A Case Study of Dramatic Democracy: Love with the Proper Stranger

Arnold Schulman’s Love with the Proper Stranger is a story in which two characters both attempt to resolve their dilemmas—to live life as their parents did (to marry) or to live a more independent life filled with sexual gratification (to be single). Angela (Natalie Wood) and Rocky (Steve McQueen) are Italian-Americans. Both come from immigrant parents who have instilled old-school values in the lives of their children. Both children are in full rebellion. But how serious is the rebellion? Will they ever be free? Do they want to be free?

The story has a very creative opening. In a busy musician’s hiring hall, Rocky is looking for work. He wants to be paged to appear busy, and so he is. But it’s not a scam; someone is really looking for him—Angela. He doesn’t recognize her. Even after she tells him she’s expecting his baby, he still doesn’t recognize her. All she wants from him is the name of a doctor, so that she can get an abortion. This is not an auspicious beginning to a relationship that is the subject of the balance of the screen story. But, surprisingly, the film starts the relationship at a point where many other screen stories end.

We find out a great deal more about Angela’s family life during the course of the film—her guilt-rendering mother, her overprotective, smothering brother— but we can’t conclude that she is the main character. We also meet Rocky’s parents and his latest girlfriend (Edie Adams). These characters present their unappealing version of domesticity. Both Angela and Rocky are on the run from domesticity, a view they associate with marriage.

Ironically, Angela and Rocky move through this story headed toward marriage, but when one proposes, the other opposes on the grounds of familiarity. Rocky offers to marry Angela because it is the right thing to do; Angela doesn’t like the reason behind his offer. These two people, so intimate before the story began, learn to like each other and eventually fall in love. Whether they transcend the domesticity from which they ran is avoided in the romantic, open-ended conclusion, which leaves them kissing in front of a big crowd outside of Macy’s.

What is most significant is that neither Rocky’s nor Angela’s struggle is made more heroic than the struggle of the other. These two characters find a solution, but we are not certain (as we would be if the ending were more heroic) that this is the end of their relationship problems. This is just the end of the film. We hope they will find happiness, but we have an uneasy feeling that their struggles will continue. This paradoxical conclusion is an inevitable result of following the plights of two equally balanced characters. This dramatic democracy is more credible, but it undermines the degree of resolution and catharsis one associates with the classic main character–secondary character balance.

A Case Study of Plot Over Character: Groundhog Day

It is unusual when plot supersedes character in relation to our involvement in a story, but this is the case in Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day. As with the vigor of plotting in Dale Launer’s work (Blind Date, Ruthless People), Groundhog Day works with a powerful plot conceit to overcome the deficit of character in the screenplay.

Phil Conners (Bill Murray), a TV weatherman, has an inflated view of himself. When he is assigned once again to the annual live report from Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, on Groundhog Day, it’s too much. Accompanied by a producer (Andie McDowell) and a cameraman, Phil is obnoxious, uncooperative, and dying to get back to Pittsburgh. But a storm prevents his return, and when he wakes up the next morning, he finds himself living through a nightmare—it’s Ground-hog Day again. A few more repeats of the day and Phil realizes he’s trapped in the worst day of his life. The rest of the screenplay relates to how he responds to being trapped.

Phil’s character is clearly unappealing, and, although they differ, the producer and cameraman are not fascinating. She is ingenuous; the cameraman is sarcastic. Their characters do not compensate for Phil’s flatness. What does compensate is the adventuresome quality of the plot. Phil is by turns cynical, opportunistic, and criminal. Once he discovers that he can’t be punished for what he does, he becomes quite inventive about what he can get away with each day. This polar swing in behavior liberates the plot just as Phil himself is being trapped. Only when he experiences something he deeply wants—the love of his producer— does Phil regret being trapped in Groundhog Day. At that point, his behavior becomes saintly, too good to be stuck anywhere, and the day finally changes, just as Phil has.

