16
Reframing the Active/Passive Character Distinction
On the most superficial level, film is a medium founded on the illusion of believability—what we see looks real (most of the time). Thus, the focus of the producer and, consequently, the writer is on making what we see as engaging as possible. Otherwise, they lose our attention. Whether one calls the connection between screen and audience engaging or electric, tame or gripping, it is the elusive characteristic that all producers look for as intensely as Francisco Pizarro looked for gold and Vasco da Gama looked for spices. In our business, it’s what everyone wants.
What are the implications for the character? More particularly, does every main character have to be active, energetic, and attractive, as well as find herself in an abundance of conflicting situations? There is little question that this option offers us characters who are appealing and easy to identify with, but it also offers us characters we rarely meet and who we rarely find in our own lives.
In this chapter, we challenge the notion that the central character must be active and energetic to ensure sufficient conflict and drive to carry us through a 90+-minute narrative story. Instead, we suggest that there is a much broader set of options available to you.
We acknowledge that in particular genres it is more useful to have active, energetic main characters. It’s hard to imagine how the plot of Die Hard would unfold if John McClane (Bruce Willis) were a reflective or passive character. But ambivalence and confession are very interesting in the Phillip Marlowe that Elliot Gould portrays in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Indeed, this main character is a perfect reflection of Los Angeles in the 1970s; more than one form of pollution influences Marlowe’s behavior. A wide range of options is available when you begin to move away from the active main character. To chart this path, we begin by studying the conventions that surround the main character.
Conventional Notions of Character
The troubled teenager, the ambitious lawyer, the poor prize-fighter, the belligerent police officer, all are characters we know. We see them in film after film, although they may enter their stories through various methods. Key to our discussion is that all these characters conform to our notion of the character. By profession and by nature, they are prone to act against barriers to their goals; each, in his own way, is keen to overcome his current situation in life. In a sense, these characters are not willing to wait, think, discuss, or feel paralyzed. They are characters who act.
The Active Character
Central to the conventions of characterization is the character who, in the superficial sense, will act. Not only does this type of character fit more easily into the event-filled story line, but in all likelihood his actions will help shape that story line. In this sense, the active character helps you do your job—to tell the story as effectively as possible.
The active character is, by nature, a character who gets involved in relationships and in events. Active characters are less predictable in their responses to people and events, and this involvement and potential for surprise are useful and helpful qualities for the screenwriter. It isn’t surprising, then, that the active character has become a convention for screenwriters. Wyatt Earp in the John Ford version of the Earp saga, My Darling Clementine, is a good example of the active main character.
The Energetic Character
Second only to the active character is the energetic one. Clearly, a character who is energetic will respond quickly to a situation of conflict or to a barrier to her goals. This response may be anxious or aggressive. In either case, the response is useful dramatically, because it highlights the conflict. Generally, the more difficult the barrier, the more intense the character’s response. The question in the audience’s mind is whether the character can overcome the oppositional force.
Audiences relate quickly to energy. Energy is attractive. It needn’t be negative or positive, but it does enhance the feeling that your character has power. This power is open-ended in a way that powerlessness is not. Consequently, the energetic character is a very inviting character for the audience. The Russian colonel, played by Nikita Mikhalkov in his Burnt by the Sun, is a good example of an energetic main character.
Although the active character and the energetic character are the most common conventions used to create a main character, they are incomplete unless the character has a goal. Intentional characters are those characters who have goals that motivate them. Most often, secondary characters have more clarified, singular functions in the screen story and, as a result, appear to be more intentional. Main characters are generally in conflict about their goals, and through the actions and events of people, they work through the conflicts and move toward their goals. The audience must understand the conflict as well as the character’s goal. Only then, can the energetic efforts of the main character engage us in his struggle.
The active, energetic, goal-directed character is the conventional screen character. Charm, wit, and sexiness are all add-ons that deepen our engagement with the main character. Each invites us in different ways to get involved with the main character. Diello (James Mason) in Five Fingers is a good example of the intentional main character.
