40
For, rather than viewing the action
film as a radical departure from classical conventions, we might well understand it
as a continuation of melodramas legacy, a form that elaborates on structures that
helped define the early life of the feature filmand that, I would suggest, never
disappeared.
Stressing such continuities lessens the urgency to define a post-classical era.
Murray Smith points out that contemporary Hollywood cinema may be marked
by somewhat episodic narratives, but he reminds us that these are traceable to
serials, B-adventures, and episodic melodramas, which form a different strain of
the legacy of studio-era Hollywood.
41
In light of the persistence of situational
dramaturgy in some forms through the studio era, we might recast Singers term
non-classical narrative structure. Classicism is resilient largely because of its
flexibility in accommodating variations, including the melodramatic. Situational
narrative may not be non-classical so much as a variant that could be assimilated
by, or at least contained within, the classical tradition.
Plotting Situations, or, 30/60/30 Melodrama. The classical model retains
a tremendous explanatory value for contemporary Hollywood cinema. David
Bordwell has convincingly argued that current popular American film has inher-
ited and refined studio-era options, and that contemporary formulae for plot
structure has remained centered on character causality. He singles out action films
in particular as more tightly woven than they need to be and suggests that the
industrys ideal action movie is as formally strict as a minuet.
42
My point here is
not to dispute this characterization, but to suggest that situational dramaturgy fits
well with contemporary norms.
The most widely recognized formula for the mainstream American screen-
play is the three-act structure, popularly advocated by screenwriting guru Syd
Field in his book Screenplay: the Foundations of Screenwriting (1979). In a typi-
cal two-hour film, with each page translating into about a minute of screen time,
the first act should last thirty pages, the second act sixty, and the third act another
thirty. As Bordwell explains, this template is actually more rigid than those associ-
ated with classical Hollywood production, but it has become a standard formula
for mass-market films since the 1980s.
43
This 30/60/30 division encourages scripts
with unified action split between a setup (act one), complication (act 2), and climax
(act 3). The third act, a continuous climax, often a race against time, offers the
most likely place for a situation to be developed and resolved.
44
Here, the action
film almost invariably deploys races to the rescue, hostage situations, or chases,
with specific tangible deadlines and pyrotechnic displays. But the first and second
act, too, can house powerful situations. A prologue might present a modular action
sequence vaguely connected to the main narrative, a tradition solidified by the
Bond films, but already present in the cliff-hanger solution that opened a serial in-
stallment. The remainder of act one often maneuvers characters into a situation
that act two resolves in order to launch the climax. In Speed, act one introduces
the main players in an action prologue, and sets up the bomb-on-the-bus situation.
The second act plays this out, culminating with the buss explosion, and leading di-
rectly into the third acts subway climax. The 30/60/30 format imposes a quasi-
Aristotelian composition of beginning, middle, and end, but it also supports the
situational model. Like a stage melodrama with a prescribed number of curtains,
the three-act structure is a reliable framework for laying out situations. As noted
with regard to Speed, it also allows the embedding of local, smaller-scale suspense
structures, usually within the second act.
A closer look at a recent, fairly pedestrian actioner like Hostage (Florent Siri,
2005) illustrates how the three-act structure and situational dramaturgy can inter-
act. The film essentially doubles the hostage situation. Three delinquents take
over a mansion and hold the family hostage, preventing the father, who happens
to be a mob accountant, from delivering a DVD with financial records to his boss.
Police chief Jeff Talley (Bruce Willis) must free the young boy and his teenage sis-
ter, and also save his own wife and child, who have been kidnapped by the mob to
force him into retrieving the DVD. The films advertising tagline summarizes the
films situation in terms that Polti might approve: Would you sacrifice someone
elses family to save your own?
