Representation in drama

The Road to Nowhere is the most ambitious project I have directed to date. The script is a simple one in theory but the writer Andreas Kerrigan and I ran into many difficulties of representation. The subject matter of suicide in any script is something to take into deep consideration because it is such a relevant and terrible issue. In this blog I wanted to share some of the issues we ran into and how we tackled them.

Jennifer was a significant change, and it’s something we both thought about deeply in later drafts. The representation of the only female character was something to tackle with great care. In the original, she is introduced as a self-centred uncaring person that simply causes an emotional burden for Joe when he later discovers her cheating on him. The only female representation portrayed an image of shallowness and is absent of empathy.

The later discovery of her unfaithfulness gives Joe a greater reason to commit suicide, which essentially means that a woman was partially responsible for a potential suicide rather than the problem stemming from himself and his own terrible judgmental mindset he has in the final film, which is important to communicate otherwise the message could have been that women cause men’s suicides, which is not true. I’m sure there have been cases where this is true, but the overwhelming majority of them happen for the reasons discussed in the first section.

Another problem was the way Frank was introduced, the amount of screen time he got that insterspliced with Joe’s time suggested he is the protagonist, or at least confused things more than they needed to be. He is really a supporting character and this confusion was actually an issue that carried on throughout the production, even being a problem in the shoot itself. My personal obsession with Frank clouded my view of the entire story, and to some extent Andreas also struggled with this for a while.

I knew Joe was the protagonist and tried to focus on that, but being the fun and iconic character that Frank was, perspective was sometimes shifted too much in favour of Frank for the sake of showing more of his character. In the next draft, Frank’s retirement home scene is cut down for this reason. The scene was always destined for troubled pacing as I only realised it was too long in the edit after my editor had put everything together. Both of us felt the same way and it was trimmed down as much as possible.

Andreas changed this because the audience can already understand Frank’s essential character from just a few lines from the interaction with Eugen. The ‘fish out of water’ idea and the aggressive impatient bluntness Frank possesses are communicated with Eugene almost straight off the bat, the extra dialogue was just filler in the end. Again, it shows the enthusiasm to show off Frank as much as possible because he’s a fun character, but this undermines the story.

As mentioned earlier, the entire aspect of Jennifer cheating on Joe brings on many problems of representation. However, this scene is also changed for the better because it allows the story to show how confined Joe really is, and ends up lying to his grandfather about being with Jennifer which is more accurate to his troubled and isolated character. This scene as it is means Joe never lies, and an emotionally confined person lies all the time; the idea that they need to keep up appearances is an urgent matter that always needs attention.

Realism was one of the most important elements of the film. If any kind of message is to be conveyed within the subtext of the film, it has to be very realistic, to the point where a story like this could happen in real life; if a real-life issue is presented in the film then it can’t be represented correctly within an unrealistic story/setting/character and so on.

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