Chapter 6Infinite Variety: Variables of Characterization

The ideal reader of narratives—ancient or modern—must be prepared to respond to the emphasis of the narrative with respect to character, placing individuality or “typical” connection foremost to the extent which the narrative itself calls for such priority; but above all he must bring to his consideration of character a versatility of response commensurate with the infinite variety of narrative characterization.--Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg1

Round and Flat

This chapter might be seen as yet another gloss on the famous distinction made in E. M.

Forster’s Aspects of the Novel between round and flat characters. According to Forster,

round characters are life-like and “capable of surprising in a convincing way,”2 while flat

ones are more likely understood as types, easily described, perhaps in a single sentence.

Many Dickens characters are flat; Dostoyevsky’s are round. To extend this to movies,

we might say that while standard genre types are flat, art cinema protagonists like Guido

in 8 1/2 are round. The general pattern in such a gloss on Forster would be briefly to

affirm the appeal of distinguishing between two such categories of characters and then to

discuss various complicating issues. Because “flat” sounds like “bad,” the critic must be

at pains to show as Forster himself did that some writers use flat characters artfully. And

because two categories would seem insufficient to account for the “infinite variety of

narrative characterization,” the critic will want to further elaborate the distinction by

adding criteria, subdivide Forster’s two categories, or supplement them with additional

ones. Seymour Chatman argues that round and flat refer to the variety (or lack thereof)

of the character’s traits.3 Scholes and Kellogg assert that the key distinction between

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characters is really a matter of whether and how their “inner life” is explored;4 likewise

Tzvetan Todorov discusses psychological and a-psychological characters.5 Mieke Bal

adds that flat characters are unchanging, whereas round ones develop,6 and she goes on to

plot various relational distinctions between characters: they may be more or less

predictable, may have more or less detailed accumulations of traits, and be more or less

similar to other characters in the narrative.7 Shlomit Rimmon-Kenan, citing the Israeli

theorist Joseph Ewen, organizes the distinction into three scales: complexity (which

refers to whether the character has a small or large number of traits), development

(whether the character changes or is static), and “penetration into the ‘inner life’”

(whether or not the character’s “consciousness is presented from within”).8

Within cognitive film theory there have been several attempts to clarify and

expand upon Forster by referring to the spectator’s comprehension of character rather

than to character as a textual figure. Murray Smith creates a typology of seven character

dimensions: complexity, fixity, stereotypicality, plausibility, artificiality, centrality, and

transparency, but goes on to criticize typologies of character for “hypostasizing”

character instead of analyzing the phenomenology of character construction. In place of

Forster’s definition, Smith suggests that a flat character would be “one that never

challenges the stereotype schema it invokes on first appearance,” while a round character

would be “one where the initial schema is subject to considerable revision.”9 Thus for

Smith, the crucial dimension of round/flat is the typicality of the character’s attributes as

understood by the spectator, however, round/flat is not the only way of accounting for

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different kinds of characters. Per Persson, complementing Smith, proposes that the

distinction between round and flat should be based upon the way spectators attribute

mental states to characters: a flat character “defies or makes difficult mental attribution

processes,” while a round character “is one that not only allows mental attributions, but

also presents a wide range of cues and appraisal parameters with which to reason and

‘play around with.’” He continues that “roundness is thus a result of the interaction

among the way in which the narration places the character in rich situations, the powerful

inferential structure of folk psychology, and the viewer’s cognitive creativity.”10 Persson

also cites Ed S. Tan, who writes, “The characters in quality films are round, in the sense

that they display more emotion, and that emotion is more developed than that of the

heroes in the popular genres.”11

These cognitivist formulations repeat many of the elaborations on Forster from

literary theory, albeit with a different vocabulary and a more reception-oriented

perspective. Round characters, according to Smith, are less easily typed than flat ones.

According to Persson, round characters are more richly psychologized. And according to

Tan, their emotional development is greater. I agree with all of them that typicality,

psychological richness, and emotion are very significant components of the key variables

of characterization, and with Smith that roundness cannot be reduced to a single

dimension. But I believe that these elaborations on round/flat can be clarified more still

by considering the distinction between character and characterization, by granting that

there are qualities of flatness and roundness that describe characters but not

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characterizations and vice versa. It is also important to consider the effect of

characterization on our sense of character, and on the degree of fit between the two. I

believe as well that distinctions among characters are more likely to be described

effectively using a scalar continuum than using pairs of opposites, and that films may

have certain aspects of roundness in some respects and certain aspects of flatness in

others.

What will distinguish this gloss on round and flat from others is its focus on

understanding characters rather than character in the abstract, and on distinguishing

between character as a person-like agent constructed by the spectator out of the encounter

with narrative, and characterization as the process by which character is brought to life.

If American independent films have interesting characters, does that mean that the

characters of indie cinema are more likely to be what the literary and film theorists above

would call round, which is to say psychological, changing, un-typical, emotional, and

possessing many traits? And whether these characters are seen to be flat or round, can

something similar be said of their characterization? It is these questions that I want to

explore here. In doing so I will discuss three sub-distinctions of the round/flat

opposition, borrowing some of Ewen’s terms and ideas: depth of characterization (which

includes the “inner life” and “mental attributions” ideas but is more basically the degree

to which the character’s construction is informative); complexity of characterization (i.e.,

the degree to which the presentation of the character is multifaceted, straightforward,

roundabout, contradictory, enigmatic, sophisticated, etc., as well as the degree to which

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the character herself is); and character change (i.e., the extent to which the character and

characterization develop). I am assuming that for all three variables, one side of the scale

is clearly understood as the flat side (shallow, straightforward, unchanging) and the other

side of the scale is clearly the round side (deep, complex, and dynamic). By using a

tripartite distinction, it will be possible to plot characters on a scale that accounts for both

round and flat aspects of a given individual’s representation, rather than being forced into

a choice between one or the other. The point, however, will not merely be to generate

another taxonomy, another analytical model, another set of terms. I recognize that this

taxonomy is to an extent arbitrary, to an extent redundant with others, and that other

taxonomies might better suit other analyses. The point, rather, is to establish a baseline

of understanding about what makes independent cinema’s characterization distinctive.

(Since I shall weave many independent film examples through the discussion of these

three variables, this chapter will not end with a case study as its predecessors did. I hope

that my points will be well enough illustrated without one.)

In previous chapters I have already suggested many ways in which independent

cinema characterizes, and this chapter is meant to complement those suggestions and

bring them together. It is also intended to echo many of the points made in Part I about

the cognitive processes used in constructing character. This discussion is especially

closely related to Chapter 2’s discussion of types, since typing is one of the dimensions of

the round/flat dichotomy. This discussion is also, however, aimed at investigating some

pre-theoretical notions about independent film and about character more generally, such

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as the idea that characterization is best conceived as an arc, and the oft-heard suggestion

that some films spend more time on character “development” than plot or vice versa.

We often assume that narratives judged by a wide consensus of critical opinion to

be of high aesthetic value must have round characters, characters who have depth and

complexity and who undergo significant development. Pre-theoretically and intuitively

this appeals to our common-sense assumptions. Probing the characters of independent

cinema, however, we find some significant instances of shallowness, straightforwardness,

and an absence of character change. Contrary to our intuition, independent films

sometimes have static, straightforward characters whose inner life is not made evident to

us in the fashion of Murnau and Lang, Bergman and Fellini, Hitchcock and Welles. The

characterization may complexify a character whose is not all that multi-dimensional, as in

Memento and The Limey, or it may keep us at such a distance from a character’s inner life

that we cannot arrive at a satisfying sense of who she is, either temporarily, as in Hard

Eight, or even in the end of the film, as in Safe. In many films, such as Down By Law

and Reservoir Dogs, the characters do not undergo meaningful change or the sort

prescribed in screenplay manuals.

My thesis in this chapter is that independent cinema’s approach to

characterization is in some ways better conceived as flat than as round: for aesthetic

effect, many filmmakers construct characters who are shallow rather than deep,

straightforward rather than complex, or static rather than changing. Such effects may

satisfy any of several functions: they may further an aesthetic of minimalism, allow for

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genre-based play, serve thematic goals, produce ambiguity, appeal to a conception of

realism, or be necessitated by aesthetic experimentation or innovation in other areas.

These effects and functions support the three viewing strategies introduced in Chapter 1.

Flatness effects can enhance the sense of characters as emblems, can stimulate formal

play, and can be seen as an antidote to the conventional character depth of mainstream

1 Scholes and Kellogg, 206.

2 E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (San Diego: Harcourt, 1927), 78.

3 Chatman, Story and Discourse, 132.

4 Scholes and Kellogg, 170-204.

5 Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977), 66-79.

6 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985.), 81.

7 Ibid, 79-93.

8 Shlomit Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Routledge, 1983), 40-42.

9Smith, Engaging Characters, 117.

10Persson, 216-217. While I agree that round characters typically demand that we “play around” with their mental attributes, I believe Persson errs in defining flatness as “defying mental attribution.” Surely the relatively flat secondary characters who help the hero of a movie, such as secretaries, taxi drivers, and assistants, do not defy mental attribution—they simply have a small number mental attributes, such as the desire to help the hero, which are made very clear within the narrative scenario. I describe characters who defy mental attribution later in the chapter in terms of complex characterization.

11 Tan, 173.

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popular cinema. However, by saying that flatness is a salient strategy of independent

film, I do not mean to suggests either that independent film is less than it has been

cracked up to be, or that the theoretical project of categorizing characters along scales

corresponding to roundness and flatness is inadequate to the task of understanding

cinematic character. I hope this analysis will demonstrate the independence of roundness

and flatness values from the evaluation and judgment of characters and narratives. In

other words, good stories can have flat or round characters, just as can bad ones.

Narration and Characterization

As a sub-process of narration, characterization varies according to patterns of information

distribution. One important aspect of narration for purposes of understanding

characterization is exposition, the introduction of character-relevant information.

Following Meir Sternberg, I understand exposition to be the process whereby the

spectator is introduced to the narrative world, including “the history, appearance, traits,

and habitual behavior of the dramatis personae; and of the relations between them.”12 I

have already discussed in reference to Passion Fish and Hard Eight how delayed

exposition creates an interest in character by frustrating processes of typing, trait

attribution, folk-psychology inference, and emotion recognition. As Sternberg argues,

narratives typically are full of gaps which the reader or spectator must fill in by posing

such questions as “What is happening or has happened and why? What is the connection 12 Sternberg,1.

