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Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay, Updated-Expanded

University of California Press

What is going on in these pictures in my mind?
Joan Didion, "Why I Write"

A Process Theory of Character

Novelist William H. Gass writes, "A character, first of all, is the noise of his name , and all the sounds and rhythms that proceed from him" (1988, 272, emphasis my own). Seymour Chatman, on page 23, takes note of the endlessly receding nature of such "noise." For we all feel we KNOW what character is until we try to explain it. Yes, character is somehow everything that makes us who we are as individuals .

But what is that? And what is the difference between the way we see ourselves and how we are perceived by others? As the twentieth century winds down, perhaps we are too self-conscious in that we in the West have come to think of character (thus our "selves") in basically Freudian and post-Freudian psychological and psychoanalytic terms as opposed to other models (religious, historical, cultural). Yet in posing a question about the nature of character, I wish to go beyond the usual psychological labels and categories to offer a more open-ended view of character as process and discourse rather than product.

Roland Barthes (1974) comments that "character is a product of combinations" (67). As such, he continues, character is an ever-changing "adjective" rather than a thing or "noun": "Even though the connotation may be clear, the nomination of its [character] signified is uncertain, approximate, unstable" (190). Translation: character is never complete, set, finished but always glimpsed in motion from a certain perspective. "What is character?" thus leads to "Who is asking, how, why, when?"

Barthes is speaking of characters in written fiction. But his observations help start our investigation into the theory of character as we perceive it in "life" and as we create it on the page while imagining it for its

final destination: the screen. What we should focus on in Barthes's approach is his centering of character not in psychology per se, but in interactive language processes. "Characters are types of discourse," he adds (179). With such a basis, he builds his theory of character on the seme , the smallest unit of linguistic meaning, observing that a single seme is not complete in itself but is "only a departure , an avenue of meaning" (191). A complete character, therefore, is, in Barthes's view, "no more than a collection of semes ."

Anthropologist and cultural theorist Claude Livi-Strauss takes us a step farther. His study of myth suggests implications for a process theory of character as well. He points, like Barthes, to an ongoing, open-ended view of culture, personality, and narrative myth. "The evidence is never complete," writes Livi-Strauss (1969, 5). The "deep structure" he has sought in myth and culture and the "core characteristics" we have discussed in the introduction must be viewed against an ever-shifting context:

There is no real end to mythological analysis, no hidden unity to be grasped once the breaking down process has been completed. Themes can be split up ad infinitum . The unity of the myth is never more than tendential and projective. (5)

Such thoughts may seem very far from the actual work of writing a Raiders of the Lost Ark action/adventure movie under contract or even an off-Hollywood independent feature such as Just Another Girl on the IRT (written and directed by Leslie Harris, 1993).

But in actuality, the emphasis on process and discoursethe interaction of voices and languages through history and culturesthat both Barthes and Livi-Strauss suggest, should prove useful for all screenwriters. The message is clear: treat character as a complex network of "discourse" or "myths" that cannot be totally explored, explained, examined. The rub is to be able to create characters who have such resonance, even in what may appear to be a stereotypic genre film (western, musical, thriller) or a campy comedy, that they break out of any limiting stereotypes we are used to. Take one simple example: why does the Clint Eastwood figure in Unforgiven (screenplay by David Webb Peoples) leave his children, home, and farm and, after so many years of the "straight life," take up his guns again to become a hired gunman? No simple answer can be given. "For the money," "for the adventure," "because his life has become too boring," "for the cause of justice," "because a woman has been wronged and he remembers his own dear departed wife," and so forth. The motivation is perhaps all of these processes and discourses and more. But it doesn't matter . As created by screenwriter David Webb Peoples, the "evidence" of this film, which

won four Oscars, is "never complete" to quote Livi-Strauss once more. We thus have a double experience as audience members; first we enjoy the genre westernwith all its "set" codes, formulas, cliches. And then Peoples expands the experience by opening up his characters beyond what we have seen in traditional westerns. It is this very incompleteness that makes People's western what Premiere editor Peter Biskind called the only 1992 Hollywood film that "deserves to stand with the other great movies of the past" (1993, 51).

The sense of character as process leads us to the concept of the carnivalesque and to Mikhail Bakhtin's description of it. But it is not carnival per se that the Russian theoretician Bakhtin was initially concerned with. Thus we must look at Bakhtin's view of language and character. Years before Barthes and others were writing about character as discourse and process, Bakhtin (1981) wrote:

My voice gives the illusion of unity to what I say; I am, in fact, constantly expressing a plentitude of meanings, some intended, others of which I am unaware. (88)

This point is driven home even more clearly by Bakhtin in his elaboration of the "polyphonic." Bakhtin best explained his term in his discussion of Dostoyevsky's novels. He pointed out that what really distinguishes Dostoyevsky not only as a great novelist but as the father of the modern novel is the unresolved nature of his characters. Bakhtin (1984) puts it this way:

In none of Dostoyevsky's novels is there any evolution of a unified spirit. . . . Each novel presents an opposition which is never canceled out dialectically, of many consciousnesses , and they do not merge in the unity of an evolving spirit, just as souls and spirits do not merge in the formally polyphonic world of Dante. (26, emphasis my own)

What Bakhtin suggests is that the polyphonic character and thus the polyphonic novel is one in which the hero is not a "fixed image, but the sum total of his consciousness and self-consciousness " (1984, 48). The novel itself and Dostoyevsky's novels in particular, Bakhtin held, allowed for a polyphonic viewpoint and form because, unlike poetry and drama, it was the literary form that was most "formless" and thus more plastic, more capable of incorporating "a particular point of view on the world and on oneself" (47).

Bakhtin's comments are useful on a number of levels. His focus on the novel, for instance, helps us to move beyond the mindset of drama which has so thoroughly dominated the classical Hollywood script and those

industry-oriented books about screenwriting that emphasize an Aristotelian, cause and effect, plot-driven form of writing. Yes, a film is like a drama in that it uses actors and is...