It is surprising that although the increasing prestige of realism has eroded the prestige of the epic and romance, the narrative structure of the novel is not more important to our movies. You might not think so at first because so many movies start life as novels. (Or at least as works of realistic prose fiction called novels; the importance of novels to movies is further magnified because most critics are intellectually overinvested in the novel and so judge melodramas and romances by the canons of realism.) Genuine novels are tempting both as source works and as working models for American moviemakers because they focus on central characters--all those middle-class subjects who give their first and last names to the books they "star" in--a seeming mirror of the American movie industry’s devotion to stars. (It’s fair to say that in terms of the elements of storytelling Hollywood can’t see the forest for the rangers, and never could.)

Character is indeed central to the novel, as Ian Watt states in his formulation of what was new about the form when it arose in the 18th century in England: "[T]he novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms." 1 

As for the narrative structure, realistically depicted characters set events in motion and then develop in response to the consequences of their actions. A clear-cut example: Jane Austen’s Emma plays matchmaker, her trifling in other people’s lives causes confusion that finally makes her see the wrongheadedness of her behavior, and this coming into self-awareness makes her a fit mate for Mr. Knightley, bringing the comic matchmaking impulse full circle. The character doesn’t have to set the events in motion--Hardy’s Tess doesn’t, for instance--but develops, becomes more fully herself, in response to them--tragically in Tess’s case--all the same.

Whether it’s the story of an actor or a reactor, told as comedy or tragedy, in Northrop Frye’s words, "the novel’s chief interest is in human character as it manifests itself in society," 2  that is, among fellow actors and reactors. The concept of character resolves the tension in the realistic plot between the development of a life story as it "happens" and the demands of revelatory storytelling to produce a system of actions and reactions as interlocked as a balance sheet and which likewise has to add up, make sense, be consistent and believable.

Screenplays, however, don’t read like novels but like playscripts, because they run on theatrical time rather than the more leisurely, pick-it-up-and-put-it-down novel-reading time. (In the past, movies were sometimes adapted from intermediate theatrical versions of novels: the Laurence Olivier-Greer Garson Pride and Prejudice (1940), William Wyler’s Dodsworth (1936) and The Heiress (1949), George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951), and Fred Zinnemann’s The Member of the Wedding (1952) are well known examples.) Unlike novelists, moviemakers don’t have the time for full novelistic development nor do they have as much access to the characters’ unexpressed thoughts and feelings as they care to avail themselves of, and so it isn’t surprising that a photographic medium working from texts written as playscripts should owe to the novel its realistic treatment of the constituent elements more than its narrative structure. At the same time it’s odd that they haven’t taken over the more compact narrative techniques or the outlook of naturalism, the term for modern realism in the theater.

It’s important to distinguish between realistic novels and plays since plays have so many more constraints within which to develop their plots. Naturalism is actually more useful as a term not for a narrative genre in itself, but for the pole of realism farthest from the intricate plot ingeniously designed to bring out character. Naturalism, which cuts across the theater and the novel, and is also a useful term in the visual arts, is the aspect of realism that faithfully depicts nature; thoughts, emotions, behavior, and relationships; processes; and institutions, as they are and as they operate, as if they were not being observed or, in fact, created by the artist.

Watt has described how this plays out in narrative structure. He states that "Defoe and Richardson are the first great writers in our literature who did not take their plots from mythology, history, legend or previous literature." 3  Instead, Defoe

merely allowed his narrative order to flow spontaneously from his own sense of what his protagonists might plausibly do next. In so doing Defoe initiated an important new tendency in fiction: his total subordination of the plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoir is as defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel as Descartes’s cogito ergo sum was in philosophy. 4 

Naturalism is probably too impartial to figure in our movies much; it doesn’t offer enough excitement for the mass audience or enough of a "take" on the action. It is often used by artists specifically to combat melodrama, the dope American audiences are addicted to: that’s what Dreiser does in Sister Carrie when he has Hurstwood trick Carrie with a false wedding and then makes it turn out better for her that they aren’t really married when Hurstwood goes into his decline. The apex of naturalism in our movies comes in Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries.