Real Life and Dramatic Life
In real life, we find the full gamut of characters—from active to passive, energetic to depressed, happy to angry, frustrated to fulfilled. These characters exist, whatever their state, in the ebb and flow of everyday life, with both its ordinariness and its excitement. Elemental tasks mix with significant events, and, as with many of us, these characters’ lives are surrounded by the confusion that so often engulfs people and events. Dramatic life is considerably more shaped. Conflict, critical events, and intentional characters are codependent variables that make up the screen story.
One of our goals in this chapter is to suggest that how you interpret dramatic life in film can help you draw real-life characters into your stories. Before you can do this, however, you have to understand the limits and opportunities of real life and dramatic life.
Real-Life Characters
The primary problem for the screenwriter is that if the real-life character is not active, not particularly energetic, and does not have a goal, she is difficult to place in a screen story. Characters such as this, disinterested in their fate, are potentially unappealing. Consequently, they don’t lend themselves to involve audiences with their story.
We have purposely overstated the traits of real-life characters. Often, we encounter active, energetic, and goal-directed people; they are people to whom we feel drawn. But what about all those other people who are in the middle, who are the opposite of the conventional main character? Must we discard all of them as potential main characters? The answer is no. Real-life characters appear as main characters in Land and Freedom and Truly Madly Deeply and in the works of Mike Leigh.
Movie Characters
The opposite of the real-life character is the movie character— the character to whom we have grown accustomed through our exposure to movies and television. Because we have had so much media exposure, writers are as likely to draw on a movie character for characterization as they are to draw on a character they know from their everyday lives.
Movie characters are an exaggeration of dramatic characters. They are shaped in ways characters in real life are not. Movie characters tend to be goal directed, energetic, and active, but they go even further. They are often charismatic, at least in the case of main characters, despite their proximity to a stereotype. Movie characters seek out resolutions to the conflicts they encounter, but they do so in an exaggerated way. They apply their energy with a vigor virtually unknown in real life. The complexities of everyday life are alien to these characters. Movie characters represent the opposite of the more complex characters we examine shortly, characters who represent a shift away from the active character, and characters who are more recognizable in real life. The main character in The Last Action Hero is a good example of a movie main character.
Dramatic Characters
Dramatic characters lie between movie characters and real-life characters; they are not as resolution oriented as movie characters are, but because of the conflicts in which they find themselves, they must find a resolution. Such characters may feel ambivalent; they may choose not to act or they may not exhibit the kind of energy we associate with conventional main characters. Dramatic characters may act as observers, they may be catalysts, and very often they are in the middle of the action of the story most reluctantly. They may not understand the forces at work in the situation, and they may not function well even if they do understand the situation.
We get involved with these characters, because they find themselves in the midst of crises that take over their lives. This dramatic situation allows us to engage with characters regardless of whether they are active or passive. The further the character is from the movie character, the more likely we will recognize him in our lives. Because of this identification, our response to this character is likely to be more complex than it would be toward a movie character. The dramatic character provides a wide range of options from which the writer can choose to engage the audience.
Real Life as Drama
One of the most powerful films of the early 1970s was a small domestic drama by Ken Loach entitled Family Life. The movie followed the life of a young woman who was falling into a schizophrenic state. Needless to say, she wasn’t a very active character. Indeed, after 2 hours, she barely spoke. Yet, her story breaks the heart. Her conflict is multileveled. She is the younger of two daughters and is controlled rather than parented. Her stronger sister has broken out of the stranglehold of the family and has made a life for herself. The doctors who treat the young woman disagree on her psychological state.
A psychiatrist experimenting with treatments has luck with her, and she improves. However, when he loses his position to a more conventional doctor, the young woman moves from group therapy to shock treatment, and she is lost. The story has dramatic values at the level of interaction between family and institution (hospital). The character has a goal—to get better—but she is not strong enough to overcome the goal of her family (to keep her under control) and the goal of the institution (to keep people like her under control).
In real life, this young woman is quite recognizable, but she is a stranger and an exception to the screen story. The story works because of the nature of the dramatic situation, and because it has narrative drive.
