Tag Archives: William Shakespeare

Well-Rounded or One-Dimensional?

As a teen and young adult, I used to regularly read Focus on the Family’s Plugged In magazine. Recently I checked out their review on the film Fury, which I’d recently seen. It can be summarized with these paragraphs:

Some will see that unflinching glimpse at perpetual bloodshed and gray-smoking destruction as something of an antiwar declaration. They’ll see a cautionary tale of men hollowed out and broken by the unspeakable horrors they’ve witnessed.

Others will see this pic as a one-dimensional splatter-fest dressed up in khaki Army fatigues, with limbs innumerable being severed by large-caliber machine gun fire and mortar rounds in a story of brutal, hard-fisted soldiers battling a Nazi evil even more wicked than themselves.

“Did you watch the same movie I did?” I asked.

In case you don’t know, Fury is a WWII film released last fall that stars Brad Pitt and Shia LeBeouf. It’s about a greenhorn Army clerk who ends up on the frontlines with a battle-hardened tank crew and sees firsthand the horrors of war, which makes him more willing to kill the enemy. I read Plugged In’s review because I wanted to see what they thought of Shia LeBeouf’s character, who is a Christian. (LeBeouf reportedly became a Christian during filming). Unsurprisingly, they complained about him, saying, “We see him praying over a wounded soldier and quoting Scripture several times before battle. That said, his faith doesn’t keep Bible from being every bit as foulmouthed, boozy and death-dealing as the rest of his crew.”

“What would you have preferred?” I asked. “That he fit the equally one-dimensional perfect or nigh-perfect stereotypes that populate ‘Christian’ films?” Besides, he swears much less than his compatriots and I only saw him drink alcohol once (and he didn’t get drunk, which is what the Bible condemns, not the consumption of alcohol). When his buddies make crude comments about German women, he rebuffs them. When they harass a German woman, he doesn’t participate. He’s not perfect. No Christian is. But he’s also not the typical religious loon usually seen in Hollywood films.

They also presented Pitt’s character “Wardaddy” as a one-dimensional, jingoistic jarhead you typically see in bad action movies. That more than anything baffled me. I saw a character who in many writers’ hand would’ve been exactly that, but both the script and Pitt’s performance add layers of nuance to him. He’s a man who will shoot an unarmed POW in the back and a few scenes later protect two young German women from his horny subordinates. When he walked into the women’s apartment, I fully expected him to do something terrible to them. But he didn’t. He does encourage the new recruit to sleep with the younger woman (which isn’t shown, so it’s debatable if they did anything). When they walk out he tells the young guy “nothing needs to be said.” But his defining characteristic is his desire to keep his men alive. Yes, he’s a borderline psychopath and possibly mad, but he’ll do whatever it takes to save his men. They respect him for that. He’s a complicated character. I was enthralled by this.

Not only was I bothered by this magazine’s overly biased review, it reminded me of the challenge writers have creating characters. What’s the difference between a well-rounded character and an inconsistent character? The line between them seems fuzzy. A common trait of bad writing is having a character act, well, out of character. For example, it’d be out of character for a patriotic superhero like Captain America to suddenly become a communist. On the other hand, people are full of contradictions. Hardened criminals in prison will abuse child rapists because despite their depravity, they have enough moral fiber to know not to do unspeakable things to children.

Dinobot from Beast Wars.

This is why my favorite character from Beast Wars (a childhood favorite cartoon) is Dinobot. He’s easily the best-written character in the show because of how complicated he is. He’s too honorable to be a bad guy but too rough to be a good guy. He’ll pull an opponent from cliff edge if said opponent slipped, but he has no qualms with throwing him off the cliff during combat. He defected from the bad guys but considered betraying the good guys later. Yet all of this fit his character.

Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet.

A more literary (and nebulous) example is Hamlet. Talk about complicated! I haven’t the time or space to adequately examine him. All I will say is he is a man who has a strong sense of justice and strong moral convictions. He believes his uncle is a murderer who should die, but he hesitates to kill him because of that same moral compunction against murder. (I don’t subscribe to the theory that Hamlet was insane). That’s one of many reasons why Shakespeare’s Hamlet is considered to be one of the greatest pieces of literature in the history of the world: the titular character is nuanced, complex, and seemingly contradictory.

Writing characters like this is hard. This is why many writers prefer static, two-dimensional characters. That isn’t to say such characters are inherently bad. There are plenty of great examples out there. But even they must act in ways consistent with their character.

What do you think is/are the difference(s) between well-rounded and inconsistent characters?

Why Shouldn’t Characters Make Mistakes?

My mind tends to wander at my day job (no surprise, right?) and contemplate random ideas. Most recently, I thought about how audiences are averse to characters making mistakes.

Critics and comedians alike have made careers out pointing out the “stupid” mistakes characters—villains in particular—make in many stories. I’ll be the first to say I’m not beyond making such criticisms/jokes and I love websites like the Evil Overlord List. But this begs the question: What’s wrong with characters making mistakes?

"Now here's my little secret--I AM YOUR FATHER! (oh wait...wrong movie!)" Image courtesy of www.queeofsarcasm.tripod.com
“Now here’s my little secret–I AM YOUR FATHER! (oh wait…wrong movie!)”
Image courtesy of www.queeofsarcasm.tripod.com

The specific instance I was thinking when this thought came to mind was Scar in The Lion King. When Simba returns to Pride Rock, Scar forces him to confess that he’s responsible for Mufasa’s death. He pushes Simba over the edge of a cliff. Then, with his nephew clutching the precipice, Scar whispers that was actually him who killed Mufasa. Simba suddenly finds a second wind and pounces on his uncle. The climactic showdown follows.

On the surface, this seems like a variation of the tried-and-true “villain’s monologue before killing hero” trope. If Scar had just kept his mouth shut, he’d probably still be king. Plenty of other villains have made the same mistake. Is it often contrived and stupid? Yes. But I would argue that when done right, it serves the story.

One of the great ironies of villains (and other characters) is that they’re undone by their own hubris. For villains it usually manifests as sadism or narcissism. In other words, they show off. They can’t just kill the hero: they have to flaunt how badly they’ve beaten them. The hero, usually being the villain’s foil, exploits this weakness, thus proving that humility trumps arrogance.

But this isn’t limited to villains. Many have criticized Hamlet’s reluctance to kill his uncle when he had the chance in Shakespeare’s classic play. (I’m amused at the unintentional irony because The Lion King was loosely inspired by Hamlet, but I digress). If he had done so, Hamlet not only would’ve avenged his father, he probably would’ve prevented his own death. (My apologies for the spoiler). 😛

I think much of this criticism stems from audiences’ own arrogance, whether they know it or not. They watch characters make mistakes and think, “I wouldn’t have done that.” Maybe they wouldn’t have. Or they would’ve made a different mistake. The truth is that both good and bad people make mistakes in real life. Napoleon made an infamous one at Waterloo. Hitler foolishly tried to invade Russia during winter. George W. Bush gave a war speech under a banner that said, “Mission Accomplished.” The list could go on. Nobody’s perfect. Art is a reflection of reality, and mistakes are part of it. That can be traced all the way back to the Garden of Eden. Mistakes can and do service a story.

So be careful next you criticize a character’s mistakes. You may as well be indicting yourself, too.

Besides, Vizzini avoided making “one of the classic blunders,” and it still got him killed!

"...but only slightly less well-known is this: "'Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line'! Ha ha ha..."
“…but only slightly less well-known is this: “‘Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line’! Ha ha ha…”