Dramatic Comedy vs Tragedy

An instructor of mine once said that there are four criteria for understanding a film**:
1. Who's the main character?
2. What does he want?
3. What's in his way?
4. Is it a dramatic comedy or a dramatic tragedy?

He defined a dramatic comedy not as a funny story but as a story where the protagonist overcomes his flaws to become a better person. By that definition, the following films are all dramatic comedies:
- Jaws
- Titanic
- Terminator 1 and 2
Not films that you would normally think of as comedies but meeting this definition, nonetheless.

By contrast, a dramatic tragedy is a story where the protagonist succumbs to his flaws and dies, either literally or figuratively. Dramatic tragedies include:
- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
- There Will be Blood
- Election
- Double Indemnity
- Chinatown
- Affliction

Writers need to know these two archetypal patterns because they have different structures. More on that in my next post.

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**Plot & Structure has a very similar system called LOCK (Lead, Objective, Confrontation, Knockout (ending))