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between this event and the previous ones? What is the motivation of this or that

character? To what extent does the logic of cause and effect correspond to that of

everyday life? And so on.”13 Exposition is a process of strategically managing these

gaps by presenting information in an order that maximizes particular aesthetic effects.

Gaps may be flaunted or suppressed by the narration, meaning that we may or may not be

made aware of their existence. These two options may produce, respectively, suspense

and surprise.

The effect of gaps on the spectator is dependent on the order in which narrative

information is presented. Sternberg describes the strong effect that first impressions have

on readers. This “primacy effect” can be exploited by narration in the choice of which

events to dramatize in the beginning of a narrative and which ones to withhold as gaps.14

The primacy effect is a psychological principle of impression formation and it holds that

the first of a person’s traits we encounter has the effect of shaping the meaning of later

ones, so that a person being described as “intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical,

sullen, envious” would produce a different impression from one described “envious,

sullen, critical, impulsive, industrious, intelligent.”15 It is not merely that the mind

emphasizes the things we encounter first, but that we view the latter traits through the

impression we have already formed on the basis of the first ones encountered.16 We form

a schema based on the first-encountered item which we impose on the subsequent data.

13 Ibid, 50.

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The primacy effect shapes meaning by influencing our expectations. It is no coincidence,

then, that screenwriting advice stresses the importance of character introductions. 17

The impression that we form of a main character is typically accomplished

quickly in the early sequences of a film, often with redundant, repetitive narrative data,

and is very seldom radically challenged. This is partly the product of a widespread

narrative convention and partly the effect of cognitive structures of person perception.

The order in which perceivers encounter information about others is crucial to their

evaluation of them, and this is easily exploited in characterization. As a principle of

narrative construction, the primacy effect is especially significant in films that either

present temporally disordered events, such as Pulp Fiction, or that withhold significant

details about a character, such as The Crying Game. By exploiting it, filmmakers bias the

impression that spectators will form of characters, allowing for subsequent refinements

and revisions of our understanding. The effect of characters surprising us, an important

element of roundness, is a product of manipulating the order of exposition so that 14 Ibid, 93. See also Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 38.

15 Perry R. Hinton, The Psychology of Interpersonal Perception (London: Routledge, 1993), 84.

16 The primacy effect is credited to Solomon E. Asch, “Forming Impressions of Personality,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 41 (1946), 258-90. See also Ross and Nisbett, The Person and the Situation, 70-71 and Menakhem Perry, “Literary Dynamics” Poetics Today 1.1-2 (1979), 35-64, 311-361.

17 For example, Syd Field writes, “The first ten pages of your screenplay are absoultely the most crucial.” Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting expanded edition (New York: Dell, 1994), 70.

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primacy is given to particular character attributes and not others. In Passion Fish, Sayles

withholds information about Chantelle that imbues her with depth and complexity and

shows her to have changed, and the impression of these roundness effects is created by

the narration’s surprising us. And the effect of characters having complex, contradictory

attributes may be amplified by an order of exposition rigged to create a specific first

impression, only to complicate that impression later on. The convoluted order of

Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2 begins with the Bride as a victim of

unspeakable violence and quickly shifts ahead in time so that she may exact comparably

gruesome revenge. Tarantino saves the backstory about the Bride’s relationship with Bill

and the assassin squad until the second film, and also saves the ultimate meeting of Bill

and the Bride. These “earlier” and “later” scenes reveal aspects of the Bride that

humanize her and show a different dimension of emotional experience. Like the

characterization of Chantelle, this process of withholding imbues the Bride with depth

and complexity that is merely hinted at in the early stages of the plot.

Sternberg discusses such effects in relation to The Odyssey and Pride and

Prejudice, but they are also standard features of independent cinema.18 The exploitation

of the order of exposition fits well into all of the viewing strategies introduced in Chapter

1: by increasing the interest in character, effects of surprise and complexity flesh out the

social rhetoric of independent film and make emblematized characters more interesting

(admittedly, this is not the case in the Kill Bill films); by manipulating formal design 18 Sternberg, 56-158.

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features, films with scrambled time structures may make play a matter of exposition; and

by introducing complexity in both of these areas, independent films implicitly challenge

the straightforwardness of much of mainstream cinema’s expository approach. This is

another way of saying that regardless of whether its characters are really round and

Hollywood’s really flat, independent film’s characterizations tend to be more

sophisticated and challenging.

Variable 1: Depth

If we think of a film character as a quantity of narrative data processed by the spectator—

something like a computer file—then the most apparent variable among characters is that

some comprise larger files than others. Most basically this is observed in the distinction

between major and minor characters: some characters appear only briefly while others are

in every scene of a film. The dramatized events of the narrative, and other events merely

described or alluded to, are informative about the characters who take part in them so that

even a character about whom we know very little may still be given a degree of depth by

having appeared in so many scenes or been so repeatedly referenced. In Hard Eight,

Sydney is a deeper character than Jimmy because we simply see more of Syd, hear more

of his speech, and see more of the other characters in relation to Syd. The narration of

Hard Eight is more informative in relation to Sydney, and depth of characterization is in

a sense simply a matter of informativeness: the more information we are given, the more

depth the characterization takes on. The choice of “depth” over another term such as

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“breadth,” “richness,” or even “informativeness” is somewhat arbitrary, though it follows

the most common casual usage. Depth is not simply a matter of the “inner life” being

represented or not, since, as I have argued, the construction of a character’s mental states

is often more a matter of social-cognition inferences than it is of direct subjective

representation. Informativeness refers to all of the aspects of characterization, external

and internal.

A large file of data would seem to make for a rich character, however,

informativeness may mean two separate things in relation to character and

characterization. First there is the quantity of information, which itself is a necessary but

not a sufficient condition for characterization in depth. For characterization in depth, the

information must also be of a certain kind. Knowing what a character eats for breakfast

every day of his life would be informative in terms of the quantity of data but not in terms

of its meaningfulness. So second, characterization may or may not be informative in the

sense of the information about the character being relevant, interesting, and useful in

making sense of the narrative world. One of the most significant factors in determining

the parameters of our engagement with characters is our ability to understand them or to

believe that we understand them, because even an avalanche of information about a

character will not be meaningful without a clear way of organizing it.

In this section I argue that depth should be understood as including two distinct

variables, one relating to character and the other to characterization. The first sense of

informativeness, referring to the quantity of narrative information, corresponds to depth

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of character, while the second sense, referring to the explanatory coherence of the

information, corresponds to depth of characterization. As we shall see, depth of character

is no guarantee of depth of characterization, but depth of characterization does

correspond to depth of character.

There are many ways in which characterization may or may not be informative.

A character who is in virtually every scene of a film, such Michel in Bresson’s

Pickpocket, may still be presented opaquely, while a character who is only in one or a

few scenes might seem to be richly informative by comparison. We may feel that we

understand Norman Bates’s mother fairly well, though she is a secondary character who

we never really see, and who doesn’t really exist! The effect of satisfactory depth in the

characterization of Mrs. Bates is a product of the kind of information presented, which

can be just as important as its quantity in determining our response to characters. So by

the second sense of informative I mean that we can formulate a coherent explanation for

their behavior as we can for Mrs. Bates, whom we deem to be pathologically jealous of

her son’s feelings of affection for Marion; as we have seen, this requires that we establish

a nexus of attributions linking causes of narrative events to the situations and dispositions

of fictional persons and to infer stable personality traits on the basis of our observations

and inferences. With this nexus of character and causality in place, we can generate

further explanations the more information we are given: the new information is

understood in the context of a pre-existing pattern of knowledge, a character-specific

schema. And while understanding others requires more than knowledge about their

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behavior or their external life circumstances, it also requires more than penetration into

explicitly represented mental states. The effect of depth is achieved by the integration of

different kinds of information about a character into a coherent schema. Characterization

in depth is multifaceted and holistic, synthesizing material from the multiple channels of

narrative data, integrating the elements of characterization I have described and analyzed:

observed actions, descriptions, typing, attribution, folk-psychology inferences, emotion

expressions, and stylistic effects such as music and camera movement. Because all of

these elements are informative, all are potentially depth-producing. But the essential

requirement of depth is the combination of relevant data with an explanatory mechanism

to make sense of it.

We might think of depth not as a pair of opposites, deep and shallow, but as two

separate but related scales of informativeness. (See figure on pages 290-291.) There is

the scale of quantity of information and the scale of explanatory coherence. We may plot

any given character along both scales. If the depth of information and the depth of

explanatory coherence are equal, we have depth of characterization that is commensurate

with depth of character, because our means of making sense of the character allows our

completion of the task. We might call this satisfactory depth. If the depth of information

is greater than the depth of explanatory coherence, then we must say that the

characterization is shallow in comparison to the character. Thus it is possible for

relatively shallow characters to have commensurately shallow characterization, in which

case they have satisfactory depth despite their shallowness. This would be the case in

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primitive narrative films such as Porter’s The Gay Shoe Clerk, in which the means of the

representation of the characters is adequate to the degree of informativeness about them.

Or it is possible for characters with moderate or greater depth to have shallow

characterization, as in films by Bresson.19 I do not believe it is possible, however, for a

character to have depth of characterization but not of character, since it does not make

sense for an explanatory mechanism to be more advanced than the data it purports to

explain.

In a classical narrative, the most typical effect of depth in characterization is a

product of repetitive narrative data and straightforward narration that minimizes

contradictory or ambiguous character traits (for more on straightforwardness see the next

section, on complexity). This produces a moderate depth in character as well as

characterization, and satisfactory depth. Classical cinema depends on redundancy

generally, but especially in its mode of characterization, with mutually reinforcing traits,

expressions, cinematic techniques, and narrative events creating easily recognized

characters with clear belief-desire psychologies that link directly to narrative causes and

effects. Clarity and coherence are twin engines of depth: understanding behavior and

expressions, inferring psychology, and integrating diverse data into a meaningful whole

produces an effect of a character about whom we know a substantial amount of

meaningful information. The redundancy of cues in the classical mode maximizes clarity

19 See for example Murray Smith’s discussion of characterization in Bresson’s L’Argent in Engaging Characters, 173-181.

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and coherence (though perhaps at the cost of complexity, uniqueness, elegance, or other

aesthetic values). This is achieved most often by the radical restriction of personality

traits and the convergence of all other narrative data around the most central one, such

that typing, emotion expressions, folk-psychology inferences, and secondary traits tend to

reinforce that trait and, more importantly, not to contradict it.