The interesting element in the film is how plot development compensates for a main character who does not engage us empathetically. In Groundhog Day, only the plot and its inventiveness compensate for the lack of interesting characters; in this case, it is the plot, not the character, that saves the day.

A Case Study of Multiple Main Characters: Mystic Pizza

Some films opt for three protagonists rather than one. An early example (1946) is Robert Sherwood’s The Best Years of Our Lives. Postwar adjustments were thematically appropriate to that time. The more recent Mystic Pizza is appropriate to the 1980s. Feminism, upward mobility, acquisitiveness, and education all play parts in the film.

Kat (Annabeth Gish), Daisy (Julia Roberts), and Jo (Lili Taylor) are three young women who work at Mystic Pizza, in Mystic, Connecticut. Daisy and Kat are sisters. All three women wonder about the future and, through their male– female relationships, learn that there are no easy answers. All they have is an enduring affection for one another, which, they hope, will help them through their lives.

Having three main characters divides character identification as well as the capacity to make any one character’s struggles heroic. Indeed, the fact that each meets her travails in a different fashion—Kat with a naive romanticism, Daisy with a street-smart aggressiveness, and Jo with an adolescent propensity for avoidance—suggests that all these women are dependent on one another. For example, if Kat had Daisy’s street smarts, she wouldn’t have fallen in love with a married man. These differences in character and approach to problem resolution threaten to destabilize the unity of the story, but they don’t.

Because the time frame is short and because each character’s story chronicles a relationship, there is a sense of unity. These stories are all slices of the same pizza, to use the metaphor from the movie. These are winning characters; their intentions and actions are understandable, not alienating. Their mutual friendship creates a net under the individual stories, and the result is an emotional unity that is as strong as a single-protagonist screen story.

The men in each relationship are the antagonists of this story. When the three women salute one another at the marriage that ends (and begins) the story, we admire them and resent those who come between them—their men. Writers Amy Jones, Perry Howze, Randy Howze, and Alfred Uhry have fashioned a sisterhood story that transcends the downside of using more than one main character and alleviates the consequences of the traditional main character–secondary character dynamic. This screen story is very much in balance.

A Case Study of the Main Character as Antagonist: The Talented Mr. Ripley

Does the negative main character need to be surrounded by one group of character even more negative and by another that is more positive? This is the central question posed from a narrative perspective by Anthony Minghella in his screenplay, “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999).

Base on Patricia Highsmith’s novel of the same name, filmed in 1960 by Rene Clement as “Plein di Soleil”, this story of Tom Riley down on his luck in New York. Mistaken for a classmate of a well-to-do playboy, Dickie Greenleaf, Tom is paid to go to Europe and convince Dickie to return home. This begins Tom Ripley’s journey to pretend to be someone he’s not.

In the course of that journey Tom will fall in love with Dickie and with his life. He kills Dickie when Dickie threatens to send him away, begins to impersonate Dickie in Italy, kills Freddy Miles, a friend of Dickie’s when he threatens to unmask Tom, and finally kills a homosexual lover whose existence threatens to suggest he is ot the heterosexual Dickie.

In order to sustain the sense that part of the character population is more negative than Tom Ripley, both Dickie and Freddy are portrayed as shallow, callow and cruel. Whether this merits their fate is dubious. Both women in the story, Marge Sherwood and Meredith Logue are portrayed as possessions more than people. The character population, at least its younger characters are principally more negative than otherwise. Their positioning is similar to the publishers in “The Hoax” (2007) and the adults in Hanneke’s “The White Ribbon” (2009). If you are powerful materially or in authority, skewing these groups toward the negative, creates some degree of sympathy for a negative main character, who is positioned as a victim of those in power.

A Case Study of Balance: “Revanche”

“Revanche” (2008) written by Gotz Spielmann, balances off the classic case of the main character dominating and driving the narrative. In “Revanche” the main character is Alex, an ex-con working in a bordello. To extricate himself from a dead end life, he chooses to liberate himself and his prostitute girlfriend, Tamara. To do so he will rob a bank in a small town close to the home of his grandfather, a farmer. Escaping from the robbery, Tamara is killed by a police bullet.