After a prologue hostage situation in which Talleys failed negotiation ends in
the murder of a young boy and his mother, Doug Richardsons screenplay effi-
ciently sets up the central situation. At the half-hour mark (roughly thirty pages
in), Tommy (Jimmy Bennett) and Jennifer Smith (Michelle Horn) have been
taken hostage in their home by the three thugs; their father Walter (Kevin Pollak),
an accountant for the criminals, has been knocked unconscious; and Talley has
opened negotiations with Dennis (Jonathan Tucker), one of the delinquents. The
main twist occurs fifteen minutes later, when Talley learns that his own family has
been abducted. The event makes for a longer first act, but it effectively introduces
our last set of characters (the criminal hit men) and doubles the first situation.
Talley is now officially in a bind. In trying to save his loved ones, he will have to
put young Tommy Smith at risk, asking him to retrieve the DVD. The central por-
tion of the movie, its second act, milks the situation, as Mars (Ben Foster), the
delinquent sociopath, grows increasingly violent and menaces Jennifer Smith.
Meanwhile, the shadowy criminals continue to threaten Talley, eventually invad-
ing the mansion on their own, disguised as FBI agents.
In the final half hour of action, Talley resolves the situations in two standoffs.
Mars sets fire to the mansion, and Talley frees Jennifer and Tommy only to be held
at gunpoint by a hit man. Mars unexpectedly breaks the standoff by attacking the
hit man and then, mortally wounded, collapsing amid the flames of his own Molo-
tov cocktail. Talley then uses Walter Smith as a hostage to secure the release of his
family. In the second standoff, the crime boss refuses to release Talleys wife and
child until Talley releases Walter. This time, Walter breaks the standoff by shooting
the crime boss with his concealed gun. In the action film version of a double wed-
ding, the twin standoffs ensure that the Talley and Smith families will be reunited.
With the strongest statements of the situation dominating the first and third
acts, the longer second act rearticulates the two overarching situations and plays
out smaller-scale suspense structures along the way. In a reversal of the Die Hard
scenario, Bruce Williss character must address the situation from outside the oc-
cupied building. He negotiates the release of Walter Smith, and Tommy sneaks
through a network of air ducts to steal the DVD from his fathers office while the
gang is on the prowl. Talley attempts to draw the thugs away from the hostages by
offering them a helicopter. The plan fails and leads to a standoff in the driveway,
in which Mars holds Jennifer at gunpoint and Talley withdraws. Later, Tommy frees
his sister, and they are chased by Mars, who corners them in the mansions panic
room. These moments keep the film moving without altering the main situations.
As the second act draws closer to the climax, the plot tightens and defines the
situations further. Mars kills his accomplices, eliminating two morally ambiguous
characters and setting the stage for the confrontation of threatened innocence and
the cold-hearted sociopath. Similarly, Talleys authority seems all but lost when the
FBI agents (hit men in disguise) arrive and give him command of the case. At the
close of the second act, the forces of good and evil are well defined, and the situ-
ations have been refocused. Unlike Speed, which resolves one situation in the sec-
ond act only to launch a new one in the third, Hostage runs two parallel situations,
resolving them in quick succession in the climax.
The films debt to melodrama is striking. Hostage elaborates a premise remi-
niscent of a one-reel Griffith Biograph melodrama. The invasion of the home and
the eventual reuniting of the family, and Marss chase of the two children through
a series of adjoining rooms, strongly recall The Lonely Villa (1909). The whole
melodramatic works are set into play by a founding coincidence: the delinquents
happen to attack the home of a criminal accountant on the night he is supposed to
deliver the DVD. Similarly, the crime boss behaves arbitrarily to keep the plot on
track. Seeing that Talley has failed to obtain the disk, he sends in the sham FBI to
steal it, a plan that will likely end in Jennifers and Tommys deaths. By the films
cruel logic, this move should take Talley out of the equation; he is no longer essen-
tial to the criminals plan. In order to launch the climactic resolutions, however,
the bad guys continue to hold Talleys family hostage and give him the opportunity
to approach the mansion on his own. Coincidence looms over the timely interrup-
tion by the sham FBI just as our hero is being removed from duty. Marss inde-
pendent decision to burn the mansion at exactly the same time that the criminals
and Talley invade the house also rings of chance.