Harry Morgan’s most prominent traits in Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have

Not are his independence and individualism: he doesn’t want anyone’s help, and he

doesn’t want to stick his neck out to help anyone. This is revealed in his dialogue, his

actions, his expressions, the other characters’ reactions to him, and the most basic

conflicts of the plot: whether or not he will risk his own safety to aid Frenchie’s Free-

French comrades attempting to enter Martinique illicitly, and whether or not he will enter

into a committed, romantic relationship with Slim (Lauren Bacall). It is also supported

by the film’s political rhetoric opposing American isolationism prior to entering World

War II, and by the film’s intertextual referencing of similar films (e.g., Casablanca) that

are also about reluctant Americans abroad, other Hawks adventure movies such as

Scarface and Only Angels Have Wings about stoical, self-assured male protagonists, and

other Bogart films such as The Maltese Falcon in which he plays similarly independent

heroes. Harry clearly has greater depth than his affable sidekick, Eddie (Walter

Brennan), about whom we learn very few details beyond his perpetual drunkenness and

his loyalty to Harry, or the snarlng local French official Renard (Dan Seymour), about

whom we learn even less. This is because Harry has more scenes and more lines than

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Eddie or Renard, because he interacts with more characters than they do, because Harry’s

mental processes are given much greater significance in the unfolding of the plot, because

Harry is the cause of many more of the narrative’s events, and because the narrative

events are represented in terms of their impact on Harry more than any other character.

So it is true that Harry’s inner life is explored—indirectly, of course, in a Hawks film—

more than the inner lives of the other characters. In particular, his internal process of

decision-making is critical for our understanding of the plot. But it is also true that we

have more information about Harry than the others. These two facts are made relevant by

the other details of the characterization, especially by Harry’s place within the

organization of narrative events as the central node around which the other characters are

arranged in their network of relationships. The result is typically classical: a moderate

depth of characterization befitting a mode of storytelling that favors efficiency, order, and

balance: not too shallow, not too deep.

Thus the moderate degree of classical cinema’s depth of character and

characterization is a product of informativeness that is moderate as a function of its

redundancy and relative simplicity. This kind of informativeness is itself a product of the

imperative for clarity and coherence that insures legibility, accessibility, and maximal

audience appeal in a commercial entertainment industry. It is for this reason that

Bordwell et al. call Classical Hollywood an “excessively obvious cinema.”20 Classical

Hollywood, heir to 19th century traditions of both realism and melodrama, borrows some

of each narrative mode’s characters and characterizations.21 John Ford’s westerns offer

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excellent examples of how these inheritances are combined, with some of the richness of

detail and milieu of 19th Century fiction, as in the cross-section of western society

offered in Stagecoach, and its emphasis on probing character psychology, as in the

complexity of Ethan Edwards’s motivation in The Searchers. Nineteenth Century

realism emphasizes both the texture of the social domain, as in Balzac’s extensive array

of characters, and the vividness of the individual, as in Flaubert and Tolstoy, and Ford’s

evocation of both western society and the western hero achieves some modicum of these

effects. But as westerns, Ford’s films also borrow the Manichean morality of the

melodramatic mode, as in My Darling Clementine’s contrast of the Earps and the

Clantons and Clementine and Chihuahua; melodrama’s clarity of overwrought

emotionality, as in Wyatt’s hatred for the Clantons and his passion for vengance; and the

staging of spectacular scenes, as in the O.K. Corral shootout.22 In merging these

traditions, Classicism balances richness and vividness of characterization with a pattern

of genre- and star-based expectations and a powerful emotional rhetoric that is more

easily achieved with relatively shallow characters. (I should insist here that I do not use

the term shallow in an evaluative aesthetic sense, and I mean no judgment or disapproval

on the basis of taste in my usage.)

There are three ways in which films from outside of the classical tradition

frustrate our conventional expectation of modest depth achieved by the merging of the

realist and melodramatic modes, and I have alluded to them all in the discussion above.

We must first of clarify the distinctions between character and characterization and

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between information and explanation. A shallow character is a character about whom we

know little, while a shallow characterization (so defined by being shallow in comparison

with the depth of the character) is one that frustrates our understanding of a character

about whom we do have enough information to achieve at least modest depth. This

distinction may seem overly subtle but it is necessary, as some characterizations produce

an effect not really of shallowness but of opacity: the narration suggests a character in

depth but closes off access to her. This distinction explains two of the three non-classical

depth techniques: truly shallow characters lacking even the depth of classicism necessary

for character-centered causality, and characters presented using a technique of opacity.

20 Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, 3.

21 On the theatrical tradition, see Nicholas A. Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1949). On realism, melodrama, and classical Hollywood, see Rick Altman, “Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88.2 (1989): 321-60, and Jane M. Gaines (Ed.), Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992). On 19th Century realism and classical Hollywood, see also Colin MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses,” Screen 15.2 (Summer 1974), 7-27, and Colin MacCabe, “Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure,” in Phil Rosen (Ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Colubmia UP, 1986), 179-197. On the history of the term melodrama in Hollywood see Steve Neale, “Melo Talk: On the Meaning and Use of the Term ‘Melodrama’ in the American Trade Press,” The Velvet Light Trapp 22 (Fall 1993), 66-89.

22 This conception of melodramatic appeals is indebted to Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia UP, 2001), 37-58.

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The former is as much a theoretical as a practical category because depth is

always a matter of degree, but examples may be found in modes of discourse that are

only minimally narrative, such as the cinema of attractions, some examples of

experimental cinema, advertisements, music videos, and even non-narrative forms that

contain some narrative traces. The characters in the films of Méliès, for example,

certainly lack depth, as do those in the films of Michael Snow that have characters, such

as Wavelength, some of Andy Warhol’s duration exercises and superstar studies, such as

Sleep and Mario Banana, and Richard Linklater’s more experimental films, such as

Slacker and Waking Life. As for limit cases, in which narrative is itself minimal,

examples may be found in children’s television programs such as Teletubbies in which

the characters have a very small number of distinguishing traits and in which the

principal narrative events are simple in the extreme, such as riding a scooter around the

lawn or saying “Bye-bye!” and leaving. While minor characters such as Renard in To

Have and Have Not may also be considered shallow, it depends on our scale of

comparison: they are shallow when viewed next to the main characters, but deep

compared with the Teletubbies. Since most films have minor as well as major characters,

it would be incorrect to identify shallow minor characters as somehow “un-Classical,”

though we would do just that with the other examples I have mentioned.

Truly shallow main characters are the exception in narrative feature films, but

shallow characterizations of characters whose depths have parameters we are not able to

apprehend are much more common. Carol in Safe is an example: we have a great deal of

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information about her, but we do not know enough to explain and understand all of her

represented experiences; she may have psychological depth or she may not—we cannot

tell, and so we are puzzled by her. By contrast, the narration may suggest no such thing,

and merely represent a shallow character as such, in which case the narration does not

solicit our interpretation of the character, does not challenge us to figure him out. Silent

film comedies abound in such characters, such as the various antagonists in Chaplin’s

The Kid who have minimal attributes and function merely as obstacles preventing the

tramp and the kid from getting along in life as a makeshift family. While truly shallow

characters may either be minor characters or characters in simple, one-dimensional

narratives, a truly shallow, opaque characterization is a fundamentally ambiguous device

and much more likely to be found outside of the Hollywood tradition. Shallow

characterization is characterization that keeps the audience at a distance, that forces us

into speculation and even puzzlement, and that can produce characters as objects for

intensive interpretation, such as Patricia in Breathless, Noriko in Late Spring, Mr. Badii

in Taste of Cherry, and William Blake in Dead Man.

The key distinction between shallowness of character and shallowness of

characterization is thus the fit between them: if the characterization seems appropriate to

the character, it is not shallow in relation to it, but if the narration suggests that a better

understanding of the character is possible but beyond our means, and both awakens and

frustrates a desire in the spectator to know more about the character, then it seems that

the character has greater depth than the characterization, and the characterization is thus

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shallow in relation to its object. This strategy is not necessarily typical of independent

cinema, which is generally more likely to favor characters and characterizations in depth.

But among a subset of formally experimental indie films that use disordered temporality,

shallow characterization is an element of formal play. In Soderbergh’s The Limey, the

characters of Wilson (Terrence Stamp) and Valentine (Peter Fonda) would seem to have

much greater depth than we can ascertain from the jumbled presentation of them in the

film’s first half, during which the narration is frustratingly uninformative and difficult to

follow, with no one trait announcing itself as the most central facet of Wilson’s or

Valentine’s characters comparable to the redundant emphasis on Harry Morgan’s self-

reliance in To Have and Have Not. Such films use experimental patterns of exposition in

relation to their characters such that in the first parts of the narrative the characters’ very

identities are obscure. I will return to this point on experimental exposition and to The

Limey in the next section, but for now the key idea is that shallow characterization is a

narrative value that is distinct from shallow character. Shallow characters are those about

which the narrative is uninformative; shallow characterizations are those wherein the

narration is insufficiently explanatory, or rather, is insufficient in soliciting inferences

which the spectator may use to create an explanatory framework vis-à-vis the characters.