Narrative Drive
Stories such as Family Life have a crisis that is sufficiently acute, and, if there is no quick resolution, the character will be lost forever. This sense of urgency is compelling and gives the story narrative drive.
A sense of urgency for the fate of a character can be replaced by a sense of urgency for the fate of a community ( Matewan ), of a society ( The China Syndrome ), or of the world ( WarGames ). In all cases, the sense of urgency creates the story parameters. Will the world be saved? Will the characters survive and thrive? However, a sense of urgency is not enough to grab the audience. There has to be an interesting story to tell. For example, the training of an assassin to kill on command and the execution of that command at the highest levels of government is the narrative drive of The Manchurian Candidate .
The more reflective or passive the character, the greater the writer’s reliance on a sense of urgency and a strong story. Psycho is populated by characters of varying psychological states. The main character, portrayed by Janet Leigh, steals money and runs away. For 40 minutes of screen time, we are with her as she plots and ponders, decides, and finally changes her mind.
Guilt is her most prevalent characteristic. After 40 minutes, Hitchcock kills her off, and we are left without a main character. Yet the film remains etched in our memories. Why? Aside from Hitchcock’s brilliant artistry, urgency and narrative drive are what capture our attention. Thus, the story doesn’t end with the death of Marion Crane.
Narrative Energy
Often, a character’s energy is the same as the story’s energy. This is the case in The Lady Eve, in which Barbara Stanwyck’s Eve is certain that she will wrap Henry Fonda’s Adam around her pinky. The narrative energy is the way in which she goes about it. There is a lot of story to The Lady Eve. There are many other examples of this type of story, including Papillon, The Great Escape, Champion, and Stella Dallas .
Energy and drive, however important to the screen story, needn’t reside in the main characters. The story and the secondary characters can compensate for the ambivalence or conflict of the central character. More often, we are presented with stories that have considerable narrative drive and characters who are ambivalent, conflicting, or reflective—the writer in Sunset Boulevard, the decent insurance clerk in The Apartment, or the reluctant book promoter in Crossing Delancey. In each of these stories, the drive or energy comes from the story. In each case, there is a secondary character who is driven and whose actions are critical to the evolution of the story. The most memorable of this trio of screen stories is Sunset Boulevard. Gloria Swanson’s portrayal of the aging silent screen star is one of the greatest moments in cinematic history.
The Problem of Passivity
Avoid passive central characters: This is good advice for beginning screenwriters, who may face multiple problems of structure, language, and character, but it is too restrictive for writers who are comfortable with structure and storytelling. Clearly, the character who is totally passive leaves little room for opportunity to interact with the world. However, such characters have been the center of film stories— Oblomov and, more recently, a Polish film called A Short Film About Love. As mentioned earlier, other characters and the story have to compensate for passivity in the major character.
What is not possible—except in an Andy Warhol movie, perhaps—is a screen story in which all characters and the level of action and narrative remain quiescent. This does not leave much room to deal with stories in which characters are relatively passive, reflective, ambivalent, and unexpressive. In this type of story, the writer runs into real trouble. In the remainder of this chapter, we discuss examples of screen stories in which the active/ passive balance clearly tilts toward passive characters.
A Case Study of a Passive Main Character I: Sex, Lies, and Videotape
The main character in Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape is aware that she is unfulfilled but is totally unaware as to why. She is a passive main character. The young married woman is having sexual problems. She has a concerned therapist, a promiscuous sister, and a wandering husband. She is unaware and frightened by much of her behavior, particularly by her lack of sexual feelings.
An old friend arrives to stay with the woman’s family and in his straightforward way alienates her husband, shares his sexual sublimation with her (he videotapes women talking about their sex lives), and stimulates her sister to new heights of arousal. His presence also destabilizes the young wife’s slender hold on what passes for a married life. Her marriage collapses, she has a sexual experience with the voyeur, and becomes better friends with her sister.