Classical norms supported by the three-act structure, however, do much to
minimize the appearance of melodrama. The films prologue initiates a strong char-
acter arc for Talley; the shock of losing his hostages provides a vivid emotional mo-
tivation for saving Jennifer and Tommy. The first act also establishes that Talleys
family life is on the rocks, and that he cannot communicate with either his wife or
his own teenage daughter. As is typical of contemporary Hollywood cinema, the
resolution of the external conflict triggers the quelling of Talleys psychic beasts.
45
Character arc helps bind the situations together. The exemplar of this kind of plot-
ting is Die Hard, which offers a thorough integration of John McClanes reconcili-
ation with his wife and his victory over the supposed terrorists.
46
In Hostage, the
connection between the internal and external struggle is relatively bare bones, but
Talleys success at rescuing both sets of hostages implies that he has conquered
his inner demons and can rebuild his own family. Moreover, as in Speed, the basic
situation serves as a sort of motif that unifies the film. Hostages abound; after los-
ing two in the prologue, the Smiths are taken hostage, then when Talleys family
is taken, he becomes a hostage himself. Finally, Walter Smith serves as a false
hostage in the climactic standoff. What may be a melodramatic contrivance gains
the strength of a structuring element through its repetition.
Like Speed, Hostage is readable against both the classical and melodramatic
models. In the contemporary action genre, both modes operate, united into a
structure that can supply the ride experience of tension and release held to-
gether by a tight weave of unifying elements. The three-act structure, because of
its familiarity as a norm, does quite a bit of work to motivate the situations. In
Hostage, the second act puts a brake on resolving the main situations, and instead
deepens and extends them. We fully expect that the plot elements will align them-
selves in the final half hour to facilitate a speedy resolution, and this buys the film-
makers room to force some coincidence at the end of the second act. Nonetheless,
the film is built from melodramatic building blocks that date back to nineteenth-
century stage tradition. We might view the motifs and achingly clear character arc
as elements that help the melodrama fit with contemporary norms, or a way to
bind together the situations. The 30/60/30 division provides an able framework
for connecting situations; a contemporary convention that serves forth time-tested,
if critically disreputable, melodramatic pleasures.
Tony Scott and the Limits of Situational Dramaturgy. I contend that the ac-
tion genre relies on melodramatic situations, but not all action films are equally sit-
uational. At one end of the spectrum, the James Bond and Mission Impossible
franchises, and films like Speed and Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998), trade in-
tensively on a very small set of suspense structures. But genres tend to be flexible.
Producer and director Tony Scott, who worked extensively in the genre, tests the
limits of situational dramaturgy in two of his recent films, Man on Fire (2004)
and Domino (2005). As Scott tries to innovate within his well-worn formula, his
films work against the patterns of melodrama in very different ways. Together, the
films illustrate how situational dramaturgy provides a basis for genre experimen-
tation. Man on Fire offers a variant on Poltis tenth and third situations, Abduc-
tion and Vengeance of Crime. Creasy (Denzel Washington), a CIA assassin
turned bodyguard, undertakes a vendetta against the men who kidnapped his
charge, a ten-year-old girl named Pita (Dakota Fanning). The film, however, delays
the onset of the situation with an unusually long first act, mostly given to develop-
ing Creasys character as a suicidal alcoholic and depicting his relationship with Pita,
who redeems him. Creasys internal conflict reaches a crisis point at the thirty-
minute mark, when in a suicide attempt, the bullet fails to fire. Twenty minutes
further on, Pita is kidnapped, setting the saga of vengeance in motion.