In addition to shallowness, then, there may be depth of character and

characterization, which do not need to be separated out into discrete functions because it

is inconceivable that a characterization could have depth without the character also

having it. Ethan in The Searchers is a character who has depth because we have

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considerable, clear information about him that coheres and makes sense in the narrative

context. Many independent films traffic in characters in fairly conventional depth, such

as Passion Fish, Smoke, You Can Count On Me, Traffic, Boys Don’t Cry, Monster’s Ball,

Before Sunset, Fargo, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Sideways, Clerks, and Do the Right

Thing, all of which have main characters who are the central nodes in richly informative

narrative patterns, all of which achieve a high degree of clarity about character

psychology, and all of which combine all of the basic appeals of characterization in this

process, including a complex approach to typing, a power of strong emotion effects, a

pattern of clear disposition attributions, and a density of inferential knowledge about

intentional states. In comparison to typical classical characters in contemporary popular

genres such as action, horror, or comedy, the protagonists of these films may have greater

depth, but the difference is one of degree and may be more subtle than champions of

indie films might like to think. Are the differences really so great in the depth of

characters in films by Frank Capra, George Cukor, Billy Wilder, John Ford, Alfred

Hitchcock, Sidney Lumet, Mike Nichols, Steven Spielberg, and Robert Zemeckis, on the

one hand, and films by John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch, Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee,

Quentin Tarantino, Todd Haynes, and Kevin Smith, on the other? While the concept of

informative characterization may be somewhat hard to quantify, it would seem highly

unlikely that the crucial distinction between The Apartment and Clerks, The Philadelphia

Story and Down by Law, E.T. and Welcome to the Dollhouse, is that the independent

films have characters with greater depth than the classical ones. Even so, there is a

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widespread notion that independent films offer characters with more depth than

Hollywood films, and perhaps the idea of depth in popular discourse may really be a

placeholder for some other value, such as perceived realism, vividness, uniqueness or

complexity, or it may arise out of a misperception of the depth of Hollywood

characterization among spectators who prefer independent cinema as a matter of cultural

taste.

There is, however, the possibility of deep characters and characterizations, which

would entail having significantly more knowledge and understanding of characters than

is typical of the average film. Since this is a matter of degree, we must admit that some

especially character-centered Hollywood films, such as Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and

Raging Bull, would seem to be models of this. Classics of international art cinema

furnish many more examples, such as Wild Strawberries, Charulata, Juliet of the Spirits,

The 400 Blows, and Belle de Jour, as does its more contemporary festival film

equivalents, such as Breaking the Waves, Talk to Her, and A Brighter Summer Day. This

is a straightforward notion of depth: informative and relatively clear and coherent

characterizations that engage our attention in their own right. Some independent films

achieve this unusual degree of depth (e.g., Passion Fish) and many do not (e.g., Stranger

Than Paradise). To summarize, then, the three modes of depth that deviate from

classical character and characterization are: (1) shallow character; (2) shallow

characterization; and (3) deep character/characterization. (See figure 6.1.) But because

all of these are relative and relational terms, it is hard to say whether independent cinema

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as a whole uses any of them to any significant degree. Depth of character and

characterization is a usefully vague variable, like the relative terms we use to describe the

weather. Whether we say that the weather is mild or harsh depends on many factors

aside from temperature, wind, and precipitation, such as climate, time of day, and time of

year. As I write I am expecting tomorrow to be a mild day, but as it is now winter in the

Midwestern United States, that means the temperature will be in the high 40s Farenheit.

So with depth of character and characterization, we may say that a particular film,

director, genre, cycle, etc., favors a particular shallowness or depth, just as a particular

region has a warm or cool climate, but whether a given characterization is deep or

shallow will always be a matter for critical judgment and interpretation in relation to

other characters, films, and narratives.

Character and Characterization: Scales of Depth

Scale 1: Character Depth

GSK W, HM CW? CFKShallow <---------|-------------------------------|-----------------------|----------->Deep

Scale 2: Characterization Depth

GSK W, CW HM CFKShallow <---------|-------------------|------------|-----------------------|----------->Deep

Legend:GSK: The Gay Shoe Clerk (The Gay Shoe Clerk)

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W: Wilson (The Limey)HM: Harry Morgan (To Have and Have Not)CFK: Charles Foster Kane (Citizen Kane)CW: Carol White (Safe) marked with a question mark and no solid position on Scale 1 because of our inability to understand her fully

Shallow character/shallow characterization=small quantity of information, commensurate quantity of explanatory coherence

Deep character/deep characterization=large quantity of information, commensurate quantity of explanatory coherence

Deep character/shallow characterization=large quantity of information, inadequate quantity of explanatory coherence

Shallow character/deep characterization=not possible

One significant complicating factor in the area of depth returns us to the topic with which

we began this section: the comparison between major and minor characters. In ensemble

films, there typically is no main character or pair or characters. Instead there are

constellations of interrelated characters, who have no greater depth than many of the

minor characters in other films. In Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, there are at

least eight characters represented with modest depth, but none of them is given the degree

of attention that a main character would get in a single or dual protagonist film, such as

Before Sunrise. Yet ensemble films do not seem to have shallow characters. This is a

paradox of characterization, but it reveals something about how depth works. No

individual character in Dazed and Confused is represented with the kind of

informativeness that we expect of main characters, but many of them seem no less vivid

and memorable, no less compelling as characters. This should really come as no

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surprise, however, when we recall that the sheer quantity of narrative information about a

character is no guarantor of the effect of depth absent a clear explanatory framework.

The characters of short stories may seem to have significant depth, but they are

represented with considerably less information than the characters of novels. The minor

characters of novels and feature films often seem shallow by comparison to the main

characters, but this often really is a product of comparison.

In ensemble films, the effect of depth is achieved in two ways: by setting a lower

baseline for comparisons of depth and shallowness than in single or dual protagonist

films, as I have discussed, and by the effect of accumulative and comparative

characterization. By accumulative I mean that Dazed and Confused spends as much or

more time on characterization as a single or dual protagonist film of the same length and

scope, and that keeping all of the characters straight in one’s mind involves as much or

more character-related activity as following only one or two major characters. Although

no one character has significant depth, in aggregate there is considerable depth to the

film’s characterization. And by comparative I mean that because there are so many

characters, they take on additional significance and depth not through any particular

device of characterization, such as the solicitation of inferences or the attribution of

personality traits, but through the effect of being juggled with the other characters in our

minds and compared in the process. The characters set each other into relief to a greater

degree than in a single or dual protagonist film, and the structure of Dazed in Confused

prompts these comparisons, such as comparisons between the male and female bullies

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and male and female victims, between the boys and girls more generally, between the

athletic kids and the more artsy ones, and between the younger kids and the older ones.

The male bully, O’Bannion (Ben Affleck), is characterized in part by the implicit

comparison of him with the high school graduate who hangs around the kids, Wooderson

(Matthew McConaghey), which makes O’Bannion seem pathetic. The kids drinking and

taking drugs, especially Randall “Pink” Floyd, whose football eligibility depends on him

staying clean, are characterized in comparison to Slater, the stereotypical stoner, and this

makes the other kids’ consumption seem less serious. The younger characters, the

victims of the last-day-of-school hazing, are represented as parallel to one another, so

Mitch’s (Wiley Wiggins) relationship with an older girl is echoed in Sabrina’s (Christin

Hinojosa) relationship with an older boy. Mitch is also characterized in comparison with

his sister, Jodi, who is popular and well liked. In general, these character traits have two

possible functions: transferability and contrast. The former is a kind of guilt by

association, as in the linkage of O’Bannion and Wooderson and of the male and female

bullies. The other sets off characters from one another more starkly than would

otherwise be the case. In terms of the two hazings in the film, the older girls are more

interested in humiliating and degrading the younger ones, while the boys are more

interested in inflicting physical pain through violence. This establishes the sexes as

parallel but distinct spheres in the world of the film, but this is turned around in the scene

in which O’Bannion gets his comeuppance outside the bowling alley.

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In general, then, the function of the ensemble cast can be to accentuate an effect

of depth of characterization without offering substantial additional information about any

given character. The whole of the narrative context is thus a factor in the effect of depth,

and depth must be seen in terms of relationships established among elements of the

narrative, not merely in terms of whether a film uses character point-of-view structures,

subjective narration, or an intensive focus on an individual.

Variable 2: Complexity

If the first variable refers to the way that characters and characterizations are informative,

the second concerns qualities of the information. The complexity of a character is

determined by the extent to which comprehending the character challenges our cognitive

habits and skills. Some characters are presented so straightforwardly that we seem to

understand them almost automatically, they are so readily comprehensible and so

familiar, while others require more work. This is distinct from depth; a character can be

richly informative without having complexity. The opposite is not true, however;

complexity requires at least a minimum of informativeness.

As with depth, it is important to distinguish between complexity of character and

complexity of characterization. Characterizations often exceed characters in complexity.

As a narrative progresses, the Characters often become clarified to the point that the gaps

that made us curious about them are eventually mostly filled in. They may seem quite

complex after two or three reels but by the end of the film they seem much more

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conventionally straightforward. This is especially true, we shall see, in narratives with

delayed exposition, in which a convoluted narrative structure complexifies

characterization without complexifying character. In other cases, as with depth, character

and characterization are commensurately complex, and as the narrative unfolds so does

the complexity of both character and characterization. This is the case, for example, in

You Can Count On Me, which progressively reveals new dimensions of the two main

characters without the manipulation of temporal order. The younger brother (Mark

Ruffalo) who we are meant to suspect as being selfish and unreliable comes to seem more

like a good guy, while his dependable big sister (Laura Linney) starts to seem impulsive

and a bit irresponsible. By contrasting their trajectories and multiplying their

contradictory traits, the film enhances both character and characterization in complexity.

There are at least three relevant (non-grammatical, non-mathematical), related

meanings of the adjective “complex” in the dictionary: (1) consisting of several

connected parts, i.e., composite; (2) consisting of parts that are related in an intricate

fashion; and (3) complicated, as opposed to simple, and thus difficult to analyze. These

are all apt descriptions of complex characters, especially if we substitute “traits” for

“parts,” and while there may be other aspects to complexity in characterization, at least

these make for a good start.23 How do these meanings distinguish complexity from

depth? A character having depth presupposes (1), but not (2) or (3). Since (2) and (3)

really presuppose (1), complexity in characterization can be assumed to involve

intricately interrelated characteristics and to cause difficulty in analyzing (or more

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basically, comprehending) them, while depth can be assumed to be a more general

descriptive term for a character with a relatively large number of traits (or belonging to a

relatively large number of types). Thus complexity refers both to facts of the

characterization as represented in cinematic discourse and to facets of the process

wherein the character is taken up and constructed by the spectator.

For example, in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, Hank Quinlan (Welles) has both

depth and complexity. We know and understand a considerable amount about him,

including substantial backstory that is not represented directly but is described in

dialogue. Quinlan’s characteristics combine contradictory values, such as coarseness,

corruption, racism, hubris, and murderous violence with a desire that justice and right be

done, a sense of duty to his role as enforcer of the law, and loyalty to his friends.

