23

Agency and the Other

Agency and the Other

Near the end of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), the detective, Jake Gittes, convinced of the guilt of his client/lover Evelyn Mulwray, charges into the house where she is staying. Mulwray’s Chinese housekeeper tries to block Gittes from entering, but Gittes brushes him aside. As the housekeeper does not deter Gittes in any way, he does not “bend” the story. As a result, he does not have a beat¹ —he could just as well be a chair blocking the entrance, an inanimate object to be tossed away. This is the role that many minority, female, and marginalized characters have played throughout the history of film. It is the dramatic characterization of “the other.”

“The other” is the term used by anthropologists, sociologists, and media theorists, among others, to represent classes of people that are alien to the self. The other is unknown and unknowable; as a result, the other functions as an unarticulated force in stories, as an object that is incapable of focusing consciousness. The motives and thoughts behind the actions of the other remain unexplored, and the actions themselves are usually futile. An obvious other, the Chinese housekeeper’s inability to affect Gittes is, of course, ironic, given the detective’s ultimate failure in Chinatown. However, even though Gittes fails in Chinatown, his failure concerns a white love interest and a white villain. The idea of the Chinese and the section of the city where they live remains opaque to both of the white characters in the film and to the viewer. Although in some ways the antagonist throughout the film, Chinatown as a place and a culture is voiceless.

To give the housekeeper (and the neighborhood) power would mean giving him (and it) a beat. A beat would allow the housekeeper to stop Gittes in some way, to cause him to rethink his plan. It would gift the housekeeper with some subjectivity, some personhood. The term for this is agency, the ability of a character to act on his own, to exhibit will, to change the direction of the story. The housekeeper’s failure to have an effect on Gittes is a failure of the particular kind of agency we will call action agency.

In addition to action agency, there is a reflective agency, a form of subjectivity in which a character does not directly affect the action line, but rather one in which his reaction shapes the viewer’s understanding of the scene. If after failing to stop Gittes, the housekeeper had instead watched him disappear into the house and the camera remained on the housekeeper, watching, there would be a point where the viewer’s perspective would shift to that of the housekeeper. The housekeeper would have a beat, not of action, but of reflection. He would have been given agency, not to control the line of the story, but to shift our perception of the story.

In most films in which we are brought into character, we are given both forms of agency. The reflective agency prepares us for action, whereas the action agency drives the scene. It is the reflective agency that makes the viewer feel she is participating in the thought process that leads to the action. Even when we see reflective agency but do not understand the logic underlying a main character’s action, it is usually subsequently explained. For instance, in an earlier Chinatown scene, we participate with Gittes’s decision to break the taillight of Evelyn Mulwray’s car, even if we don’t fully understand why (because the white light, shining through the broken red taillight, will make it easier to trail Mulwray) until later.

But let’s return to the portrayal of the Chinese housekeeper. Contrast his treatment to the treatment of the Iraqi other in David O. Russell’s Three Kings (1999). ² In the torture scene, the Iraqi captor, Captain Said (played by Saïd Taghmaoui), discusses his dead child with the American prisoner, Sfc. Troy Barlow (played by Mark Wahlberg). Said is no longer a father, because his child was killed in an American bomb blast; Barlow has a new child back home. As Said has Barlow tied and wired for electric shock, there is no question that Said has action agency. But Said also controls reflective agency and, through this, is able to achieve a more profound action agency than physical force—the control of Barlow’s imagination. Said describes the death of his son, which motivates a cut to the boy’s crib being destroyed by a bomb blast. We read this as Said’s imagined image of what happened to his son. Next he provokes Barlow into thinking about his own wife and daughter walking along a calm, American suburban street. Here is where the reflective agency becomes action agency. Said pushes the American to imagine his daughter being blown up. We cut to a quick image of an explosion racking the calm suburban street. We read this as Barlow’s flash of an unimaginable horror, and it suggests that Said is not only able to exert action agency through controlling the torture, but even to impose deeper action agency by manipulating Barlow’s subjectivity, causing him to imagine what he does not desire.

To an American audience and to the American characters in the film, Said is an other. Yet, the film first breaks down our understanding of how we identify with, and who is seen as, the other, by putting us into Said’s head, allowing us access to his subjective experience, and then giving him the power to modify the subjective imagination of the character whose frame of reference usually informs our focus.