Because Pita is presumed dead at the end of the kidnapping ordeal, there is
very little suspense involved in Creasys grim mission. The action in the second
act is organized around Creasys murderous investigation, without the pressure
of a clear deadline either to save a hostage or to stop further crimes by the kid-
nappers. Nor is there much further character development, as Creasy is single-
minded in his pursuit of revenge. Having articulated Creasys master situation,
Brian Helgelands screenplay never casts the characters into a suspenseful dead-
lock during the second act. This is in pointed contrast to the 1987 version of Man
on Fire, in which the hero races against the clock to free the girl. It is only in the
final twenty minutes of Scotts version that Creasy discovers that Pita is alive, and
he gives his life to liberate her (Poltis Self-sacrifice for a Kindred). The climax
effectively (and irrevocably) closes off his character arc, as the man who had noth-
ing to live for now finds a reason to die. It does not, however, deliver the sense of
suspense and reversal on which action melodrama thrives. In Man on Fire, the
conventional action plot is refocused into a surprisingly somber character study.
Domino, on the other hand, scatters situation, coincidence, and reversals lib-
erally, but refuses to let them develop. The main narrative is played out in flash-
back, as socialite fashion model turned bounty hunter Domino Harvey (Keira
Knightley) recounts the events leading up to a hostage situation gone wrong to her
FBI interrogator (Lucy Liu). The framing device allows Scott to supply a voice-
over that helps to explain a barely coherent caper plot, and to shuffle and replay
events as they are related to us by an unreliable narrator. The central coincidence
that sets up spiraling situations occurs when the bail bondsman and operator of an
armored truck company Claremont Williams (Delroy Lindo) stages the robbery of
a clients truckload of cash in order to claim a reward for its recovery. Williams
does not realize that his mark is laundering money for the mob. He also (unknow-
ingly) sets up the mob bosss college-aged sons as fall guys. Williams intends to use
the money to buy a desperately needed operation for his girlfriend Lateeshas
(MoNique) young daughter, who is suffering from a rare blood disease. Domino
and her crew are caught in the middle when Williams contracts them to round
up the fall guys, and then to recover the cash. Potential situations include the mob
bosss discovery that he has ordered the execution of his own children; Dominos
dilemma of whether to return all of the money to the mob (thus saving her life),
or stealing some of it for the girls operation; and a final standoff between
Dominos crew and the mob boss, during which it is discovered that one of the
crew has sent all of the money to Afghanistan and replaced it with a remote-
controlled bomb.
However, none of these situations are refined or focused to the point of sus-
pense. Instead, most of them are resolved quickly and capriciously. A replay of
events reveals the mafia children have not been killed; Domino almost immedi-
ately decides to steal money for the dying daughter; and the standoff, interrupted
by the revelation of the bomb, quickly explodes into gunfire. Even the frame-story
of Dominos testimony, which she says will make the difference between freedom
and a prison term, bristles with undelivered suspense. In the end, the interrogator
releases Domino, but the reason is never clarified.
The standoff that closes the first act is emblematic of Dominos use of melodra-
matic convention. The scene marks Dominos acceptance into Ed Mosbeys (Mickey
Rourke) team of bounty hunters. In a raid on an L.A. gangs hideout, the team
finds itself severely outgunned. As the antagonists face one another in a standoff,
Scott provides a flashback to a scene of Domino as a child, while her voice-over
intones that night, my coin was tossed. Heads you live, tails you die. The film re-
turns to the standoff as the gang opens fire, killing all of the bounty hunters. Mo-
ments later, Dominos voice-over continues My destiny was life over
images of the massacre playing in reverse. Once more the standoff begins, but this
time Domino diffuses the situation by offering the gang leader a lap dance! The
resolution of the standoff is identified within the film as the product of dumb luck,
and the lap dance is self-consciously implausible. If any film merits the epithet of
two-hour trailer for an action movie, it would be Domino. Where Man on Fire
blunts the situations by focusing on character and removing the hostage, Domino
multiplies and fragments them to the point of incoherence. Both films, though, are
firmly within the action genre, and they each innovate by citing and diverging
from situational dramaturgy.