Another element of his complexity is the sympathy Welles brings to his portrayal, the

sense he achieves that Quinlan deserves no less admiration than his rival, Mike Vargas

(Charlton Heston), who is morally much more upstanding, and the vindication Quinlan

posthumously receives when he, not Vargas, is proven to have been right all along about

who killed Rudy Linneker. Welles portrays Quinlan with pathos and poignancy, as the

23 The definition of complexity by the way in which character traits are combined has many antecedents in narrative theory, e.g., in S/Z, Roland Barthes writes: “character is a product of combinations: the combination is relatively stable (denoted by the recurrence of the seme) and more or less complex (involving more or less congruent, more or less contradictory figures).” Barthes, S/Z trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 67. Seymour Chatman argues that the translation of the French figures into “figures” is misleading, and should be rendered as “traits.” Chatman, Story and Discourse, 116n22.

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mere shadow of a once-great man, while Heston plays Vargas with a kind of bland,

handsome earnestness. Vargas, for his part, also has considerable depth—though not as

complete a backstory—but lacks complexity in comparison to Quinlan because Vargas is

less contradictory, less enigmatic, less of a challenge to figure out. For Ewen, complexity

refers to whether a character has a small or large number of traits,24 which makes his

complexity closer to my depth, but the difference here has to do with the way in which

those traits are arrayed and the way that they interrelate. Quinlan might have more traits

than Vargas or he might not, but the crucial distinction between them is to be found in the

process whereby spectators make sense of the narrative data. Because of the intricacy of

his traits, Quinlan is more complicated and demands more cognitive work.

Like depth, complexity depends on all of the resources of characterization. The

poker-faced portrayal of Dawn in Welcome to the Dollhouse gives her complexity

because it forces us to consider whether she is suppressing her feelings, and if so which

feelings she is suppressing. The situation in the opening cafeteria scene cues folk-

psychology inferences and her response within that situation cues attributions of

personality traits and prompts questions about the character. The staging, cutting,

framing, and sound all support the generation of this effect. The interrelation of these

devices adds up to an intricacy of characterization, while specific challenging devices

such as inexpressive vocal and facial expressions make this complexity more prominent.

Similarly, the absence of backstory about Sydney in Hard Eight, the opacity of Carol’s 24 Rimmon-Kenan, 41.

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inner life in Safe, and the play with type-related expectations in Passion Fish are all

complexifying devices. They all make comprehension more challenging and demand an

active engagement with the process of characterization through interpretation.

Sydney is a clear-cut complex character who demands this kind of engagement.

In the early parts of Hard Eight, his motives are unclear because his backstory is not well

established, his loyalty to John seems unearned, and as the plot develops, he has to

balance contradictory desires to help himself and to help John and Clementine. His

personality traits seem to be partial: we know only so much, but want to know more, and

we have difficulty making clear attributions based on dispositions and situations in

reference to his behavior toward Jimmy, Clementine, and especially John. His face and

voice, while very distinctive and engaging, do not seem to display basic emotions to help

clarify his goals. All of these elements of Sidney depend, of course, on the narration’s

withholding of the key narrative information about Sid having killed John’s father.

Expository delay thus generates complexity because it forces active interpretation of

character. Yet even in the end, having been satisfied with our knowledge of Sydney, he

still seems somewhat complex, if only because he has been willing to kill again—to kill

Jimmy—to protect his relationship with John and to protect his own secret. We are left

wondering still about Sydney’s character and the motivation for his behavior, including

his motivation for killing John’s father, though we are hardly as curious and puzzled in

the end as we had been after the first twenty or thirty minutes. The complexity of

Sydney’s characterization exceeds that of his character, as is most typically the case.

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Enigmatic characterization demanding that we puzzle over character rarely intensifies at

the end of a narrative; the conventional pattern is to exploit complexity until the

dénouement, when the questions posed by the characterization are mostly answered.

As this example attests, the temporal dimension of narrative is crucial to effects of

complexity. Complexity often requires contradiction and omission to be effective, and

these things are more often found in the beginning and middle rather than the end of

stories because of their utility in generating narrative interest. We must distinguish

clearly, then, between character and characterization, just as we did with the variable of

depth. A complex character, such as Charles Foster Kane, is himself a finely crafted

intermeshing of traits, a filigree of contradictions. He is both powerful and frustrated,

admired and loathed, high-minded and petty, fortunate and hapless, sentimental and

heartless, loyal and cruel. This is Kane as a character abstracted from the narration of

Kane. (Sometimes such characters are thought to be true-to-life because we perceive real

people to have this kind of complexity, to be full of contradictions and inconsistencies,

especially when compared with the more straightforward heroes of myth and

Hollywood.) Characterization in Citizen Kane is also complex, a jangle of voices distinct

every one in its representation of the hero, and moderately exploitive of the potential for

this process to challenge, to pose questions, to open up enigmas, to temporarily frustrate

our understanding. By the end of the film, however, with the revelation of the sled

thrown into the fire, a good measure of the uncertainty about Kane has been resolved—

the difficulty in analyzing Kane has to a large extent been overcome by the time we learn

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the significance of “Rosebud.” It is standard that complex characters are represented

through complex characterization and so these terms are interchangeable in some cases.

But it is also possible for a moderately complex character to be represented

straightforwardly, as is standard in classical cinema, and for complex characterization to

represent a comparatively straightforward character. The latter is sometimes the case in

formally playful films which require that we expend considerable resources puzzling over

a character who in the end is hardly intricate or contradictory in a fashion commensurate

with his characterization. More on this shortly.

The demand to analyze a character’s personality traits, intentional states, and

emotions, rather than merely to comprehend details about them, is hardly specific to

narratives that seem especially character-focused. As Barthes observed in S/Z, character-

related questions are a primary engine of plot development in mainstream (readerly)

texts, generating interest and a desire to know more.25 Moderate character complexity,

like moderate depth, is a standard feature of classical cinema. In To Have and Have Not,

Harry’s contradictory desires give him complexity: he wants to stick to his modus

operandi of keeping to himself, but we sense that he feels honor-bound to help a friend

and support in practice a cause that he already supports in principle. Likewise he insists

that Slim leave Martinique while at the same time also, it seems, he desires that she stay

with him, and his claim to independence is also tempered by the closeness of his paternal

relationship with Eddie. These may not seem to be complex descriptions of the same 25 Barthes, S/Z.

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degree as Sydney, because no enigma is generated around Harry and the others beyond

the comparatively simple will-he-or-won’t-he, but these elements of his characterization

do give Harry more complexity than, again, Renard, who is one-dimensional by

comparison. Our efforts to understand Renard are much simpler: his personality traits are

limited and consistent, his facial and vocal expressions are transparent, his beliefs,

desires, and goals are obvious, and no contradictions or questions attend our perception

of his character.

Many independent films, such as Safe and Passion Fish, maximize complexity of

characterization and character without pushing the limits of comprehension, plausibility,

and narrative convention. These are all important constraints on complex

characterization, as the audience may be unwilling to entertain too much omission and

contradiction. Typing is especially significant in the effect of complexity, because the

interrelation of traits is a key element of this variable, and traits and types are closely

linked. Safe and Passion Fish are both films in which novel and contradictory types,

both genre types (from the woman’s picture/disease-of-the-week drama) and social types

(rooted in milieu, age, gender, race, class, physical ability) are introduced and contrasted

within a given characterization. These two films are good examples of a fit between

character and characterization: both Carol in Safe and May-Alice and Chantelle in

Passion Fish are complex in close correspondence to their respective characterizations.

This pattern fits well with the socially emblematizing tendency of independent cinema:

complexity lends itself to the exploration of identity and justifies the film’s interest in it.

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Indeed, the socially emblematic rhetoric of independent film would not function well

with predominantly simple, straightforward characterizations or even with only the

modest complexity of classicism, because complex characters are distinctive and vivid,

they call attention to character as a narrative value and as an appeal of cinema, and they

make character especially salient to audiences.

A more interesting and distinctive approach, however, corresponds to the form-as-

game tendency. One central appeal of formally playful narration is a concomitant

formally playful characterization. Surface structures of play, such as radical temporal

reordering and genre-norm subversion, are devices for complexifying characterization,

but they may do so without necessarily complexifying character. Thus it is possible for a

narrative to have complex characterization but not have complex characters. The

characters in Memento are hard to understand, especially at first, because of the film’s

contorted expository pattern. But by the end, the events and their causes are unraveled

clearly and coherently, and the ultimate effect is that Leonard is not a particularly

complex character. The appeal of this approach to character within the form-as-game

strain of independent cinema may go along with the notion of play as the central appeal

of narrative experimentation. Thinking seriously about characters leads naturally, it

would seem, into thematic interpretation and social rhetoric. If form is pure play, it is

precisely these modes of engagement that the narrative is trying to close off. Thus while

complexity in characterization can be fun, complexity of character might be too serious to

fit this reading strategy. So while the form-as-game film is underway the characters seem

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fascinating, but in retrospect, with the puzzles mostly solved, the gaps mostly filled in,

the characters may not appear to be so different from those of much more conventional

narratives. In The Limey, Wilson and Valentine are not very different from characters in

genre films with similar narratives in terms of character complexity, but their

characterizations certainly do pose difficulties of comprehension.

The idea of characterization being difficult for the spectator to analyze prompts

the question of what devices of characterization promote active interpretation, puzzling,

reconciling, unraveling, etc. There are two main devices that give complexity to

characterization in character-driven narratives such as independent films, each of which

have several sub-devices. First, narratives may present character data which are at first

incompatible or contradictory. Such data create complex characterizations and complex

characters by requiring that the spectator resolve contradictions inherent in the

characters’ internal composition. . For example, characterization may have intricate

typing, with multiple types in tension with one another. In Passion Fish, aspects of

Chantelle’s character that are withheld add to her complexity, as we compare our

expectations of her with the character she turns out to be, and her complexity in turn adds

to May-Alice’s. Characterization may also present character attributes or behavior that

contradict established typing. The latter is a feature of many of the characters in The Big

Lebowski, who combine categories of identity and identifying behavior as a kind of

character mix-and-match game. Walter is a Vietnam-obsessed veteran and an observant

Jew who refuses to bowl on the sabbath. The thugs who are Bunny’s “kidnappers” are

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also members of a German techno-pop band, a parody of the group Kraftwerk. The

flamboyant Latino bowler Jesus (John Turturro) is also a child molester, for no apparent

reason. Of course, The Dude himself is an unemployed slacker thrust into the role of

detective. Comedies do allow for certain kinds of formal anarchy as a genre convention,

but we would not withhold the badge of complexity from these characters simply because

it is a convention of comedy to subvert norms of consistent typing. However, some of

these characters (the kidnappers, Jesus) are minor and have little depth. Thus they are

moderately complex—more so than the characters in, say, American Pie, but less so than

the characters in Passion Fish.

