Reading David Bordwell's interesting book on Hollywood narrative innovations in the forties, Reinventing Hollywood, focuses my attention on the way plots are designed in contemporary films and TV. The long form dramatic TV series has, I think, fostered a new kind of narrative. Shows like Westworld and Babylon Berlin display this new sort of plot and I think it's worth considering. Westworld is so abjectly terrible that I won't address that show here -- although I confess I watched all episodes out of a perverse desire to see how bad things could get. The show hooked me with a very interesting program mid-series and, so, despite my reservations, I watched the rest of Westworld -- in fact, I wrote an earlier note on an episode that intrigued me and suggested that the program might actually achieve something worthwhile. Alas, I was misled and the program deteriorated week by week until it had achieved a majestic state of total incoherence. Babylon Berlin illustrates the same kind of narrative, although much better written and less chaotic than Westworld and, so, I will use this show (which I haven't finished watching) as my example. I don't have a good title for the kind of narrative that is exemplified by these programs -- but will describe their traits. These shows imagine a specific milieu -- that is, a city or a historical period or situation that will be interest viewers. The show, then, establishes a closely inter-related group of protagonists and sets into motion a phalanx of plots, unified by the (arbitrary) relationship between the protagonists (they work in the same place or live in the same area or are related by marriage or blood somehow -- in Babylon Berlin all of these categories are more or less operative.) Conventionally,a plot can be devised as a main story with a subplot or parallel and thematically related plots (for instance, King Lear - two parallel plots involving betrayal of older members of a family by their juniors) or main plot with several digressions (a good example of this is John Ford's My Darling Clementine in which the main narrative which involves the fight at the OK Corral is interrupted for an hour by romantic and other digressions that have nothing really to do with the central story.) Babylon Berlin doesn't adopt any of these schema. Instead, the show sets up, at least, eight to ten plots, runs them simultaneously, cross-cutting between an episode in one plot and a simultaneously occurring episode in another plot,but, generally, glances at each of the stories in a single 45 minute episode. (The show is comprised of about ten episodes each between 40 and 50 minutes long). By the eighth episode or so, several of the plot lines are exhausted -- that is, the conflict or project posited by the plot has been resolved. Those episodes, then, drop out of the show, more or less, with the final two programs resolving the plots that remain, although always keeping one or two narratives alive so that the program can be renewed for another year. The advantage to this kind of narrative structure is that the film maker can deliver a kaleidoscopic (or prismatic) series of experiences to the audience and, in effect, suggest that the show is exhaustive or encyclopedic with respect to the era or situation presented. Most fundamentally, this complicated narrative system keeps the audience's attention because something exciting is always happening -- maybe three or four of the narratives are slowly establishing the perquisites of their plots; but simultaneously, another three or four of the stories are moving rapidly to their climaxes so that the viewer isn''t bored, as it were, with mere exposition --some of the plots are involved in preliminary expository development but others are careening toward a climax. This schema also allows for multiple climaxes. Beginning around the fifth episode, the director can stage one or more climaxes per night, but still keep the show moving forward -- in other words, a climax doesn't necessarily spell the end of the program; it just terminates one of the moving elements in the multi-pronged plot. There are disadvantages, of course, to this kind of narrative structure -- most obviously, unless very carefully written, the group of stories can devolve into chaos. This happened both last year and this season with Westworld -- I don't know anyone who can reliably tell me what happened in that show. Things reached a saturation level and, although the violence was picturesque and, even, exciting (women fighting with samurai swords, dismembered robots, etc.), none of this mayhem mattered because no one could explain what anyone was fighting about. The other risk that Westworld also illustrates is that the plots became so diffuse that the audience's emotional investment in the characters simply evaporated -- I didn't care who lived or died because the proliferation of plots (and confusing flashbacks) inevitably