“Character is what you have left when you’ve lost everything you can lose.”
That’s one of the Quotes of the Day featured on my iGoogle homepage today. The quote comes from Evan Esar and evidently he was quite a quotesmith.
The reason I draw attention to the quote is it strikes me as an apt articulation of what stories, and in particular mainstream Hollywood movies, typically ‘do’ to Protagonists. By taking the P out of their ordinary world and forcing them into the ‘extraordinary world of adventure,’ typically what happens in the transition from Act One into Act Two, that first half of the second act is primarily about events and other characters which shake, rattle, and roll the P — shaking their belief systems, rattling their coping skills, rolling over their defense mechanisms (all locked in place through their experience prior to FADE IN and in evidence in the ordinary world in Act One). Once the P’s psychological / emotional / spiritual status is deconstructed or disassembled, whatever they discover inside their Self, what I sometimes call their essence of being, core aspects of their Internal World persona that they’ve had all along but somehow ignored, repressed, or simply failed to tap into, is free to emerge. Esar has a simpler description of that internal ‘stuff’: Character.
The P’s ‘character’ grows through tests and wisdom learned during the latter half of the second Act, leading typically to an All Is Lost moment, representing a major test of their character: Do they turn back or go on toward their Goal? Act Three functions as a compressed version of Act Two, reminding the P of their deconstruction and reconstruction, all in preparation for a Final Struggle to determine if the P has truly connected with and accepted their ‘character.’
Of course, this is all a variation of The Hero’s Journey, although less about plot particulars than narrative function. And while acknowledging the importance of Joseph Campbell, it occurs to me that “Character is what you have left when you’ve lost everything you can lose” is the obverse of what Campbell suggested was the theme of The Hero’s Journey: “Follow your bliss.” Identify that which is truly important and essential to you – and follow that. The underlying principle of ‘story,’ and to a screenwriter’s perspective mainstream movies, is how you do that for a Protagonist character is thrust them onto a journey and into a series of tests which cause them to lose everything they can lose, in order for that which is essential to them, their ‘character’ to emerge.