Characterization may also be complex when there is an incompatibility or

contradiction between narrative situation and character reaction, including emotion

expressions and behavior. This is the Welcome to the Dollhouse kind of complexity, in

which typing offers a baseline of knowledge about the character, but narrative situations

are the most salient input into character psychology. Dawn’s behavior, including actions

and expressions, challenges our understanding of her because it forces us to consider

various motivations, none of which the narrative specifies as correct. We don’t know

why she doesn’t ease her suffering by capitulating to her parents, and we don’t know why

she sees herself as a suitable girlfriend for Steve. We juggle several explanations but

may not ever settle on one. In some narratives, this kind of characterization is a function

of a suppressed gap, as when Fight Club reveals the explanation for Tyler Durden’s

behavior by planting the entire character’s existence in the mind of the narrator, or when

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Julie in Swimming Pool turns out to be an imposter. Identity itself need not be the

substance of the gap, however, as character motivations may be obscured in many ways.

In The Big Lebowski, Maude’s romantic interest in The Dude seems incongruous until we

learn that she only wants him for his sperm, which she tells him only after they have sex.

There may also be an incompatibility between previously attributed dispositions

and behavior. In Do The Right Thing, Sal and Mookie have both depth and complexity.

The latter is a product of specific attributes or actions which may seem incompatible with

typing, especially racial and occupational typing, and its associated trait inferences. Their

friendly relationship is an aspect of their complexity as it defies the racial lines of

opposition drawn among members of the neighborhood (and among characters of the

narrative) and goes beyond what one ordinarily expects of employer and employee. Sal’s

action of smashing Radio Raheem’s boom box and Mookie’s action of throwing the trash

through Sal’s window both may seem inconsistent with the characters’ attitudes of

tolerance and with Mookie’s friendly attitude toward Sal, but by assimilating this

contradictory input into their characters we see them in a new way and recast our sense of

each of them.

Finally, there are characters who have such inconsistent or contradictory traits,

intentional states, and emotions, that they are in a sense at odds with themselves as a

matter of defining their very identity. These are the classic conflicted characters torn

between opposite goals and between alternative self-conceptions. Macbeth wants to

become the king, but he also wants to be a good host to his guest, King Duncan. Does he

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wait his turn, like a dutiful subject, or does he fulfill the witches’ prophecy and follow his

ambition? Shakespeare’s tragic heroes may be the most fully achieved examples of

these internally conflicted characters, who struggle to know themselves as much as they

struggle to make their way in the world of the narrative. But on a more modest scale,

similar dynamics inform the construction of character-centered Hollywood and

independent films as well. This is a matter of character as much as it is of

characterization, since this kind of conscious internal conflict is rarely obscured—or

amplified—by the characterization.

At least one of the main characters in a romantic comedy, such as It Happened

One Night, must choose between two romantic partners, one we hope they will reject and

one we hope they will accept. The choice between King Westley and Peter Warne

represents a choice between two ways of living, two world-views, but also between two

self-conceptions for Ellie Andrews. She has to realize that she is the sort of person who

marries Peter, not the sort of person who marries Westley, and this opposition of internal

details of character gives her a degree of complexity. Initially, we aren’t sure if she’s a

Westley sort of person or a Peter sort of person. The same dynamic informs many

contemporary films, including independent romantic comedies such as Kissing Jessica

Stein, which inverts both the sexual orientation of one of the characters and the place of

self-transformation within the narrative structure. Jessica follows the same pattern as

Ellie to the point that she moves in with her Peter Warne, Helen. But the film isn’t over,

and eventually she leaves to go back to her old life. In adding this additional downbeat

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coda to the romantic comedy formula, Kissing Jessica Stein substitutes the bitter-sweet

feeling of returning to an old, “square,” straight life for the excitement of the new one

Jessica had only tasted briefly before it became untenable. She grows and learns

something about herself, but the transformation is much more subtle than films in which

a character really accepts a new conception of herself. Thus the terms of the Hollywood

transformation as it plays out in It Happened One Night are turned around as the

optimism of Capra is replaced with pragmatism and a bit of melancholy.

In independent cinema, the kind of internal character oppositions and

transformations that mark Hollywood films from It Happened One Night to Casablanca

to The Graduate to Jerry Maguire are less likely to occur in such a straightforwardly

positive fashion. More often, the character realizes his inadequacies in a state of dejected

acceptance, as Primo and Secondo do in the final scene of Big Night, or learns a life

lesson, as in High Art and Thirteen. In many films, the characters wind up no closer to

self-revelation than in the beginning, as in Down by Law, Buffalo ’66, Barton Fink, Kids,

Your Friends and Neighbors, and Welcome to the Dollhouse, though they hardly seem to

be pursuing any such thing. The moderate complexity of Hollywood characters is often a

product of their more malleable changeability, which typically is presented to the

character as fixed alternatives. Harry Morgan can either keep to his regular routine, or he

can help the Free French. The progression of the narrative is from one position to

another, and suggests a concomitant change in the character. This straightforwardly

internally contradictory character is a less prominent feature of independent cinema’s

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characterization than it is of other narrative modes. It may seem that this type of

character is too conventional for independent cinema because his arc follows a

predictable pattern and his psychology is stereotypically flattened by the fixed

alternatives.26

However, some independent films that do represent a process of growth through

the resolution of internal contradictions. For example, Secretary brings together two

characters whose complexity is a product of their shame over having illicit desires. Mr.

Gray (James Spader) has a fetish for domination, while his new secretary, Lee Holloway

(Maggie Gyllenhall), mutilates herself. He begins to act out his fantasies on her, and to

the surprise of them both, she begins to crave these sexualized play-beatings. The

characters’ parallel complexity comes from the contradiction between what they want

and what they think they are supposed to want, and the trajectory of both characters is

toward self-recognition, embracing their own “deviance” by embracing each other.

Aside from treating alternative sexual expression sympathetically, the film also

dramatizes two complex characters’ growth from repressive to expressive. Typically for

an independent film, the positive message is a product of the validation of a minority

identity—sexual fetishists, in this case—not typically represented sympathetically in the

movies.

26 One screenwriting manual that opposes the three-act structure of mainstream cinema condemns its “binary character psychology,” as in the choice facing Bud in Wall Street between Gekko and his family. Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush, Alternative Screenwriting 2nd Ed. (Boston: Focal Press, 1995), 34.

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In addition, then, to characterizations informed by incompatible or contradictory

information, there may also be those with insufficient narrative data to fit the spectator’s

expectations, causing speculation and puzzlement about undefined character attributes.

Insufficient narrative data need not necessarily create complex characters, as the withheld

information demands not resolving and reconciling but speculating, hypothesizing, and

studying. The ultimate outcome of this activity may be a complex character or it may

not.

One way of offering insufficient data is exposition through fragmented

temporality. Films with flashback and flashforward structures suppress important

explanatory information. In films of radical temporal reordering, the main characters are

often presented as the narrative’s central enigma. The complexity attendant to Wilson in

The Limey and Leonard in Memento is extensive, and the narrative form prompts us to

study them carefully, to scan their blank faces for signs of clear emotion, for evidence of

their true intentions, for glimmers that might unravel their motivation for us. Both are

revenge narratives, pursuits of both knowledge and of a person. We are aligned with

Wilson and with Leonard, seeking with them but also desiring more knowledge about

them, and sympathizing with their drive to avenge a loved one without quite approving of

this desire. The tension between these interests and desires, between our knowledge and

their knowledge (greater in Wilson’s case, lesser in Leonard’s), between our confusion

and theirs, between our cautious sympathy and our determination to know more, between

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hoping with them and fearing for them without the confidence of being able to base our

feelings on solid evidence, conspires to effect in us a sense of intricacy and fascination.

In both films, however, the narrative data becomes clarified to the point that our

interest in character shifts away from these animating tensions and back onto more

conventional appeals better described as depth than as complexity. We wind up knowing

a considerable amount about Leonard and Wilson, but ultimately, their quests are quite

linear and straightforward. The non-linear, complex aspects of The Limey and Memento

are products of an intricate narrative structure, not of intricate character traits. In The

Limey, Wilson is singularly focused on avenging his daughter Jenny’s death, and the only

twist on this comes at the end, when he reconsiders and spares Valentine’s life. This

change of heart is a product of his realization of his similarity to Valentine, of their

parallel roles in Jenny’s life. As we shall see, this is more a matter of character change

than character complexity. If the narrative of The Limey were to be arranged

chronologically, it is hard to imagine that the interest we take in Wilson would be nearly

so great, since so much of the film’s effect is a product of the ambiguous flashback and

flashforward pattern, its intercutting of spatially discontinuous shots that would seem to

be temporally continuous, and its stingy exposition of significant narrative details.

Likewise, watching Memento in chronological sequence, as one can do on the special

edition DVD, is an exercise in tedium. The explanation of Leonard’s pursuit of Terry is

put in exceedingly clear terms as the product of a specific mental illness causing Leonard

to confuse and invent memories, thus pathologizing his motivation. By the film’s end,

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Leonard’s motivation and behavior seem to have even less complexity than Wilson’s;

Leonard is quite straightforwardly a pathetic, confused amnesiac, and this trait is the

master key that explains everything about him. Character complexity is complicated by

mental illness, which is itself unusual and in some instances strangely fascinating. But

Leonard’s illness does not give him complexity. Leonard’s illness simplifies rather than

complicates his inner life by reducing his motivation to an imaginary rather than a real

source. There is no challenge in understanding Leonard once the film is over because the

narrative forestalls any possible ambiguity or contradiction about his traits. Like Wilson,

Leonard is a richly informative character presented in a formally challenging fashion, but

ultimately his complexity is no greater than the average character’s.

