Anticipation

I feel like I'm hacking through a thicket of words. I've heard that drama involves characters solving problems, characters overcoming obstacles, that it involves above all else, conflict. But I've always felt uneasy with these definitions. Who said life is about overcoming obstacles? But now that I've thought about this, I realize that what the authors are trying to describe is anticipation. What a character needs is unresolved dissonance. That I can understand. I can't relate much to the notion of tenaciously persevering through obstacles. That's why I found the film Men of Honor so strange. It comes across less as a drama of the human spirit and more like a tale of unthinkable obsession in the face in unthinkable obstacles.

But dissonance makes sense to me—the dissonance between one's world view and what actually happens in life, the dissonance between theory and practice. The reason anticipation—or dissonance—is so important is because without it there is nothing to watch in film. Mackendrick said that drama is anticipation. It's about fulfilling anticipations that become threaded into new anticipations. In order for anticipation to exist, there needs to be something to anticipate.

What's weird about film-drama is that anticipation is not necessarily built into the plot. The plot is a sequence of events that cause more things that in turn cause even more things. But there appears to be a difference between anticipation and causation. Causation just happens. Anticipation is the way causation is structured. I wonder if that's the difference between Episode III and Episode IV? In Episode IV there is clear anticipation. We anticipate that someone—Luke, probably—wil the death star. Episode III, on the other hand, seems to be more about causation. Things happen and they are all related. There is a lot of movement. But there isn't a lot of anticipation.