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Dimensions of CharacterCynthia's Column December 2005 Crash, a recent film, did something so daring with its characters for a Hollywood film that I couldn't actually come up with a precedent. The writers, Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco, had the guts to create a really despicable character, played by Matt Dillon, who, at the moment of crisis, becomes a hero. A real hero. Willing to risk dying to save a stranger. And when I say he was despicable, I don't mean cranky or mean. I mean a real bad guy. Someone who gets pleasure from humiliating and sexually assaulting a helpless victim. Nazi bad. This has to exist in real life. Hundreds of firemen and policemen rushed into the burning twin towers and died, becoming heroes. True heroes. And I don't want to be sacrilegious, but odds are some of them beat their wives. Some of them hit their kids. A couple were probably child molesters and a few took money on the side. Right? Had to be true. Crash is essentially telling that story. Why should that knock me out? Because almost never in Hollywood does this happen. Bad guys wear black hats and mustaches and good guys wear white hats and have perfect teeth. Almost never does the bad guy become the hero. Darth Vader. But it took him six movies, and really he was a good guy who sold his soul to the dark side and ultimately redeemed it. And it turned out that he did it for love. Not as bad as we originally thought. This is a Faust story in its way. Crash goes further. It has a good guy, with Ryan Phillippe's blond curls and blue eyes and bone-deep sense of moral decency, do a horrific, bad thing. He murders an innocent black kid at close range. Bravo, Haggis and Moresco. These writers are pushing the edge of the envelope in both directions here. Making the characters real, their actions believable, and showing us (the audience) that even the good guys can't rest on their Good Guy Laurels and assume that they'll always do the right thing. We all have to be careful not to be caught in a moment of fear in which we might throw it all away. A few weeks after seeing Crash, I was sitting in a movie theater watching the trailers of coming attractions and was blown away by the preview for a film called Brokeback Mountain. At the end of three minutes I was in love with this movie and I haven't even seen it yet. Here is a story none of us has ever seen in a mainstream Hollywood movie. These are not bad guys doing good things or vice versa, but their character traits are nearly as opposite. It's about cowboys -- not Mardi Gras costume cowboys -- I'm talking the real deal out in Wyoming with the callouses and cows that go with it, who fall in love with each other. The ultimate macho American icon falling in love with one of his own sex. I have lived in Wyoming and Texas both, and coming out is not something a man can do in these rural parts without risking serious physical harm. Not long ago a high school boy in Wyoming was tied to a fence and stoned to death for being gay. Annie Proulx's story, Brokeback Mountain, was so powerful that another best selling novelist of Lonesome Dove immortality (and Pulitzer Prize) Larry McMurtry went after and won the privilege of adapting it for the screen. It's almost enough to give me faith that American movies are nurturing some ground-breaking, brilliant writing. After a summer of the usual SAME (Summer American Movie Entertainment) full of comic books and adolescent comedies and horror films, it makes me happy that winter is coming and we can look forward to more grown-up fare. And as writers, we can be encouraged to be bolder in how we write our characters. We can be reassured that the commercial market place is able to embrace characters that are fully dimensional and filled with inner conflict and paradox . This is the best gift the movies have given to us writers in a long time. Let's take it and run with it. Cynthia Whitcomb is president of Willamette Writers, and has had 29 of her screenplays produced. She is author of The Writers' Guide to Writing Your Screenplay and The Writers' Guide to Selling Your Screenplay. She teaches screenwriting classes at Portland State University.and through Willamette Writers. |