Conclusion. Situational dramaturgy, Poltis language of thrills, undergirds the
action films ride aesthetic. The suspense situation may be the most classically
inclined of the melodramatic situations, and it thrives in the genre that most con-
sistently delivers blood and thunder to contemporary viewers. In his book The
Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll has defined suspense in terms of morality and
desirability; it occurs when an event has two very clear, opposed potential outcomes,
and the evil outcome is most likely.
47
This description seems strikingly aligned with
the melodramatic; in fact, Carrolls archetypal example involves a heroine and an
onrushing locomotive. As the bus speeds toward the abyss, it is most likely, but least
desirable, that it will plummet. Melodrama, with its emphasis on moral simplifica-
tion and spectacle, probably helped to define our popular idea of suspense, and
the action film inherits and further refines the melodramatic formula by favoring
situations that can be resolved through physical conflict and that motivate extrava-
gant set-pieces. Riding an action film means navigating from situation to situation,
being repeatedly brought to the height of a dilemma and plunging out of it through
luck, wit, and firepower. Hostages, chases, races against time, and standoffs form
the core situational vocabulary for the contemporary action filmmaker, and they are
repeated with such regularity that they activate the play of morality and desire
with enviable efficiency. Even filmmakers who revise the formula, like Tony Scott,
Michael Mann, and Quentin Tarantino, do so by self-consciously departing from
situational foundations. Viewing the genre thusly does not mean that it is nonclas-
sical in the sense of lacking causality or character agency. Rather, contemporary
norms, such as the three-act structure and character arc, help stitch together and
motivate situations with unparalleled finesse.
The concept of situational dramaturgy helps us untangle the apparent oppo-
sition between spectacle and narrative, and to reconcile classical and melodra-
matic qualities in the contemporary action film. It also begs an important historical
question that this essay has begun to answer. If this mode of plot construction of-
fers explanatory value for both the early feature film and the recent action genre,
what was its path of development through the intervening classical era? The tra-
jectory suggested here, of movement through serials and historical adventures,
merits further investigation. Likewise, the interplay between situational construc-
tion and film aesthetics may offer rich ground for inquiry. Tom Gunning argues
that D. W. Griffith developed and exploited parallel editing to create races to the
rescue that were visual equivalents to melodramas sensation scenes.
48
Brewster
and Jacobs examine how staging and editing techniques reworked theatrical situ-
ations in the early feature film. The need to build and resolve situations may shape
formal choices made by both contemporary and classical filmmakers. In studying
the action film and its historical development, we might better grasp popular cin-
emas debt to melodrama and refine our notions of classical form.
Notes
1. Annabelle Vilaneuva, Action Dissatisfaction, Cinescape 4, no. 1 (1998): 46.
2. The films are Star Wars: Episode 1, Jurassic Park, Star Wars: Episode III, Spider-Man,
Independence Day, Spider-Man 2, Star Wars, The Matrix Reloaded, Pirates of the
Figure 7. Domino (Keira Knightley), the center of attention in Tony Scotts
Domino (New Line, 2005).
Caribbean, and Star Wars: Episode II according to BoxofficeMojo.com. If one in-
cludes the Lord of the Rings films in this tally, the total jumps to thirteen action films.
http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/.
3. See Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: Univer-
sity of Texas Press, 1994); Wheeler Winston Dixon, Twenty-Five Reasons Why Its All
Over in The End of Cinema as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties, ed. Jon
Lewis (New York: New York University Press, 2001) 35666. For a thorough overview
and criticism of this position, see David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story
and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
4. James Camerons T2, with its use of computer morphing, helped crystallize the strat-
egy of using a particular special effects technology to define an event pictures market
identity. Other examples include the use of CGI in the Jurassic Park series, or Bullet
Time in The Matrix.
5. James M. Welsh, Action Films: The Serious, the Ironic and the Postmodern, in Film
Genre 2000, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2000), 169.