Not surprisingly, then, you find naturalism in our movies, like realism generally, in the handling of stories developed according to narrative conventions other than those of the realistic novel and naturalistic theater. In Next Stop, Greenwich Village, for instance, Paul Mazursky describes his exploratory Bohemian life as an actor in the 1950s and contrasts it with the cramped, traditional family life of Brownsville that he was desperate to leave behind. The movie feels utterly authentic in part because there is no plot. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t follow precedent narrative conventions. (No movie does that--the only alternative is incoherence.) The question is which conventions will best express what the moviemaker has in mind, and in Next Stop, Greenwich Village it’s a romance with the hero engaged in a quest of self-discovery. (For the story to register as realistic to this degree the quest has to be relatively abstract. The other end, the literal quest for a witch’s broomstick, for instance, puts you in the dream realm of The Wizard of Oz.)

In the light of romance, Ellen Greene as the hero’s uncertain girlfriend and Christopher Walken as the coolly amoral poet she goes to Mexico with function as the temptress and the rival knight whose behavior shows how the wider range of action that Bohemian morality permits imperils the nice-boy hero. With freedom come some things that aren’t so pretty or pleasant. (You can’t be misled by the subtlety of Greene’s performance; her doubts just make her a tormented temptress, like Wagner’s Kundry.) The overprotectiveness of Shelley Winters as the hero’s mother is thus "good" in that he is exposing himself to deceptive situations that will hurt him, but "bad" in that her response is to hold him back and keep him from developing into the artist who will make the movie we’re watching. She wants him to stay within bounds familiar to her and yet, with her love of Jussi Björling, also inspires him. She’s thus both inimical and tutelary sorceress figures.

In the hero’s struggle against his mother for actualization, Next Stop, Greenwich Village bridges romance and realism as much as Now, Voyager (1942), a psychotherapeutic ugly duckling tale, or Lost in Yonkers, with its witch-in-the-gingerbread-house set-up. What’s interesting in Mazursky’s movie is the fact that autobiographical material has been absorbed into romance conventions. Of course, the writing and acting are astonishingly nuanced and so we don’t feel that Mazursky is the "romancer" who, according to Frye "does not attempt to create ’real people’ so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes."  5  But while precise, particular handling of the characters isn’t what we mean by romance, it can function in romance.

We have had a few amazing naturalist play adaptations, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962) and the most imaginatively made movie among them Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street. But for the most part, realism functions not as a narrative structure but as an approach to the material that you could describe as acutely observational, regardless of structure, Fred Zinnemann’s The Member of the Wedding and The Nun’s Story (1959), Irvin Kershner’s Loving (1970), Martin Ritt’s Sounder (1972), Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974), Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon (1982) from Bo Goldman’s script, Glenn Gordon Caron’s Clean and Sober (1988), and Audrey Wells’s Guinevere (1999), having a particularly literary-realist feel.

1. [T]he novel is a full and authentic report: Watt 32. Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) is the finest movie about the distinction between the realist novel and earlier narrative forms. Kazantzakis’s literary enterprise is to reimagine the gospel story, accepting its outcome and significance, in modern novelistic terms, and Scorsese’s movie does perfect justice to it. At the center of the literary theme sits fierce, faithful Judas struggling with the unintelligibility--from a realist perspective, which emphasizes motivation, plausibility, consistency--of his necessary role. Harvey Keitel’s bluff literal-mindedness in the part provides the only profoundly funny scenes in any Biblical movie ever. Scorsese’s movie is fascinating, a kind of literary controlled experiment, and comes as close as any fictional movie possibly can to giving flesh to the problem of narrative mode. (return to text)
2. Northrop Frye: Anatomy 308. (return to text)
3. Defoe and Richardson: Watt 14. (return to text)
4. Defoe merely allowed: Watt 15. (return to text)
5. the "romancer": Frye, Anatomy 304. (return to text)