The other way a characterization provides insufficient narrative data is by delayed

exposition. When the narration withholds important backstory, characterization may

seem more complex because it can be difficult or impossible to explain characters’

behavior and reactions. Hard Eight is an example of this, and as we have seen its

complexity of characterization is not commensurate with its complexity of character. But

there are more radical versions of withholding in recent Hollywood cinema, such as The

Sixth Sense, Vanilla Sky, Fight Club, and A Beautiful Mind, all of which use that old

standby of motivating experimental devices as character psychology (see Chapter 5).

These are certainly complex characterizations, with very pronounced suppressed gapping

which, when revealed, force a complete recasting of narrative events. And even after

their secrets have been revealed, the characters do have a modest complexity. But unlike

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these examples, the more formally complex independent film announces its challenge

upfront rather than saving it for a big surprise. Since the formal play is a selling point, it

makes no sense to hide it as a narrative twist, as in The Sixth Sense. Thus elaborate

gapping is more likely to be flaunted rather than suppressed in independent films, as it is

in The Limey.

Variable 3: Change

Of all of the narrative-related terms that casual filmgoers and reviewers invoke, none may

be as vexing to the narrative theorist as “character development.” Contrasted with plot,

character development is unambiguously positive and interesting; it’s what good movies

are supposed to have and in plentiful supply. The ultimate snobbish put-down of the

genres lowest on the cultural totem pole, from kung-fu films and gross-out comedies to

cartoons and video games, is to say that they have no character development.

Independent cinema, on the other hand, is supposed to be the very opposite, higher up the

totem pole, and more focused on character. When you look closer at characterization in

terms of development, however, things are not so straightforward. Character

development may mean various things, and we have no rationale for assuming a priori

that good narratives have it and bad ones do not. Indeed, as I argue at the end of this

discussion, some films prefer to have static rather than changing characters. This may

sound counterintuitive, as we have been led to believe that character change is an

unequivocally positive narrative value. But independent cinema has many cases of static

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rather than dynamic characters, and in comparison with Hollywood cinema, independent

film characters generally change less. This preference for the static is motivated by

various factors, some of which are aesthetic and some of which are part of independent

film’s social rhetoric. I will spell this argument out in due course, but before I do we

must consider character development as a variable of characterization.

There are several meanings of “develop,” all of which may be pertinent to

understanding characterization. “Develop” may mean simply the unfolding of events

over time, as in “we’ll see how things develop.” In this simple sense, any experience of

narrative events by characters constitutes development. The earliest instance given by

the OED refers to the 17th Century usage referring in heraldry to the unfolding of an

ensign, which itself is a modification of the earlier term “disvelop,” (and we must

suppose the opposite of “envelop”) and though this meaning is now obsolete it is telling

in the sense that narrative developments are a kind of unfolding. In the 18th Century, this

usage was adapted to mean any kind of revelation or discovery. This is also telling, as

the narrative instance of development is also a kind of gradual discovery about character.

In various other, more modern senses, develop can refer to making things seen, in

photography, to the growth and maturation of an organism, in biology and psychology,

and to evolution or change, as in a object developing from one state into another. Its

connotations are of advancement and betterment. Development often refers to something

latent being brought into a state of fullness, as when the seedling of an idea takes flower

and is fully realized. In literary and dramatic terms, however, “development” can refer

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simply to the progression of action (as distinguished from exposition and conclusion),

and on the news a “development” is nothing more than a new bit of information. There is

thus a spectrum of senses of the term development, from new things coming to light to

improvement, change, and transformation.

Out of these various meanings we might identify several discrete senses of

development as it applies to character and characterization:

(1) The character experiences the unfolding of events in time, externally or internally.

E.g., the development of Carol in Safe is from typical Southern California homemaker to

Wrenwood patient.

(2) The character grows, matures, is bettered, externally or internally. E.g., in Passion

Fish, May-Alice overcomes her anger and cynicism, accepts her identity, and finds peace

in her new life.

(3) The character’s traits change, externally or internally. E.g., at the end of The Limey,

Wilson turns from being vengeful and angry to being understanding and accepting.

These meanings are, clearly, interconnected, as (2) and (3) require the passage of

time and so presuppose (1); (2) presupposes (3); and (1) presupposes (2), at least

superficially to the extent that everyone matures as life goes on. In all of these instances,

the character undergoes some kind of change that impacts upon him or her in some

minimally meaningful way, and all may be external, internal (psychological), or more

likely both since we will attribute mental states to characters without their explicit

representation or description. In none of the examples I give above is the character’s

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inner change directly indicated by the characterization, but we are generally primed to

read inner change into external change—it is both a narrative and a social convention.

Moreover, these three kinds of change are just as available to classical characterization as

they are to any other mode. If independent characters differ from classical ones along the

variable of change, it is not because only they exploit some of these possibilities. These

interconnected meanings are themselves full of intricacies and subtleties, but there is yet

another meaning of “character development” that we might glean from the discussion

above, and this last meaning complicates matters further:

(4) We learn more about the character (the character is revealed to us—unfolded before

our eyes).

This one does not presuppose any other terms, and is not presupposed by them. It is, as

with depth and complexity, another instance demanding that we distinguish between

character and characterization. Characters develop, but narratives also develop

characters. The greatest source of confusion in this area is the perpetual ambiguity

between the character’s development and the narrative’s development of character.

Like depth and complexity, change is a temporally dynamic variable of character.

It requires narrative unfolding and must be analyzed in narrative context. Also like depth

and complexity, it is possible to have change in characterization—indeed, it is

inconceivable not to have it—without having significant character change. But before

considering characters who do not change, we must probe meanings (1) through (3) to

consider how they work.

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Characters who change significantly may be considered dynamic. The classic

instance of character change in mainstream cinema occurs with the Hollywood plot point,

an event propelling the narrative forward, which often occurs when a character realizes

that he has been pursuing the wrong goals and changes course, or when some goals have

been achieved and new ones arise.27 According the screenwriting guru Syd Field, “a plot

point is a function of the main character.”28 Professional screenwriting advice tends to be

character-centered, and the idea behind the plot point is that the structure of plot action

must be tightly linked to the growth of the characters in the story.29 Not all plot points

signal significant change of personality traits, but they often do signal a change in a

character’s attitudes, feelings, desires, and most importantly, goals. In The Apartment, a

plot point that is also a point of character change occurs when C.C. Baxter decides to

pursue a relationship with Fran at the risk of not advancing in his profession. In Meet Me

in St. Louis, it is when Alonzo Smith realizes that he should keep his family in St. Louis

and declares that they will not be moving to New York after all. In North by Northwest it

is when Roger Thornhill discovers the true identity of George Kaplan and turns from

pursuing Kaplan to working with the spy agency against Vandam. In all of these cases,

an internal change and an external one link up directly, such that a character’s

intentionality affects the events of the plot and vice versa. They key to this device is that

the plot and the character develop as one.30

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Less common are changes in personality traits, and especially rare are profound

changes. I suspect this kind of transformation is what many people have in mind when

they think of characters who change, rather than develop, because when we think of

people changing we tend to think of the most deep and lasting interior development, such

as transforming from stingy to generous or from pessimistic to optimistic. Actors like to

play characters who undergo such changes because it gives them an opportunity to show

their range, and characters whose personality traits are so labile do make for interesting

stories, but they are not really that common. The problem with creating such characters

is making such drastic transformations credible. Perhaps the most typical cases are to be

found in coming-of-age stories, wherein maturity demands new traits. Michael

Corleone’s youthful idealism at the beginning of The Godfather has turned into

Machiavellian ruthlessness by the end, but this has been motivated very well by

considerable growth of other kinds over the course of a long narrative and by significant

changes in his character’s external situation. Go-for-it sports movies like Rocky and

other narratives of apprenticeship and education often require a character who begins as a 27 Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood.

28 Field, Screenplay, 123, emphasis in original.

29 For example, two critics of conventional Hollywood storytelling write that “One of the most difficult challenges of writing a three-act, character-driven story is to devise plot points that not only feed into the action, but also articulate character development.” Dancyger and Rush,, 21.

30 Many screenwriting manuals such as Field’s emphasize this point, insisting on the connection between the main line of plot action and the character’s. See also Thompson.

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novice lacking confidence, but who by the end has triumphed to the point that she has

gained a new, stronger sense of self. Politically and socially engaged films like Traffic

sometimes offer a hero or heroine who begins unaware of the consequences of some

situation but who comes into consciousness of its full impact, and so is transformed from

ignorance to conviction. And stories that fit into the Joseph Campbell pattern of mythic

quest, such as Star Wars, Braveheart, and Gladiator, portray a character transformed into

a hero by overcoming a series of obstacles, a symbolic journey mirrored by an interior

process of self-discovery.31

Often, as with the Campbell archetypes, this idea of profound internal change can

be viewed more as revelation than as alteration, as digging deep into character to discover

the truth at the core of her being. This notion of character revelation may accord, again,

with social expectations about other people. As we have seen in regard to stereotypes

and to impression formation, people’s cognitive structures are not easily changed.

Despite the appeal of redemption stories, we are suspicious of leopards who can change

their spots too easily. But the discovery of a fuller or truer sense of self may seem less

implausible than an overnight transformation. Some screenwriting guides distinguish

between characterization and character not as I have, but as the distinction between outer

and inner self—characterization according to the screenwriting guides refers to external 31 William Indyck writes of the Joseph Campbell myth-narrative, “No matter where the hero goes or what his adventure entails, his journey is always an inner journey of self-discovery, and his goal is always that of character development. The hero is seeking to become psychologically complete.” William Indyck, Psychology for Screenwriters: Building Conflict in Your Script (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2004).