This simple story parallels the Sleeping Beauty story, except here, Sleeping Beauty is awake—at least consciously—but she doesn’t understand a thing about her life, about her failures, or about her potential. Total lack of awareness is not an active, reflective, or even reticent position for a major character. Indeed, it is a position that promises a character scorn or rejection. Only the despicable behavior of her husband and sister save her from such a fate. This is not the usual position for involvement and identification with the main character. The young wife is probably similar to young wives we know in real life—confused and a submerged personality—but she is not a character we often meet in movie life.
The old friend is hardly the typical Prince Charming. He is a voyeur with no clear means of support, and his position with the other characters is too ambiguous to make him appealing. He is, however, mysterious, which makes us curious about him and about his fate. But he doesn’t replicate the powerful position that Georgia had in Four Friends or Ray had in Who’ll Stop the Rain?
A Case Study of a Passive Main Character II: My Own Private Idaho
The main character in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho is a narcoleptic. When there’s a troubled situation, he goes to sleep. He is thus the antithesis of the type of goal-directed character whose goal and energy drive the story.
Mike (River Phoenix) is a street hustler in Portland, Oregon. He leads an unpredictable life, living moment to moment. He dreams of home—Idaho—and of a mother who will nurture him. When he meets Scott, a rich, rebellious street kid, Mike is attracted to him. Together, they search for Mike’s mother. When they find Mike’s brother, he tries unsuccessfully to disabuse Mike of his illusions of their mother. The search takes them to Italy, where Scott falls in love with a young woman. The two men part, Mike returning to his former way of life and Scott becoming what he always was—a person of privilege, a person who belongs. The film ends with Mike asleep on a road in Idaho. His search continues, but the road for Mike goes nowhere.
Mike is passive in a different sense than the wife is in sex, lies, and videotape. She is passive in her marriage and in her sexual modesty until she is transformed by a man who uses a camera as a wand to awaken her. There is no awakening for Mike in My Own Private Idaho. He not only remains on the margins of society but also seems to have little impact even on those with whom he has a relationship. Scott tolerates, even accepts his neediness, but Mike’s brother does not. He is infuriated by Mike’s unwillingness to face the truth of his life. Although there is one moment in the script when Mike attempts to be with another (Scott), he is for the most part withdrawn, acting out a psychodrama or actually sleeping in response to the pain of the moment. In the sense of realizable goals, Mike has none; he has only the desire to find his mother. Mike is a passive character in the most complex sense. It is far more difficult to relate to a passive character like Mike’s than to a character who is eventually transformed. For the audience, therefore, he represents an emotional enigma who resists rescue because his mental state is his failed attempt to rescue himself.
A Case Study of Main Character as Catalyst: “The Kids are Alright”
In Lisa Cholodenko’s “The Kids are Alright” (2010), Julianne Moore portrays Jules, the “female” in a long term lesbian relationship. Jules and Nic (Annette Bening) have two adolescent children. The older of the tow, Joni wants to get to know their biological father, the sperm donor who provided the sperms for the two pregnancies. When she finds the donor, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), she invites him into her family’s lives.
Although it is Joni’s need to know that is he critical moment of “The Kids are Alright”, it’s Jules who explores the premise of the film. That premise, am I homosexual or heterosexual shakes up the stability of the family. The fact that Joni’s mother explores he heterosexual option with Joni’s biological father, Paul provides the exploration with its “rational” dimension as well as with its seismic emotional implications for Jules’ longstanding relationship with Nic.
Jules’ experiment in heterosexuality is grounded in a character that is tentative, insecure and more academic than pragmatic about career development. Jules is very much the emotionally labile female in her relationship with Nix. Nic on the other hand is the “stable, critical male”. When Paul shows up and offers Jules he opportunity to redesign his backyard, Jules has the opportunity to prove she is not who Nic’s criticism of her implies she is. Paul’s bed and Paul are only a step away.
As a main character, Jules’ impulsivity and physical need for affirmation make her more catalyst for what will follow, than a main character who genuinely changes through the exploration. Her actions nudge all the members of the family to take each other less for granted. The relationship with Paul ends. The relationship with Nic is re-established. All ends well in this dramedy that positions homosexuality and heterosexuality as opposites of the premise, only to find the two options not as emotionally different as one might have assumed.
