"Homeland" as grand, even Wagnerian, Opera

"Homeland" starts a third series on September 29th.  Ever late to the party, I've just caught up with Season 2 and watched the finale last night.  I wept during the immensely moving final moments, as Brody walked off into the dark woods alone. Then, I got to thinking how closely some scenes in this 21st century tv drama resemble Wagnerian opera.

Towards the begining of this last episode, "Homeland" took our fated lovers, Brody,  the prisoner of war who was 'turned' by his Al Qaeda captors, and Carrie, the CIA agent who routed him, back to the cabin in the woods where they first consummated their decidedly twisted and complex love.  Carrie is bi-polar, functioning on meds but prone to wild flights of intuition and impulse, that have helped bring her and her blighted lover through torture, terrorist plots and betrayal to this moment of stillness and  serenity in the cabin on the  golden, autumnal lake.

I loved those scenes in the cabin where they dare to hope for some sort of peaceful, 'ordinary' future for their love. As in so many great love stories since the beginning of time, these lovers have no logical chance of a happy outcome. Brody is a damaged, marked man - both the CIA and Al Qaeda will want him dead when he has served their purpose.  And yet, they, and we persist in hoping against hope for  a happy  future.  Like the doomed twins Siegmund and Sieglinde in Wagner's sublime "Walküre", Brody and Carrie snatch a moment of joy before the real world intervenes.

I was  reminded again of Die Walküre as they made their escape towards the dark woods between the US and Canada. In Wagner's opera, Siegmund, a very Brody-esque character who has suffered and suffered and is a lone, sometimes violent man as a result, finds love with Sieglinde. (She is, in fact, his long-lost twin sister but that is a whole other story.) Her husband and his men have vowed to kill him and in the throes of immense, overwhelming passion, the two lovers escape into the forest. Ah, the forest! What a leitmotif it has been in this series - just as it always was for Wagner and in so many great myths.

I read recently  that "Homeland" show-runner, Alex Gansa, believes that  the love story is the heart of "Homeland" so he confirms what I feel and what has touched me so deeply in this show. As the story has developed from a straightforward "is he/isn't he?" to the much more complex and human questions of love, trust, betrayal, Carrie and Brody have come to reside in the same place as another pair of legendary Wagnerian lovers,  "Tristan and Isolde".  In the original vinyl box-set of the 1966 Karl Böhm recording of Tristan, there were some extraordinary sleeve notes that expressed in words what Wagner's opera was trying to do in words and music. It talked of how the lovers longed for night, oblivion, the eternal because their impossible desire could not exist in the light of day and reality and the real world's practical concerns.    So much of the Carrie/Brody love story has taken place in dark places, in a dark, dark world of prison cells, interrogation rooms, bars. Their brief respite in the sunlit cabin can only foreshadow more darkness. Or perhaps not?

Hollywood  "Story" guru Robert McKee's  describes the basis of story as being drawn from the  eternal conflict in human beings, of the fight between "being" and "becoming".  As McKee explains, we all exist on at least two planes. Philosophers sometimes divide them into 'being' and 'becoming'.

"Being" translates into private experience where time doesn't exist, where true feelings lie. Being is heart, mind, love, soul, taste, desire...Being is all we'd like to keep stable in a constantly changing world. Being is our ability to love absolutely in spite of distance and the passing of time. Being is what makes us what we are.

"Becoming" is the public realm. The necessary structures, rules, limits imposed on us in order for society to function.  Institutions must change to adapt. Time hurtles along. Nothing is constant. So the human dilemma is: "How do you keep what you value permanently in your heart while you are constantly being forced to change and adapt?"  This is the dilemma that faces Carrie as she leaves Brody to make his way alone through the dark woods.  Will she be able to keep Brody in her heart when everything in her life, her ambition, her dearest friend, her love for her country, her moral compass and the separation of time and distance all militate against him?


I also believed in and was moved by Peter, the CIA hitman's refusal to kill Brody - at the time. Afterwards, I asked myself questions  and I may well be proved wrong. As I watched,  however, I was reminded of another great scene in  "Die Walküre" where Brunnhilde, the warrior goddess, comes to offer Siegmund a home in Valhalla with other fallen warriors provided he renounces love. But Siegmund refuses because his love for Sieglinde transcends everything else.  Brunnhilde is dismayed but forced to examine everything she believes and values. By the end of the opera she renounces her warrior status for the chance of love. When Peter told Estes that Brody's death would kill Carrie, I thought of that. Oh and isn't the superb Claire Danes as Carrie, the personification of what Wagner really intended his Valkyries to be - not fat, foghorns in horned helmets but brave, beautiful, driven warrior women.

The comparisons could go on: Saul as the bass-baritone (even though he's a tenor in real life) - the father figure - sometimes Wotan, the Walküre's troubled god watching his turbulent Valkyrie/Carrie take action where he cannot.  Sometimes Tristan's King Marke,  stepping into the lovers' night world to remind them of the real world and their duties in it.