Balancing the narrative here is a secondary character, Susanne, with a goal, to have a child; her husband, Robert, the policeman who killed Tamara, is infertile. Both Alex and Susanne have good intentions but to execute those intentions each undertakes a transgressive strategy, a robbery and unfaithfulness (Suzanne sleeps with Alex and becomes pregnant).

Alex and Suzanne are very different as people. She is church-going, a good neighbor, and wife, seemingly bourgeois in lifestyle. Alex on the other hand, is sketchy. He works in the margins of society; he finds a love relationship in that margin, and he is willing to steal. His only conventional undertaking is to cut wood for his grandfather because his mother has asked him to help the grandfather. In this sense each is opposite to the other.

They are also opposite emotionally. Susanne is forthcoming, communicative, and social. Alex on the other hand, is sullen, angry and brimming to take revenge for Tamara’s death. Revenge means killing Robert, and until the end we believe he will kill the policeman who killed his lover.

How then is it that he doesn’t? In his sexual union with Susanne, Alex changes. He sees the baby room she and Robert furnished only to be proved impulsive when Susanne miscarried. He is impressed by her assertiveness in their relationship. And he is confused when she discovers that Alex’s dead lover is the same woman that Robert killed. In spite of this knowledge she tells him that she will not betray him. She also tells him their affair is over. She has what she wants (a pregnancy). It’s as if her pragmatism and tolerance opens up an option for Alex. Emotionality demands he kill Robert. Susanne’s tolerance of Alex, suggests maybe he doesn’t have to kill Robert. Perhaps he can live here with his grandfather. Perhaps he can have a new life, a different life. At this moment the film ends. By using balance between Alex the main character and Susanne as a subtle transformational secondary character, Spielmann has opened up new possibilities in “Revanche”.

A Case Study of Main Character as a Witness: Full Metal Jacket

Private Joker (Matthew Modine), in Full Metal Jacket (written by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford), is as much a witness as he is a main character. The story breaks down into two sections (another innovation of this screen story). The first part is the story of basic training; the second story is about combat in Vietnam, particularly concerning one patrol in Huê during the Tet Offensive.

In the first story, the sergeant and Private Lawrence are more important than Private Joker is. Joker is the witness to a psychodrama played out between the sergeant and Private Lawrence. The answer to how far the sergeant will go to turn his men into killing machines is very clear: he’ll go to any lengths—including humiliation and destruction. The sergeant, the antagonist, succeeds in his goal by turning Lawrence into a killer. Lawrence kills the sergeant and then kills himself. Private Lawrence and the sergeant are protagonists and antagonists, depending on your point of view, even though Joker is the character through whom we experience the narrative. These two secondary characters take over the drama, and Private Joker survives as a witness and goes on to combat. Here the main character, Joker, is relegated to the position of observer.

This role is continued in the second act, the Battle of Huê. In combat, Joker is a photographer, a visual witness to a battle in which the antagonist is unclear. We never see the enemy, we only see the killing. The American patrol is whittled down one by one. The men of the patrol are frustrated, angry, and afraid. Finally, they capture the sniper. She is dying, and she is alone. Here, again, the members of the patrol, whether animalistic or rational, brave or cowardly, frightened or filled with bravado, are more complex and compelling than Joker is.

Joker does survive, as is appropriate for a witness, but the majority of secondary characters, who have faced life and death (mainly death), have struggled more expressively to surmount the obstacles placed before them. In Full Metal Jacket, it is clear that no one character is privileged. All characters are trying to survive, and all are limited by the same parameter—the war. Joker survives, but this outcome is neither heroic nor cathartic, a by-product of the narrative’s two-act structure.