A Case Study of Main Character as Catalyst II: Goodbye Lenin
The main character in Bernd Lichtenberg’s “Goodbye Lenin” (2003) is Alexander Kerner. Alexander lives in East Berlin. The film begins in the 1970s when his father Robert escapes to the West and ends 20 years later after the two Germanys have been unified. Alexander’s goal is to maintain his family or what’s left of it no matter what happens. And a great deal happens.
His mother hospitalized by depression after that father leaves, threatens to leave Alexander emotionally. Her fragile state keeps Alex on family watch through his mother’s enthusiasm to “improve” Communism, through his older sister’s relationships, and through his mother’s heart attack and coma in 1989, weeks before the Berlin Wall comes down.
Told when the mother awakens from her coma eight month later that any shock/change would kill her, Alex hatches a “no change” plan. In spite of the Wall coming down and the consequent flood of change in visual, material and economic facts, Alex decides to take his mother home, to redecorate the apartment in the pre-Wall style and in essence pretend everything is exactly the same.
This means recycling jars reclaimed from the trash and filling them with their newer Western versions. It means producing TV programs of old, and entering a subterfuge with neighbors, the mother’s old students and with his sister, her new lover, and his own new girlfriend, a nurse who attended his mother in hospital.
The pretense works through to the end of the second Act and then unravels. The mother does suffer another heart attack and dies in Act 3 but not before Alex has found his father and attempted to reunite his nuclear family (in spite of father’s new wife, children, life, in the West).
Alex remains steadfast in his original goal, rescue the family. Regardless of all the changes, political and personal, he clings to his original dream of family. Although Alex changes jobs and relational status, it’s his original goal that stands out. In this sense he is the catalyst for a plot launched to save his mother. For Alex his personal goal trumps all else. It is in this sense that he is the catalyst for the clash of values (old vs. new, Capitalist vs. Communist) that dominate the plot, and it is his tenacity which highlights he priorities within the narrative.
A Case Study of Main Character as Observer I: Inside Moves
Rory (John Savage) introduces himself to us by jumping out of a tenth-floor window and failing to kill himself. Disabled, he faces a limited life. This is a depressing beginning to one of the more uplifting films of the 1980s.
Rory is befriended by a group of disabled persons who hang out in an Oakland bar. One of them, Jerry, invites him to a basketball game where Rory is impressed by the expressiveness of his new friend. In fact, Jerry is a loudmouth who acts as if he can play the game better than the pros. He tells the star player how he blew the game and challenges the star, Alvin, to a one-on-one playoff. Alvin accepts and almost loses to Jerry. Rory watches and it begins to dawn on him that if Jerry (with a gimpy leg) can almost beat a pro, there are possibilities to his life.
Rory slowly begins to engage in his life; he takes an ownership stake in the bar. As Jerry’s career ascends, Rory begins to grow. He becomes interested in a woman; the future is beginning to have options. But his ascent is tied to Jerry. Only after he has observed or responded to Jerry’s achievements, does he try to broaden his life. Rory is always passive and observing. It is Jerry and the other disabled people who catalyze his final choice—to live fully, rather than in a limited way that is akin to suicide. The secondary characters are very active and energetic, despite being confined to wheelchairs, or blind, or even without arms. The narrative is elaborate and filled with events and people. There is a lot of story for Rory to observe and with which eventually to engage.
We never know Rory very well, but we can see his tentativeness, and we can relate to his emergence. He is never more than an observer. His condition doesn’t permit him to play basketball like Jerry or to be a romantic activist with the waitress he loves. All of Rory’s efforts are tentative. In the end, his efforts secure our respect for his decency and for his insight into himself and into Jerry, but it is late in the story for his character to win us over. Consequently, Rory is very far from the conventional main character in film, but he is never very far from characters we know in real life.