Yes, "Homeland" has a few audacious plotlines that many of us don't buy but anyone who has ever set foot in an opera house is used to that.  And yes, some  fans are crying foul and don't want a love story in the midst of all the intrigue and deception. I am the first to be annoyed when love stories are tacked on to movies just to thicken the plot but I think the clever writers here have moved Carrie and Brody beyond avatars in a video game to a superior status as mythic lovers. And why shouldn't our  contemporary culture produce its own figures of myth? Why do they always have to come from the past? I think these lovers are the quintessential expression of a mythical love in the early 21st century - in a world riven by terrorism, fanaticism and violence a love  between flawed, broken people that transcends betrayal, fear, separation. My but it would make a great opera.

So who could play Wotan in the movie? And, no, he doesn't have to sing.

I recently took a deep breath, packed my bags and went off to Los Angeles to pitch my "Winter Music" script to studio executives at a Screenwriting Expo Pitch Fest. These are a form of speed-dating for screenwriters. I'll post a longer account of that experience on my new website janettegriffiths.com

For now, let's just say that pitching a dramatic story with comic elements whose protagonist is a bass/baritone who wants to sing Wotan, is a hopeful and touchingly optimistic undertaking in a Pitch Fest where the buyers all seem to be looking for 'action, thriller, broad comedy in the style of "Jackass"'. But I plodded on, into the ballroom of the Westin, LAX and recited my 5 minute version of my 120 page script. And oddly enough, the guys on the other side of the table, listened, laughed and took my one-sheet (the poster-style page that evokes the story.) BUT they all asked the same question: Who could play the lead male? He's a 48 year old Italian-American, greying dark hair, powerfully built, a quietly intense man who carries his reputation as one of the world's greatest opera singers discreetly. And to add to the complication, he's a bass-baritone and not a tenor. However, he does not have to sing. So that helps.

But the general feeling from both sides of the pitching table, was that today's male leads lack the dramatic weight, the Old World 'gravitas', the true grown-up charisma that my character, Leo, needs. I do have one actor in mind but I'd be curious to hear any suggestions from any of you.

Pitching my Wagner movie in my pyjamas

A movie with a Wagner theme. Not the story of the composer's life. British director Tony Palmer took that on over a decade ago with mixed results. (How can a film on such a flawed, complicated genius be anything other than flawed and complicated?)

No, I want to adapt a big, funny love story about a bass-baritone who longs to sing the great role of Wotan, and find true love in the process. Forgive the Hollywood logline but I've been practising those all week and that's the best I can do. I had a script, I had a one page synopsis but the biggest hurdle turned out to be reducing a 480 page novel that had become a 120 page script and gone on to be a two paragraph synopsis into less than 25 words.

And I'm doing it with that nagging sense that anyone who looks at this will snigger - Wagner? Opera? Not a hope in hell. I like to respond that "Amadeus" took on Mozart and Salieri (who?) and swept the Oscars. Or that a movie about a band of geriatric musicians in Cuba packed them in across the planet.

But Wagner? Oh my, the associations are so toxic. My bass-baritone, Leo, knows that. So do the musicians he works with. In the original novel, he says to his new love, Rose: "I think it would have been very difficult to have been a singer when he was alive, to know that he was such an obnoxious man and yet to want to be part of that extraordinary music. It's easier now that he is dust." So "now that he is dust," I want to pitch my "wildly romantic, acerbically funny" (said the book blurb) story to movie producers.

I know that with its mix of big romance and daffy English eccentrics, I'm putting a foot in Merchant-Ivory country (think "Howards End" or "Room with a View".) And with the "ordinary woman meets world's greatest singer", I'm on "Notting Hill" territory.

I've got snow, I've got great love and I've got that glorious final scene of Die Walkure when Wotan bids farewell to Brunnhilde. I believe that if that theme weaves in and out of the story, people who fear Wagner as "heavy", "difficult" etc will discover the ecstasy that this music induces in people. National Review editor, Jay Nordlinger, called that passage the greatest piece of music ever written.

I recall a Covent Garden Ring with Haitink conducting in the Gotz Friedrich production. James Morris sang Wotan. There's a passage just after "freier als ich der gott," where the music leads us into a rapture that does not quite relate to the dramatic action or lyrics. But by then we don't care. On that day (it was a general rehearsal) I walked out the Royal Opera House not quite sure that my feet were anywhere near the ground. I wasn't alone. A couple of flute players from the orchestra wanted to go for a drink but both said they needed to be pulled off the ceiling before they could make it to the pub.Next thing I knew it was 3 hours later and I was in the coffee shop at the Royal Festival Hall - with no real idea how I got there. Wagner will do that. It scares some people because he reaches down and unleashes very deep emotions.


And that's what I want to put into my story but by making my protagonist a wise compassionate man, perhaps I can move Wagner away from a lot of the ugliness that has surrounded him.

Still, pitching this movie is not going to be easy. So when an email dropped into my inbox from Virtual Pitch Fest last week suggesting that I "pitch in my pyjamas" I couldn't resist. For a small fee, with the low dollar, I can pitch a dozen producers, agents and managers in Hollywood -all from the comfort of wherever my laptop has landed. I don't own pyjamas but I donned my red fleece dressing gown, my free towelling slippers from some hotel or the other, poured a glass of wine and here, looking out on the daffodils in Ealing, West London, began pitching. It's 5 am in Los Angeles. I suppose some hyper-active loony is headed for the gym but in theory, the 'Coast' is still deep in slumber. We'll see what they have to say.