The comparison between Chinatown and Three Kings is not to suggest that Three Kings is the better film but rather serves to demonstrate an evolution in the presentation of the subjectivity and agency of the other. Beyond being a faceless captor, an unknown force of evil, Said is developed as a character who can not only feel his own pain but also cause another character to imagine it.

In the rest of this chapter, we look at means of developing action and reflective agency through script examples.

Character Agency—An In-Depth Exploration

Let’s start with a simple sequence in which our fictional characters Robert and David, both 19, are road tripping across the desert.

The boys in the car have agency; the woman does not. The boys’ actions drive the scene; the woman’s actions have no effect on it. Furthermore, the woman is not characterized, except as to her gender, which is used against her by the fact that we are seeing through the boys’ eyes—they identify her as a girl. Presented this way, she might as well be an inanimate object of desire named by the beholder. Although David’s agency is active (we do not see him reflect on his actions), Robert’s agency is both reflective and active. We experience with him the seeing, processing, and then taking the subsequent action.

Now we can add a little characterization to the woman.

But the characteristic of youthful grace does not give the woman agency. In fact, this rewrite serves only to further emphasize Robert’s reflective agency, because it is his movement (or that of the car which he controls) that allows us to see more and reinforces the fact that we are seeing through his eyes. The characteristic of youthful grace is not so much a property held by the woman as it is a characterization imposed on her by Robert.

Now suppose we give the woman the simplest action.

She acts: Is this agency? Only if it has an effect on something else in the scene. So let’s rewrite it, so that it is clear that the guys would not have stopped unless she turned.

Finally, the woman has agency, even if she merely turned reflexively at the sound of the car. Her action “bends” the story, causing the boys to stop. We mark agency by its effects on the story.

Now suppose we give texture to her reaction.

This is the beginning of reflexive agency. We don’t know why her face changes, but we begin to suspect that her view of this event is ambivalent enough to make us wonder how to look at it. Her reaction creates backstory, a sense that the character is part of a specific world that predates this event. In fact, when I wrote it, I imagined a backstory to motivate her reaction. In the backstory, she had a fight with a friend, and he had taken off in anger, leaving her by the side of the road. The expectation that once he cooled he would come back to pick her up causes her joyful reaction. Discovering someone other than her friend explains her rage. It is not important that readers/viewers understand these specific details; rather, they must get the feel of the backstory, so that they can fill in the pieces later.

But does a character have to take physical action to convey active agency? Not necessarily. Let’s take a step back and look at the fact that the woman does not turn around in early versions of this script. Initially, we may read the not turning around as her not hearing the car, but there is some point at which her refusal to recognize the boys becomes willful. This makes it a form of agency conveyed by her very refusal to move.

In these scenes, we can make an argument that the story is being driven not by the boys’ activity but by the woman’s refusal to move. Her lack of action becomes a form of active agency—our attention and interest focus on what is motivating her rigidity. This form of agency through inaction is frequently described in “real” life as passive–aggressive behavior.

Before we get deeper into reflexive agency, we want to look at how the implied point of view in the screenplay is used to focus agency. For instance, let’s make one change in what the young woman is doing.

In all the versions thus far, the axis of tension projects out from the boys to the young woman. She is the object of their gaze, and the questions raised by the scene are defined by what they see. Is she interesting to them? Will she respond to them? In this version, we have given her a concrete task. Yet, the fact that she may be able to overcome the obstacle of her car breaking down, an act of agency in many other situations, has no impact here. From this perspective, she does not assert any agency, because nothing that she does affects the boys’ actions, which are foregrounded by the scene.

So let’s flip it:

As she ceases to be the object of the boys’ gazes and moves from being the object of a second-order observation (we see the boys and they see her) to being the subject of a first-order one (we see her and she sees the engine), the young woman earns a name. This serves to immediately collapse the narrative distance we felt when we only saw her through the boys’ gaze as a “woman.” Karen’s active agency is foregrounded by the concentration on the detail of her working on the car. In fact, we have emphasized this by using reactive phrases (“That’s it.” “Where is that damn wire?”) designed to pull the reader into the immediacy of the scene as Karen perceives it. Karen controls what we are able to see. The approaching car is only visible in the background by virtue of her leaning out of the engine.

All these result from our shifting the axis of tension. The dramatic question becomes whether Karen will be able to fix the car (and maybe whether she will be able to do so before the boys arrive). As a result, not only does Karen have active agency, but she also has reflective agency. Her thoughts drive her action and condition how we take the scene.

