Are We No Longer Capable of Producing Great Drama?

Reprinted with permission from Facebook, a guest post by Catholic writer and educator Anthony Esolen, a professor of English at Providence College, who write for such publications as Crisis Magazine, The Catholic Thing, Touchstone and The Imaginative Conservative.

On the nature of drama…

I’ve long told my students that drama is the most unpredictable of the main literary genres. It can go dormant for a very long time — for over a millennium in the west, from Terence and Plautus to the rise of the “mystery” plays in medieval Europe. England has been a literary powerhouse since the time of Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare, but there is almost no good drama (as opposed to poems in dramatic form, such as Prometheus Unbound) written in English between Sheridan and Goldsmith in the time of Johnson, to the generation of Eugene O’Neill.

The advent of film, precisely when it came, involved a happy coincidence of cultural conditions that gave rise to great drama for about fifty or sixty years, most of it in the form of film rather than stage plays. You had thriving popular cultures in the US and across Europe. You had pretty high levels of literacy, and more than fading memories of classical Greece and Rome and of the great and long European Renaissance from Chretien de Troyes to Milton. You had people who knew war, who knew hard physical work on farms and in mills and down mine shafts, who had been in churches and synagogues filled with worshipers, who felt the transience of human life (think of the flu pandemic), the difficulties of virtue, and the inevitable and dreadful punishments that vice brings along with its fleeting and disappointing pleasures. You had, moreover, the opera, which in places like Italy and Germany was not a precious little enclave for the rich and the sophisticated, but truly a feature of popular culture, Theater houses in the United States hosted traveling troupes of players and singers.

Then came the new medium. It produced a diseased pseudo-culture of celebrity, but FIRST it produced great drama, created by men and women who had not themselves been raised in that pseudo-culture. The studio system, despite its many injustices (and you don’t want to look too closely behind that curtain), allowed for the production of movies that were never going to be blockbusters, but that were often interesting and human, and some of those dark horses ended up being great works of art indeed.

There’s poverty and privation just one false step away from the principals in so many of the finest movies, and it isn’t poverty as a “political” thing — just the ordinary poverty that human beings have until very recently always been near. The poverty does to the human spirit what Johnson said the prospect of hanging does: it clears the mind admirably. I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang; The Good Earth; Boys Town; The Yearling; A Tale of Two Cities; You Can’t Take it With You; It’s a Wonderful Life; People Will Talk; The Keys to the Kingdom; All Quiet on the Western Front; and on and on.

I think that those cultural conditions have played themselves out. Put it this way: It Happened One Night could not make any sense now. Hardly five minutes of it could now be shot — and certainly the tremendous final scene would be a puzzle. For better and for worse, the nearness of poverty is gone; but also the demands of virtue, and the unstated knowledge that in life there must always be sacrifice and suffering.

This may also go a long way to explaining why remake after remake is bloodless, limp, lame or just plain dumb. You may be able to reproduce the basic outline of a movie, but the people who made it grew up in a different time, and the movie was released in a different time.

In our time — at once utterly libertine and creatively stunted; strangled by PC notions, and unwilling to produce anything that won’t play in China — recapturing the magic of even such relatively recent films as “Independence Day” and “Ghostbusters” may be impossible.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

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