6. Dixon, Film Genre 2000, 45.
7. Geoff King, Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London:
I. B. Traubis & Co., 2000), 36.
8. Ibid.
9. Jose Arroyo, Action/Spectacle Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader (London: BFI,
2000) vii, 2, 22.
10. Tom Gunning, The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-
Garde Wide Angle 8, no. 3/4 (1986): 70.
11. Murray Smith, Theses on the Philosophy of Hollywood History, in Contempo-
rary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neal and Murray Smith (New York: Routledge,
1998), 13.
12. Yvonne Tasker makes a similar point when she notes that the action of action cinema
refers to the enactment of spectacle as narrative. She also extends her definition of
spectacle beyond effects and stunts, and views visual display as a defining feature of
the genre. My argument, by contrast, prioritizes the narrative structures that might
enable a less generalized kind of spectacle. Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1993), 6.
13. Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997), 1929.
14. Georges Polti, The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations (Boston: The Writer Inc., 1977), 123.
15. Polti, Thirty Six Dramatic Situations, 120, 121.
16. Brewster and Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema, 24.
17. Ibid., 23, 24.
18. Ibid., 22.
19. Polti, Thirty Six Dramatic Situations, 131.
20. Yvonne Taskers important anthology Action and Adventure Cinema collects essays on
early film melodrama by Jennifer Bean and Ben Singer, along with Steve Neales useful
overview of the action-adventure genre. In her introduction, Tasker notes that action
films are typically melodramatic. Though none of this work dwells on connections
between the contemporary genre and the nineteenth-century theatrical tradition, it very
much affirms the need for further investigation. Yvonne Tasker, Action and Adventure
Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004), 5.
21. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001), 15.
22. Ibid., 20.
23. Ibid., 25.
24. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 4450.
25. Ibid., 7, 58.
27. James Ryan, Screenwriting from the Heart (New York: Billboard Books, 2000), 75.
28. Michael Rabinger, Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics (Burlington MA: Focal
Press, 2003), 171.
31. Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, 111, 112.
32. Warren Buckland, A Close Encounter with Raiders of the Lost Ark: notes on narra-
tive aspects of the New Hollywood blockbuster in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema,
16677.
33. Kristen Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Nar-
rative Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 348.
36. Elizabeth Cowie, Storytelling: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Classical Narrative
in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, 184.
37. Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 210.
38. Rudy Behlmer, High Style on the High Seas, American Cinematographer (April
1992): 28.
39. Contemporary cinema is often described as self-aware, but this moment is a reminder
that playful knowingness and irony are by no means new methods covering melodra-
matic contrivance. Indeed, the use of self-aware humor may in part distinguish main-
stream situational construction from more marginal, nave forms like the serial.
40. Cowie, Storytelling, 178.
41. Smith, Theses on the Philosophy of Hollywood History, 1213.
42. Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, 105, 109.
43. Ibid., 28, 29, 34. The three-act structure is by far the most pervasive description of
Hollywood plotting, but it may not be the most accurate. Kristen Thompson offers a
compelling argument that most popular Hollywood films follow a four-part structure,
with the second act split at a midpoint. Still, the three-act structure is the dominant
way of teaching screenwriting, and it is a contemporary baseline that serves remarkably
well for measuring Hollywood production.
44. Ibid., 29.
45. The development of inner conflicts to parallel the heros external struggle is also a
strong convention of contemporary screenwriting according to Bordwell, The Way
Hollywood Tells It, 2931.
46. In his manual for action screenwriting, William Martell proclaims: What makes John
McClane the perfect protagonist for DIE HARD is that the external conflict forces
him to confront and solve an internal conflict, leading to a single solution which solves
both problems and brings peace to the protagonist. William Martell, Secrets of Action
Screenwriting (Los Angeles: First Strike Productions, 2000), 229.
47. Noel Carroll, Philosophy of Horror (New York: Routledge, 1990), 138.
48. Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of the American Narrative Film(Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991), 95, 106.

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