A Case Study of Main Character as Observer II: Black Robe
Brian Moore’s Black Robe, set in early nineteenth-century Quebec, has as its main character Father Laforgue, a Catholic priest (Lothaire Bluteau). The priest is being taken inland to Huronia, and his guide is an Indian named Chomina (August Schellenberg). Accompanying him is a young fur trader, the family of Chomina, and several of his men.
The priest is an ascetic in a physical land, traveling with physical people. The Catholic priest believes in Jesus and organized Catholic religion; the Indians believe in the spirit of animals and the land. The journey to Huronia is a dangerous one, and the priest is totally dependent on his Indian guides. He also chooses not to experience the Indian values/interpretation of life. This is not so for his fur trader companion, who is quickly involved with Chomina’s daughter. The priest watches, desires, and flagellates himself, so that he can transcend or avoid his earthly feelings.
The priest remains on the periphery of the action, always observing, but never entering it. Although he is present and is clearly the main character, his position remains as an observer. He does not change in the course of the story, which is unusual; he maintains his position as observer. He represents one corner of the spiritual struggle in the story; it seems the less fulsome interpretation of spirituality. Although the priest lives at the end, while Chomina dies, it is the spiritual life of the Indian that seems complex and appropriate to the primitiveness of the land. The priest’s position in comparison seems outside the land—not transcendent, but residual. In this sense, his observer status as main character consolidates the narrative view that the coming of the white man and his religion to North America was not so much a progressive step as it was a new step, a different step, a misstep.
A Case Study of Main Character as Outsider: Four Friends
Steven Tesich wrote Four Friends, an autobiographical story that spans the 1950s to the 1970s. The story opens with young Danilo (Craig Wasson) and his mother joining their Yugoslavian father in East Chicago, Indiana, and takes us through the sexual revolution of the 1960s to when Danilo takes his parents to the boat on which they return to Yugoslavia; he remains to make his life in America.
Danilo’s is an immigrant story. He stays quietly on the sidelines and allows his friends to speak for his rebelliousness and sexual expressiveness. He is alienated from his parents; against his father’s wishes, he goes to college, where he befriends a rich American. He is engaged to his friend’s sister, again against the wishes of his father. Four Friends ends with Danilo reconciled to his adolescent girlfriend, Georgia, and resigned to the idea that his father will never understand him.
Most of the story’s action occurs around Danilo, and there is a lot of story to tell. The tale of the 1960s, from JFK to Vietnam, is interwoven with Danilo’s story. Many of the characters are more vivid than Danilo. Georgia is the catalytic figure in the story. She is expressive, exploratory, and spontaneous—everything Danilo is not.
The story maintains Danilo as an outsider looking in on a society from an idealistic perspective. For him, America is the land of his dreams. What he sees rarely conforms to his dream, but that is because he remains on the outside. Danilo is passionate and energetic, but he simply cannot express those feelings; he is constrained by his posture as outsider. Consequently, he is a man on the margin, a position that poses various difficulties for a main character, not the least of which is identification.
One benefit of presenting the main character as outsider is the opportunity to reflect on the action of the story as well as to participate in it. Although this isn’t taken up in Tesich’s character, Danilo’s inexpressiveness provides pauses where we can reflect on how he feels. Consequently, there is a constant tension (not knowing how the character will react) that is useful in maintaining our involvement. However, it is a tension that leads not to the concern for Danilo but to the curiosity about him and the story. This seems to be the fate of placing the main character in the position of outsider.
A Case Study of Main Character as Medium: Field of Dreams
Bill Kinsella (Kevin Costner), in Field of Dreams, is a main character who has a vision—he must build a baseball field in the middle of his Iowa cornfield. Kinsella is a three-dimensional character. He’s a nice guy; he’s a dreamer; he isn’t materialistic. A series of voices and visions populate his thoughts, with Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other scandalized White Sox from the 1919 team accused of throwing the World Series. Kinsella calls upon a black writer (James Earl Jones) and an old doctor to assist him in his quest, and they eventually join the ghost players in the idealized diamond in the sky. Kinsella finally gets to see his dead father and reconcile himself to the former baseball player whose memory he had long scorned.
