Dispatch from The Quest: Ben Odgren
Last week as we did here on GITS, the Quest writers focused on the subject of character. That seemed to have put them in an especially reflective mood as most of them used their journal entries to ponder where they were in the process of learning the craft of screenwriting. We continue this week’s series of dispatches with some thoughts the Protagonist’s destiny from Ben Odgren:
The inevitability of… That’s a loaded dot-dot-dot. Lots of things are inevitable. The tides will move in and out. The Earth will keep turning. Stars will keep imploding. Billions and billions will continue being served at McDonalds. TMZ will always find new lows to sink to. But when you bring it down to a human scale the only inevitable thing (aside from the one very obvious thing) is that we will all get an opportunity to change. And depending on who we are, sometimes we will change and sometimes we won’t. Both of those options are equally fascinating things to explore for a screenwriter. Especially when your hero changed because she survived an alien uprising. Or didn’t change because the chip implanted in her head prevented her from doing so. One of the big ideas from The Quest this week was that the stories we create for our characters need to happen because it’s the only way the characters will be able to deal with their specific problems. Gremlins needed to happen to Billy Peltzer because he needed to grow up a little and get the guts to ask out the girl. District 9 needed to happen to Wikus Van De Merwe because he was kind of an unsympathetic government tool and needed to become less so. Throwing gremlins in microwaves and catching missiles with the help of a robot suit is icing on the cake, sure, but in the end it’s all about the characters and how they react to the cosmic hand that’s been dealt to them. And when you look at it that way, it’s cool how it laser-focuses everything on the character and really makes them matter most…not the special effects or what toy they’re based on. Because when you look at it like that, you can deal with the same problems in vastly different ways. Everything becomes relatable, no matter the scale. How many movies are there about guys who need to grow up and get the guts to ask out the girl? That’s Gremlins, Spider-Man, The 40-Year-Old-Virgin, Lars and the Real Girl, the list goes on. And those are movies that couldn’t be farther apart from each other in genre and tone.
So I think that’s the takeaway for me this week. The character needs the concept to happen to them just as much as the concept needs a character to happen to. The hard part is deciding what happens when the two meet.
This goes back to the idea of Carl Jung who theorized that if we, as human beings, do not engage all the aspects of our psyche, including the shadow / dark dynamics, the universe creates circumstances to force us. That led me to the thought that a story is precisely that: The story universe creating a situation compelling the Protagonist to leave the comfort of their Old World and plunge into the New World, compelling the Protagonist to deal with their Disunity, a process that emerges over the course of the narrative as personal metamorphosis. Or as I ask in The Quest:
Why does this story have to happen to this character at this time?
How about you? In that story on which you are working, have you thought about your Protagonist’s destiny? How what they have going on in their psychological lives is tied intimately to the specifics of the characters and events the Protagonist faces in their adventure? If you have some thoughts in that regard and/or comments for Ben, please go to comments to carry on the conversation.
Tomorrow: Another dispatch from The Quest.
About Ben: Maine writer with a love for pulpy genre movies, keeping library books out for a little too long, and strong coffee. Twitter: @benodgren
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