attenuated my interest in the proceedings. Germans are good at organizing things and Babylon Berlin can actually be followed -- in other words, the viewer is able to keep the plots separate in his mind and follow them, even, though there are, by my count, at last, ten narratives taking place in the show. Babylon Berlin's superiority arises also from its production values -- the show is the most expensive TV program in German history and is mounted on a vast and spectacular set simulating Weimar-era Berlin. The set, called Berlin Mitte, can be examined on a web-site in which its owner at the Babelsberg Studio offers the place for rent. It suffices to say that with CGI and matte effects, the enormous buildings and street sets achieve a remarkable presence -- the place looks like the huge city sets that Murnau used at UFA and, then, at Fox in Hollywood for his greatest film, Sunrise (1928). Furthermore, the acting in Babylon Berlin is excellent from top to bottom -- the main characters are fascinating and don't really look like Hollywood types: the scrawny saturnine Detective Rath is, in fact, a bit rat-like, like a rodent David Duchovny, the leading lady, Charlotte (Lotte) Ritter is fantastically engaging and, like many great screen actresses, can oscillate between looking drab and exhausted and incredibly beautiful. The subsidiary characters are all wonderful, have great weird-looking mugs, and represent physical types not often seen in mainstream TV -- for instance, the police chief and the big bosses, including the gangsters, have the beefy look of actors like Wallace Beery or the hard-pressed burly cops in the films featuring Dr. Mabuse (they look like Emil Jannings or Heinrich George). The blonde, but sleazy Nazis, the Jewish journalist, the haggard tenement mothers and streetwalkers (who look like figures from George Grosz and Kaethe Kollwitz), the mutilated German generals and commanders left-over from World War Two, the upper-class Prussians with their dueling scars, the manipulative stockbrokers -- all of these minor characters are vibrantly alive and represent a main reason that I can commend the show to you.
The Seventh Episode of the program represented a major climax. The people who directed this program can stage suspense and savage violence with the best of Hollywood's directors and the program featured several gory killings, a Vertigo-style scene of a woman falling into a forest of hands upraised to catch her, and a couple of horrific fights -- all of this was done with breathtaking skill and represented an ending, ostensibly, to the one of plots developed by the show. In the Eight episode, the following narratives were advanced:
1.
A murderer in a bizarre black cape and mask is killing people on the set of a UFA film. Two gangsters have financed the film. This is a mystery story involving Phantom of the Opera elements and involves police detective work (Rath and Charlotte Ritter);
2.
In the last season, Fascists blew up a police chief's house killing him and his small daughter. The crime has been pinned on the Communists. A woman named Greta Overbeck has been condemned to death for complicity in the crime. Her child is threatened by the Fascists and so she refuses to identify those involved in the terrorist act (she thought they were commies but they were Nazis). A Communist lawyer has filed an Appeal on her behalf and this is a standard "race against the clock" story -- she will be beheaded in six days;
3.
A Jewish journalist exposes a deal between Lufthansa and the German military to restore the Luftwaffe. The Fascists are chasing him and he has to hide. This is a variant of the crusading journalist story known to us from films like All the President's Men;
4.
Fascists allied with Prussian military officers humiliated after the last war plot to engage the Nazi's to lead street-fighting with the Communists to distract from the conservative effort to seize control of the Republic. This is a political intrigue story a bit like Seven Days in May;
5.
Detective Rath's wife is living in luxury with a mysterious benefactor. She's pregnant with Rath's child and seeks an abortion. The benefactor is the mysterious and sinister Alfred Nyssen, a financier and stock market whiz. What is going on here?
6.
Fraulein Seegers is a right-wing general's daughter. But she's working for the Communists in order to provoke her chilly father and, in fact, is involved in Greta Overbeck's appeal. Is she sincere or a double-agent for the Right Wing elites?
7.
Fraulein Ritter, who is working to become a police detective (and experiencing sexist discrimination in the police force) must save enough money to finance her sister's eye surgery. Her sister is going blind. Miss Ritter has worked as a bar-girl and part-time prostitute and she goes back to sex work to pay the medical bills. (This is an ancient plot that dates to Victorian melodrama and before.)
8.