We should note, however, that, unlike the versions that focused on the boys’ point of view, this one is not a purely character-driven scene, because the reader/viewer sees more than Karen does. The scene also points out the difference between the use of image and sound in a screenplay. In the early versions, Karen’s decision not to turn when she hears someone behind her falling represents a willful ignoring of something we assume she has perceived, because sound, within hearing distance, is ubiquitous. By contrast, her lack of response to the car behind her in this version probably comes from her not noticing. As she doesn’t notice, her lack of response does not seem the same as the willful ignoring we saw previously.

Now let’s give explicit Karen agency of both kinds, and let it drive a fully character-driven scene.

Not only is Karen now driving the scene, but we have also dramatized her transition, the moment of decision or reflective agency that leads her to act. Unlike the narrated position of the previous version of the scene, where we see the car but she doesn’t, now she is the one responsible for directing our gaze. We can develop this use of point of view further.

It is now not simply the identification of a possible ride that drives this scene, but Karen’s mixed feelings about these two guys. Yet in this version, we are left out of her key thought process when she hides beyond the hood. Suppose we now take advantage of the camera’s mobility and give her a private moment where we can see what the guys cannot.

Of course, the private moment can reveal more than just a change of mood. Depending on the story, Karen might be cocking the gun she has hidden in the engine compartment. The important thing is we are with her at a period of emotional uncertainty and experience her decision to act.

Now we have built both reflective and active agency in a character that had been previously passive, but we are still treating the boys in the car as a single unit. Let’s go back and consider what we can do to characterize each of them.

Now we’ve split the boys, giving them each a different attitude to the woman they see on the road. This immediately characterizes them, making them distinct in their desires, even if we do not yet understand what is driving them. It also makes them seem less monolithic and more characterized; more human, less a threat.

But what about the woman’s hesitation we have developed in the previous version? Can it further articulate the tension between Robert and David?

Until now, we have been making an arbitrary distinction between point of view. Although there are certain times when you will want to remain in a single point of view, most of the time you will free the camera to assume multiple points of view. We’ll end this sequence by rewriting the scene to shift points of view.

In these shifts of point of view, it is useful to think like an editor. In the first transition from the boys to Karen, we cut from Robert’s point of view to the omniscient perspective on Karen using the action of the arm drop. A match cut. This covers the first shift, usually the hardest one to make, and helps it flow better. The cut back to the boys comes off the action of slamming the hood matched with cutting off the radio. This is intentionally abrupt, making the connection much more obvious. Karen has made her move. Now what are the boys going to do? The cut back to Karen at the end is one of dramatic inevitability. Karen and the reader know she has won. We want to see her savor it. Early in the scene, before the dramatic connection between characters has become as strong as it will be, we cover the transition through a smooth match cut. Later, as the dramatic tension rises and the habit of cross-cutting has been established, the cuts can be more abrupt, signaling the flow of dramatic meaning.

We have run through a number of permutations, demonstrating different ways the writer can shift agency and refocus the scene. We want to end this section by noting that if you attempt to articulate every beat of every character, your scene will lose dramatic focus. You must decide on the line of the scene, the sequences of beats marking character agency that best tells your story. Once decided, you will dramatize the appropriate beats of agency accordingly.

Withheld Agency

Much of drama comes from discovery. It might be interesting to present Karen initially as an apparently compliant character with few dramatic edges, only to have her reveal herself later. However, this does not mean you will want to withhold information. Usually, it is more interesting to hint at the growing need to act by emphasizing reflective rather than active agency. We can do this omnisciently:

The flinch might be because of the music. Or it might suggest an edgy character, nervous and ready to be triggered. We can also do this with another character clued in:

Narrative Distance

So far, we have been concentrating on character-driven scenes in which the agency is transferred from the narrative perspective to that of the characters. But suppose you want to emphasize the narrative voice? Suppose you want viewers to read the scene as an archetype of the American West, rather than as a story of particular characters? In that case, you would give the camera increased agency.

Patterns of Agency

It is very unlikely that we can conclude anything about how a script portrays “the other” by citing any one encounter. Most scripts contain a range of characters, none of which can be said to represent the script’s point of view as a whole. However, in sections with a dominant narrative voice, we can sometimes see patterns of agency that, inadvertently or not, begin to suggest a point of view.

For instance, the following version of a narrative-voiced sequence of a number of encounters might suggest that sexual initiative is solely the providence of males.