A Case Study of Interior Main Character and Exterior Secondary Characters: Paris, Texas

Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) is a 1980s poor version of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. A relic from his past provides a key to his current behavior and character. Or does it? Sam Shepard and Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas is the story of a man who has lost his memory and must reconstruct his life. His brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) and his son Hunter (Hunter Carson) help. It is not until Travis takes his son on a journey to find the boy’s mother, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), that we get a true sense of Travis as a man who is incapable of coping with his own shortcomings. His possessiveness has cost him his wife; his self-absorption has robbed him of raising his son. Like Kane, Travis is fixated on the relationship of his parents and the circumstances surrounding his early life in Paris, Texas—where modern cosmopolitanism clashed with primitive ruralism. He cannot sustain the contradictions and has been among the walking wounded ever since.

In terms of character, Travis is lost, a position that is not conducive to mastery or primacy over other characters. The secondary characters seem more rooted (brother and sister-in-law) and more exposed (wife), and thereby more vital and engaged than Travis is. However, in the absence of primacy, Travis does occupy a dramatically more democratic position vis-à-vis the secondary characters. The secondary characters try to help Travis, but his conflict is internal; he has to help himself. For all their externalized actions, the secondary characters do not seem paralyzed by their deeper fears. Each is fearful, but each, including Travis’s wife, is able to act in ways that elude Travis. As a result, Travis leaves his son with his mother at the story’s end. Travis is alone and seems to realize the rightness of that stance. He has used his son to find his wife and realizes that although he may desire a traditional family life, his passivity prohibits him from having one.

A Case Study of Role Reversion: Something Wild

Charles Driggs (Jeff Daniels), the main character of Max Frye’s Something Wild, is a closet rebel who happens to be a stockbroker. He is a conventional middle-class main character, and he allows himself to be accosted and then kidnapped by Lulu (Melanie Griffith). The ensuing adventure is filled with sadomasochistic dimensions. Lulu ties him up, has sex with him (he doesn’t object), and eventually calls his boss, forcing Charles, naked and tied up, to make excuses for being away from the office for the afternoon. Later, Charles accompanies Lulu to her high school reunion and meets her ex-husband. He then almost loses his life in trying to take Lulu away from her ex-husband, a violent, unpredictable psychopath.

Charles is overwhelmed by Lulu, a dynamic, unpredictable woman whose sense of danger stimulates him. In a stereotypical sense, Lulu takes on male behavioral characteristics in Act I, whereas Charles assumes female behavioral characteristics. Because of this blurring, it’s difficult to identify Charles with the classic main character (hero). Not until Lulu’s ex-husband appears do we have a secondary character who is an antagonist—another requisite for prompting heroic action on the part of the main character.

The degree of role reversion intensifies when Lulu saves Charles from harm at the hands of her ex-husband. It is Lulu who decides whether she will have a relationship with Charles. To the degree that he has lied to Lulu about himself, Charles is as much a sociopath as she is. They are misanthropic and belong together in a relationship based on mutual deception and role reversion.

Charles, Lulu, and her ex-husband are all outsiders. In Charles case, he has been more repressed about it. Although these three are opposed to one another, their characters are quite similar. In this sense, they are different from classic secondary characters who represent different sides of the issue faced by the main character. These secondary characters, Lulu and her ex-husband, have a dark side, as does the main character, Charles. The lack of a clear-cut choice—to be an upright citizen and broker or to be a criminal or sinner—makes the resolution, the death of Lulu’s ex-husband, less a climax than a relief from an untenable situation. His death, however, does not resolve the relationship issues between Charles and Lulu.

The central question with regard to the balance of main and secondary characters in Something Wild is this: Has the role reversion subverted the separateness of the main character, and is Charles defined enough to be further segregated (for heroic ends) by the active antagonist to qualify him as a classic protagonist? The answer is no. The role reversion has subverted Charles as a classic main character. His shared deception with Lulu has dramatically democratized Charles and Lulu. An argument could be made to consider Lulu the main character; although she isn’t the main character, she is too much like Charles to be considered a conventional secondary character, either. Only the ex-husband’s posture as antagonist works to save Charles status as a classic protagonist, but it isn’t enough. The balance between main and secondary character has been successfully subverted.