Rath's step-son -- his wife was previously married to Rath's brother who was killed in the war (although Rath had an affair with the woman)-- is recruited by the Nazis for their youth group and goes on a weekend outing to the Grunewald;
9.
Charlotte Ritter's younger sister flirts with a sinister pimp and considers becoming a whore;
10.
Alfred Nyssen plots to get Berlin investors to speculate, planning to create a financial panic and, then, profit by short-selling. He plots to short-sell 100 million Marks worth of stock. The series began with a sequence showing panic in the German Boerse or stockmarket and the entire program is a flashback to five weeks before the stock market collapse. Nyssen plans to blame a cabal of Jewish stockbrokers for the financial panic.
All of this material is packed into the 8th episode. I've left out a love affair or two and an alarming sex-show performed for the benefit of a Right Wing general in which Charlotte Ritter participates.
The density of narrative is astonishing. But we are dealing with a form that invites binge-watching. In other words, the episodes aren't doled out to the viewer on a weekly basis -- requiring that the viewer recall the plot over a period of six or seven day between episodes. (A problem with Westworld on HBO.). Rather, all episodes are simultaneously available since this is a Netflix program. Thus, the viewer can watch two or three episodes per night and, at the very least, watch one episode on consecutive nights. Thus, the labyrinthine plot can be kept in mind. The principle is that demonstrated by forties film noir like The Big Sleep. The viewer doesn't need to recall the twists and turns in the first four episodes, let's say -- it's sufficient if the viewer can bring to mind key plot points in the two or three episodes preceding the one that you are watching. Although the whole trajectory of the narrative may be obscure, the viewer can be counted on to recall enough of the two or three preceding episodes to make sense of the plot as it is unscrolls.
Furthermore, the writers can slow down the frenetic pace and, indeed, sometimes have to stall-out the plot to prevent information overload. For instance, in the 9th episode, the show pauses to stage a birthday party for a gay police photographer, an affair that doesn't really advance the action but that shows the esprit d' corps at the police force. (The scene also provides an opportunity for Rath and Fraulein Ritter to passionately kiss -- Rath's romantic life has gone badly awry, but Miss Ritter is, at least, bi-sexual and, maybe, lesbian, a sexual orientation that doesn't bode well for their nascent romance.) This scene serves no obvious purpose -- it involves a gay couple who aren't really in any kind of closet and, I suppose, is a cultural comment on sexual mores in the Weimar Republic. (Among other things, Babylon Berlin is a musical -- the gay cop gets into drag and sings a torch song for his boyfriend.) There's also a curious sort of commentary on the action proposed by a psychoanalyst with one side of his face badly scarred. This fellow appears from time to time counseling the various characters -- he's a profoundly ambiguous fellow, so much so that we can't tell if he's a good guy or bad guy (or where he aligns on the political spectrum which is pretty much the same thing.) Here, this character asserts that the war was an occasion for creating "the new man", a sort of cybernetic figure: if an eye is shot out during the War, it can be replaced with a camera; if an arm is torn off, a robotic limb can be substituted. Similarly, the war caused fear and, thus, has occasioned a sort of somnambulistic fatalism and fearlessness in its survivors. The psychoanalyst broadcasts these remarks by radio -- a transmission that all the major characters are shown attending to. (This seems symbolic to me, possibly non-naturalistic). The psychoanalyst's ideas are transformed into a re-edit of the film that the gangsters financed --the leading lady has been murdered so the movie is going to be re-cut into a robot version of Orpheus and Eurydice, not that bizarre of a plan since there is a disruptive (Communist) female robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
I don't know what to call this multiple plot structure. In some ways, the presentation is novelistic and, so, I wonder if this narrative might be characterized as a Tele-novella structure -- although I am aware that Tele-novella has a specific meaning, particularly in Mexican and Latin-American media. The form is fantastically flexible -- for instance, it allows cross-cut climaxes between the different plot-strands scored to a single musical theme or number: this is a staple of the form and creates an abstract sense of coherence, although showing the different characters musing while a song plays on the sidetrack really doesn't actually unify anything.