In dramatic scenes, the writer’s treatment of the other may be disguised because it comes through a character. Our reading of the author’s attitude toward the character is essential to our interpreting the script. For instance, if the preceding all-male libido version was told to us by a male character that we felt the writer was posing as an ideal of behavior, we would wonder about the point of view of the script. We would have less of a problem if we understood that the character was being presented as insecure and uncertain about his own virility.

A good writer will use subtle devices to separate him/herself from the character. Here is an example from Jon Favreau’s script for Swingers (1996):

This continues until Nikki finally answers the phone and blows him off. The writer is able to dramatize Mike’s desperation while also commenting on it and do all this with humor. Anthropomorphizing the phone machine—so that not only can it talk to Mike, but it can also give him the advice we would give him—allows the writer to enjoy Mike’s passion while positioning the audience outside of it. The progressive phone calls to Nikki, each one built on unfinished business from the call before, not only are funny, but simultaneously let us watch Mike’s building desperation, and laugh at it. We care and suffer with Mike, but we also understand the script’s point of view toward his behavior.

Otherness is More Complex than We Can Fairly Treat Here

The notion of us versus them is premised on a clear demarcation between those who have power and those who do not. Power in this case means the ability to make a representation, to create characters in our image— power comes from the ability to see through the eyes of our characters; the other is that which is seen. The historic impact of the Hollywood production/ distribution apparatus and the developed world’s access to the technologies of representation has led many to believe that they will always dominate media representation. They will always define the other as not them.

However, this thinking has been challenged in recent years. The availability of the Internet and more recently of blogging has given voice to those traditionally regarded as other. Also, the re-representation of the First World by many Third World societies has raised the question as to whether representational power only flows in one direction. Michael Taussig ³ cites the Panamanian Cuna tribe as an example, who, in their pictorial cloth molas that are often made into decorative blouses or dresses, have redrawn some of the icons of Western advertising power and reflected back to us images of how the other sees us. The Cuna’s redrawing of the RCA Victor “Talking Dog” icon transforms the staid image of the dog listening to the gramophone against a black background into a frenzy of color and geometric patterns. Taussig speaks of the intense pleasure this modification brings to Westerners today, the delighted laugh when we see the original ad and the mola side by side. He notes, “the possibility that this sudden laugh from nowhere registers a tremor in cultural identity, and not only in identity but in the security of Being itself”; for Taussig “Being” is the certainty of the superiority of the developed world.

One can also turn this perspective entirely around. In the Western desire to represent otherness from the inside, have we presumed to dramatize motivations that we do not deeply understand? Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005) relates the story of three young Muslim men who become terrorists. They are portrayed as the opposite of the oil people, as pure as the oil industry is corrupt. The treatment of American business as universally corrupt is a trope, something that we are used to seeing in film. Pretending to show us the three terrorists up close, but reducing them to a similar trope, the opposite side of the corruption, reduces them to the same post-modern cliche as is represented by the oil men. It allows us to feel that we understand and have assimilated something that we do not. It is not so much an exploration of the other, as a reduction of the other to the comfortable categorization of the opposite side of greed.

Conclusion

There are no simple answers when it comes to dramatizing the other. All we can ultimately ask is that the writer imagine all participants in a scene, even if the writer is only focused on a few of them. The writer is responsible for meanings, both intended and not.

You cannot give every character agency all the time or your story will have no focus. But if you find you are repeating patterns in which you deny agency to a class of characters—that is, all women cannot speak up in a relationship—you and your script may be saying something about your view of the world that you are not aware of and which you did not mean to say. You must first learn to sensitize yourself to unintended messages or find a trusted reader who can point them out to you. If you discover that you are inadvertently suggesting a more limited view of voice than you intend, then you want to add agency to those characters who are denied, using some of the techniques discussed in this chapter.

Ultimately, the question of otherness is very complex, and simple answers do not work. All we can ask is that you as a writer listen for the range of perspectives and explore how you can give agency to the widest range of voices in your script.

References

1.  This was brought to my attention by my former student, the media maker Charlene Gilbert who is currently an Associate Professor of Film and Media Arts at American University.

2.  The example of Three Kings was brought to my attention by Dr. Christine Holmland, Lindsay Young Professor and Chair of Cinema Studies at University of Tennessee.

3.  M. T. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York, NY: Routlege, 1993), 226.