Perhaps we all long to say something to parents we have lost. Kinsella’s wish isn’t fulfilled until the end of the film, and until then, there isn’t much to him. Unlike some of the other passive, reticent, or ambivalent main characters we have discussed, Kinsella’s flatness is not compensated for by a rushing flow of narrative or by another major character who drives the story. The writer is interesting but too ambivalent to compensate for the shortcomings of the main character. Yet, the story has a powerful emotional resonance in Act III, despite the use of larger-than-life characters and a main character whose primary function is to act as a medium for this 1980s fantasy. Perhaps Kinsella, too, is recognizable as one of us.
A Case Study of Splitting the Main Character: Mystic Pizza
Another approach to the active/passive split in the main character is to challenge our involvement in a manner that fractures our identification with one character, whether that person is active or passive. In Mystic Pizza, there are three main characters—two sisters and a friend, all in their late teens and all preparing for their adult lives. Each character is different: One sister is loud and sexy; the other is quiet and cerebral; the friend is ambivalent. Character splitting offers us choices in terms of identification and involvement. On a continuum, the characters are active to passive around their sexuality, just as they are active to passive about a career, a husband, and their futures. The element that ties these three characters together is their need to work to secure a future. All of them come from working-class families, and all of them work in the restaurant named Mystic Pizza.
The story has none of the narrative drive or the overdeveloped secondary characters present in the films discussed previously in this chapter. What does propel us through the story is, in part, a choice of characters to identify with, the honesty of the characters, and the parallels of each character’s story. In each case, the story unfolds through a relationship. The difference is the background of each character. Although there are significant differences among the three, their personal bond suggests that we concern ourselves with the fate of all three young women. These main characters are recognizable to us; they live among us and, in some cases, could be us.
A Case Study of Antagonist Compensating for Main Character: The Little Foxes
Alexandra (Teresa Wright), the young protagonist of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, is an innocent. Her mother, Regina (Bette Davis), the antagonist, is anything but innocent. Regina is so worldwise, manipulative, and evil that we can’t believe she has given birth to someone quite so angelic. This polarity is so extreme that it compensates for the slightness of the protagonist.
Set in the deep South in 1900, The Little Foxes tells the story of a wealthy Southern family. Their goal of growing richer is stymied by their reliance on the banker in the family, Alexandra’s father (Herbert Marshall). The ailing man is urged to return from convalescence in Baltimore. Business dealings, particularly with his wife and her brothers, threaten his wealth and health, and cost him his life. Alexandra is witness to all these. The issue for her is whether she wants to remain an innocent or face up to the fact that her mother is willing to do anything and sacrifice anyone to fulfill her own ambition. This particular strategy has been frequently used to restructure the active/passive nature of a protagonist. The Luke Skywalker–Darth Vader relationship in Star Wars is one of the most famous examples of this very strategy.
Conclusion
In all the case studies discussed in this chapter, the main characters were not active or energized. Danilo ( Four Friends ) is a reactive character, and Rory ( Inside Moves ) and John ( Who’ll Stop the Rain? ) are characters who act out of desperation. These actions bring each of them to the brink of disaster. They are reticent, passive, ambivalent main characters, and all are recognizable to us. They are tentative and all too human. They are flawed, and, in each case, they have been considered failures for much of their lives. Their commonality lies in their recognizability. They remind us of people we know rather than of movie characters.
In order to make these characters succeed dramatically, however, the writers had to modify their narrative approaches. These characters need dramatic situations and stories that are particularly energetic. The stories also needed memorable secondary characters, such as Ray Hicks in Who’ll Stop the Rain? or Jerry in Inside Moves. Finally, these stories require a very special antagonist, an antagonist who in her nature can compensate for the shortcomings of the main character. Regina in The Little Foxes is but one of a long line of great antagonists.
The benefit, should you choose to use active/passive characters, is that you will move away from movie characters and move toward real-life characters. This shift, as we have seen, can take you toward other options for your character. In the next chapter, we discuss one of these options—identification with the main character.