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details such as the character’s car, office, and favorite football team, while character

refers to their inner nature. For many screenwriters, the development of character is a

journey from the outside to the inside, from characterization to character. For example,

Robert McKee writes:

The revelation of true character in contrast to characterization is fundamental to all fine storytelling. Life teaches this grand principle: what seems is not what is. People are not what they appear to be. A hidden nature waits concealed behind a façade of traits. No matter what they say, no matter how they comport themselves, the only way we ever come to know characters in depth is through their choices under pressure. 32

McKee is actually making two related points here: first, characterization should develop

from a level of shallow appearances to a deeper level of reality; second, the events of the

plot should allow us to “come to know”—that is, they should reveal—character through

conflict (“choices under pressure”). Like Field, McKee asserts the crucial

interdependence of plot progression and character development. But McKee goes a step

farther in the direction of asserting the necessity of character revelation linking with a

change in the character’s traits, especially the most important personality traits: “The

finest writing not only reveals true character, but arcs or changes that inner nature for

better or worse, over the course of the telling.”33 McKee thus advocates a two-step

process: (1) characterization should develop from representing external details to

32 Robert McKee, Story: Structure, Substance, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (New York: ReganBooks, 1997), 103.

33 Ibid, 104.

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revealing previously hidden true character; (2) this true character should change over the

course of the characterization.

Step (1) makes sense insofar as all characterization suggests beneath-the-surface

features of character, in which case it is a truism, but it is a stretch if by “true character”

we mean that people have a secret core of identity—inaccessible even to themselves—

that we can come to know by witnessing them under ideal pressure-filled conditions.

Granting that characters are not people, we must still remember that our means of

engaging with characters is the same cognitive apparatus that we use to make sense of

real people, and that characters are assumed to be minimally different from real people in

most cases. The New Age and self-help culture notwithstanding, we don’t go around

searching for people’s true core of identity very often in our everyday lives, especially

not while our thinking is occupied by a task as attention-consuming as reading a story or

watching a film. Furthermore, what is to say that the inner character revealed in the end

is truer than the one introduced at the beginning? Why is Michael Corleone’s violent,

mafia-don self more true than his youthful, idealistic self? Thinking about character in

terms of true nature may be useful as a tool for screenwriters, but it does not seem to

describe the process of watching most films very aptly.

What we make of step (2), of course, depends on what we made of step (1). But

what I find interesting about McKee’s formulation is that he links two kinds of revelation

together, one a revelation that unfolds over time, and one a revelation that probes into

depth. As a film unfolds, we learn more about character moment by moment—more of

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the character is revealed to us, as a flag being unfolded is revealed piece by piece. But as

this temporal revelation of narrative events occurs, a cumulative effect occurs as we learn

more and more traits and arrange them in our character schema, which allows us to probe

the character’s inner life and to work out the interrelation of the many traits we have

learned about. Then to that we can add character change, which itself is another kind of

revelation. So whether or not we think of “true character” as something fairly ordinary or

as something profound, these various levels can be seen to operate together in many

instances.

Passion Fish is a fine example of the McKee paradigm of character revelation: we

go from the external (May-Alice’s injury) to the internal (her anger, frustration,

acceptance, etc.); we go into depth about her traits (her feelings about not only her injury,

but also her career, family, and background; her generosity as well as stubbornness; and

her sexuality in relation to Renny); and some of her attributes change (her distemper is

replaced with a sense of peace). In response to various pressure situations, May-Alice is

revealed through an arc of character-events. Many independent films, and many

Hollywood films and foreign ones, popular and art-cinema alike, follow similar

progressions. Most characters change in certain respects, and all characterizations

develop by a progression of revelations, by unfolding along a trajectory. This is what

McKee and others mean by “character arc,” a shorthand way of making plot a function of

character. Some guides demand that the arc combine revelation with change, and this

kind of characterization may be very old (Scholes and Kellogg identify it with the rise of

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Christianity34), but development does not demand that character follow characterization

into the realm of change.

As with shallowness and depth, it is hard to imagine a main character in a feature

film who is really unchanging, because change can be thought of in so many ways. But

in relative, comparative terms, many characters are better thought of as static than as

dynamic. As always, minor characters are flat by comparison to major ones, and so a

character who appears only once in a film obviously has no arc to speak of. But main

characters can change in many ways, and even if they grow physically, even if they

encounter many others, experience many events, have conversations and confrontations,

engage in dramatic conflict, they need not necessarily change very much as characters.

Because Hollywood characters are expected to change and to change in a somewhat

predictable fashion, one way of countering Hollywood’s norms of representation is to

offer static characters. But there are other benefits to taking a counter-Hollywood

approach to character. Indeed there can be something comforting—or frightening—

about the constancy of some characters, such as those in some of the films of Jim

Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, Todd Solondz, or the Coen Brothers. There are a variety of

effects that static characters can achieve in a narrative. In films with episodic or vignette

structures, such as Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law, the kind of Hollywood

plot points that at once reveal character and propel the narrative forward are attenuated.

These are character studies which treat characters as unchanging objects of 34 Scholes and Kellogg, 165.

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contemplation. In some crime films the main narrative events, such as the heist and its

aftermath in Reservoir Dogs, the kidnapping-gone-wrong in Fargo, and the confrontation

between Jimmy and Sidney in Hard Eight do not produce character-changing conflict;

rather, they show the characters for who they are and are satisfied with that. The events

of Fargo do not change Jerry or Marge so much as reveal them to us. Characterization

develops but the characters do not.

Then there are films such as Safe and Welcome to the Dollhouse in which

characters resist change in the face of events that might offer it to them. These characters

counter the McKee paradigm head-on: instead of their true nature being revealed and

altered by the pressure of events, it is undefined or unyielding in spite of them. Carol’s

external circumstances change considerably, and her emotional life is completely

transformed. But part of Haynes’ agenda, part of his commentary on identity, is to keep

Carol’s “true character” from ever being revealed in a coherent fashion. We simply do

not have enough access to Carol to determine her salient inner traits and their potential to

be changed by her experience. As for Welcome to the Dollhouse, here is a case in which

a different dynamic applies: Dawn is resistant to change in the face of overwhelming

social pressure. As I have discussed, the power of the film’s ending is a product of her

constancy, of the expectation that her suffering will continue. The whole point of her arc

is to defy the forces of this social pressure, and Solondz’s social commentary, like

Haynes’s, demands a static character. Otherwise the problems these filmmakers address

may seem more manageable than they actually are.

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The socially emblematizing viewing strategy sometimes prefers static characters

to dynamic ones because social problems cannot appear to be easily solved by the

transformation of individuals. If there is something unsatisfying in the ending of Passion

Fish it is the way that Sayles leaves questions open about the future while at the same

time emphasizing the positive aspects of May-Alice’s and Chantelle’s development.

Their transformation from antagonists into a kind of family, integrated into an authentic

community and looking after each other, is subtly undercut by persistent questions about

their romantic relationships with men and Chantelle’s responsibility to her daughter.

Thus the character development that makes the ending possible also makes the film’s

social rhetoric more problematic because of our lingering skepticism about the

characters’ fortunes.

There are also the temporal disorder films, some of which are also character-

change-resistant. The main character of Memento is psychologically incapable of change

because of his amnesia, but the film’s narrative structure does him no favors in this

department. This is the cost of focusing the narration on determining the cause rather

than the effect of the narrative’s basic conflict. Leonard does not decide to kill Terry

because he has changed, certainly not because his inner “true character” has changed.

Rather, he kills Terry because he is incapable of change. Memento is an excellent

example of the distinction between character revelation and character change, between

characterization as development and the development of a character: all of the

development we see in the film, which is substantial, is geared toward showing us more

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and more of the characters, but comparatively little of it probes beneath their surface to

explore their depths. Memento also gives the lie to the notion that films are either plot- or

character-centered, since it is so obviously both of these at once.

Pulp Fiction is less radical in its construction of character than Memento, but in

its way it also downplays character change as the expense of formal experimentation. In

Pulp Fiction, Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) is the one whose change is made prominent, as

he takes his lucky break of being missed by a bullet early in the film as a religious sign

that he should quit his life of crime, and in the end (he says) he leaves that life behind.

But the effect of the disorderly temporality on the other characters is to militate against

the notion of character change, and the focus of the audience on playful narration might

outweigh their concern with thematizing Jules’s character development.35

Vincent (John Travolta), for example, is seen at the end of the film leaving the

diner, but we know that later in the story he is to be killed coming out of the bathroom of

Butch’s apartment. The effect of his murder and “resurrection” is a blow against

conventional character development. For a main character, Vincent’s murder seems

somewhat arbitrary and is not well explained, with a gap in motivation that is never filled

in: why is his gun on the kitchen counter rather than with him in the bathroom? This

killing is causally underdetermined according to the terms of the narrative; there is

insufficient significance to Vincent’s being gunned down. There is no redemption or 35 The audience’s focus on narrative experimentation and play is emphasized in Dana Polan, Pulp Fiction (London: BFI, 2000).

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other positive thematic value to the event, so it could be a gesture toward nihilism, or

more likely, a gruesome Tarantino bit of shock and fun. (In terms of Butch’s story,

however, it is a conventional plot point, as killing Vincent allows Butch to get away with

his watch.) But knowing at the end of the film that Vincent’s life will end so arbitrarily

leaves us appreciating him as a basically static character, as a character who defies the

convention of the Hollywood arc, as a counterpoint to the emphasis the ending gives to

Jules’s religious transformation. Tarantino seems to be telling us that we can have it both

ways if we want: we can have meaningful character change, motivated according to the

terms of the crime genre as redemption, or we can have meaningless character stasis,

motivated by the desire to have fun with storytelling conventions. The static character

becomes a function of formal play.

In terms of characterization, then, a static state is not really an option for main

characters because more information about a character is constantly being revealed.

Characterization is a constant flow of information, and in that sense it develops whether a

film emphasizes character, plot, or whatever. But in terms of character, significant

change is neither necessary nor is it necessarily aesthetically preferable. Some films

prefer to have static characters, or to have characters whose growth is not measured in the

profound alteration of the personality traits that define their identity.

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Conclusion

This discussion of variables of characterization has been an attempt to suggest some ways

in which characters who are relatively flat can be just as interesting as characters who are

round through and through. It has been an attempt more specifically to distinguish

between different kinds of flatness and roundness: between characters and

characterizations, between main and minor characters, between different variables of

characterization, and between different modes of cinematic practice. As an aesthetic

principle, it is simply incorrect to place depth, complexity, and change on a higher plane

of value than shallowness, straightforwardness, and stasis. Whether motivated as an anti-

mainstream gesture or by a specific aesthetic program such as realism, social criticism, or

formal experimentation, devices of flatness in characterization are no less compelling to

the spectator or the film critic. As a character says in Pulp Fiction, “Just because you are

a character doesn’t mean you have character.”

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