Babylon Berlin is sophisticated about the Weimar culture that it documents. In the 8th episode, Fraulein Seeger cites Walter Benjamin when the suave and cultured Right Wing aristocrat (who is prone to murder) quotes Ernst Juenger. There are obvious glaring errors. The film is set in 1930, just before the German stock market crash, but the UFA production on which the leading lady is murdered looks like a variant on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the echt-Expressionist classic made in 1919 -- by 1929-1930, German cinema was no longer expressionistic, but, rather, savagely realistic on the basis of what was called the Neue Sachlichkeit ("the new objectivity"). Sordid films like Pabst's Dreigroschenoper ("Three-penny Opera") and Pandora's Buechse ("Pandora's Box") ruled the screen. In fact, the leading lady who is murdered is replaced, at one point, by a woman named Tilly Brooks, an American who is obviously modeled on the Kansas femme fatale, Louise Brooks.
It's my contention that the plotting shown by prestige Netflix and HBO productions represents something new, an enhanced level of narrative density that presses the limits of the form -- Babylon Berlin seems to pile on new plots and characters as if to test the viewer's tolerance for narrative complexity. This is, by no means,the only paradigm available. A counter-example is the Netflix show La Casa de Papel, a Spanish series that is, perhaps, the most popular show in the world right now. Broadcast in subtitled form on Netflix as Money Heist, the series involves a group of criminals who stage a raid on the Spanish mint. Wearing orange jump-suits and Salvador Dali masks, the criminals take hostages and proceed to print 980 million euros. The police besiege the Mint for ten or 12 days before the criminals successfully elude capture and escape with their loot. Several of the criminals are killed but the core of their group survives and, even, escapes to Thailand. La Casa de Papel is successful because it establishes fascinating, fully rounded ("thick") characters who are intensely appealing. The heist is engineered by a shy, even fearful, criminal mastermind, referred to as the "Professor". Superficially realistic, the show is completely absurd, featuring a panoply of love affairs, thousand-bullet shoot-outs, and operatic torture scenes. The program realizes that it's strength lies in the development of the Robin Hood-style gang of criminals (they steal from the rich to give to the poor) and it doesn't conceal its superficial and nonsensical plot behind a fancy narrative structure. Rather, the show tells a single story, albeit with many characters with differing agendas. The presentation is straight-forwardly chronological although the show begins in media res with the heist and, then, uses flashbacks to fill in information as it becomes necessary. The series is precisely calibrated to produce cliff-hangers at the end of each 45 minutes episode, thus compelling the attention of the viewer. But the appeal of this program, and it's very exciting and brilliantly made, lies in the sequential and simplified plot -- a design amplified by schematic oppositions: cops v. criminals, criminals v. hostages, husband v. wife, the rich v. the poor, inside the Mint v. the streets outside, even upper levels of the mint v. the tunnels underground. Casa de Papel espouses an anarchist sensibility and is also anti-Fascist (one of the musical themes used in the show is Bella Ciao, an anti-Fascist love song): the series argues that the bail-outs of bankers and lenders in the wake of the 2008 financial crash was a kind of robbery akin to the money heist at the Mint -- both thefts involve redistribution of wealth, either to the rich or the poor. This is questionable on many levels but it gives the Spanish show a popularist "us against them" zing that carries the audience's interest from episode to episode and helps the viewer to forget the ludicrous nature of much of the action presented. Casa de Papel is scrupulously linear (although freely uses flashbacks), and the show represents, in some ways, an apotheosis of straight-out chronological plotting, solving the problem of how to extend a simple situation (worth about two hours in a movie) into a plot five times that length or more -- I think the show has 15 episodes per plot line. (Two seasons for the Royal Mint heist with 15 episodes; two season in the new series that I haven't yet watched.) Casa de Papel, which has been called a Tele-novella by some critics, is an example of elaborate conventional plotting in contrast to the maze of parallel plots that characterizes Babylon Berlin (and the much weaker Westworld). The Spanish show demonstrates that there's plenty of vitality remaining in standard single-plot narrative.
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