Do your characters exist beyond FADE OUT?
Last week, Film School Rejects ran a piece honoring the 25th anniversary of the Cameron Crowe movie Say Anything called “Are ‘Say Anything’ Lovebirds Lloyd Dobler and Diane Court Still Together?”
Sometime during the spring of my freshman year at college, a friend of mine decided to break out a big romantic gesture for his girlfriend of just a few weeks — they weren’t celebrating anything special, no anniversary or holiday to peg it to, he just wanted to do something — and he decided to recreate the infamous boombox scene from Say Anything. It went over like gangbusters. He drove his truck to the back of her dorm, stood in the bed of it, and blasted Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” for everyone to hear. I’m certain that was part of the charm — his girlfriend heard it, the rest of her dorm heard it, people walking to class heard it. (She was, to put it delicately, a bit of a show-off.)
Most importantly, everyone seemed to get it. Cameron Crowe’s film was nearly fifteen years old when this particularly over-the-top expression of love occurred, and although I’d never dare to compare the epic love story that was Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) and Diane Court (Ione Skye) with a pair of dumb college kids eager to make their affections public in a world pre-Facebook, they did have something in common — neither couple is still together.
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It is also a love story with a traditionally happy ending that is still worth wondering about. Say Anything ends with Lloyd and Diane heading off to London so that Diane can embark on her snazzy (and long-looming) fellowship. The duo have already been through quite a bit — a stop-and-start romance, bad advice from friends, a break-up complete with a pen consolation prize, Ice Man Power Lloyd, more bad advice from friends, and her father’s incarceration for bilking the IRS — and exiting America for a new adventure certainly sounds like a nice way to start over.
But nobody thinks it will work. No, really. Diane even says to Lloyd, “Nobody thinks it will work, do they?” to which Lloyd responds with the most perfect line: “No. You just described every great success story.”
If you’ve seen the movie, you can’t have forgotten its last image:
Waiting for the smoking sign to light up, but the subtext of them peering upward is clear: What is their future? An homage to this ending shot:
Benjamin and Elaine in The Graduate staring into their uncertain future. Which brings to mind this final image:
Ryan Bingham in Up in the Air peering up at an airport sign, dozens of flight departures, but again the subtext is about this main character gazing into his uncertain future.
Did Lloyd and Diane stay together? Benjamin and Elaine? Did Ryan ever come down to earth or stay floating above this thing we know as Life?
All good questions that presume an even more important question: Do your characters exist beyond FADE OUT?
We all know about backstory, the set of key events in a character’s past that directly influences who they are and what they will do, essentially their life before FADE IN. But if our characters exist in their story universe — 24/7/365 — isn’t it also true they would have a life after we type THE END?
It’s something to think about as you develop a story: Where will your characters be in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, and beyond.
To spur your thinking, let me ask this: If there is one movie you could find out what happened to the characters after FADE OUT, what would it be?
As for me, it would be Little Miss Sunshine, the 2006 movie written by Michael Arndt. There is the delightful, spontaneous celebration of the Hoover family in support of Olive at the Little Miss Sunshine pageant:
But after the dust settles, what do we know?
We know Dwayne is not going to become an airplane pilot.
We know Frank is not going to get back his teaching job or young lover.
We know Richard is not going to get his self-help book published.
We know Olive did not win the Little Miss Sunshine trophy.
We know Grandpa is dead.
And we know the family is in desperate financial straits.
What we don’t know is what will happen to them.
They have come together as a family on stage and it’s truly a wondrous moment. But then they pile back into the VW, smash through the parking lot gate, pull out onto the highway and head east toward their home in New Mexico. And there’s that fantastic master shot of the VW driving off down the road, accompanied by the final song on the soundtrack, the instrumental version of How It Ends and… the annoying, irregular bleat of the car’s horn, which I have always taken to mean this: “Hoovers, you just had a positive experience. But your life lies ahead of you. You are still going to have to deal with your shit. And there’s a lot of shit for you to deal with. This horn is a friendly reminder of your destiny… after FADE OUT.”
I hope the Hoovers are well. And if I ever get the opportunity to meet Michael Arndt, that’s the first question I would ask him: How are the Hoovers? My guess is those characters still exist for him.
How about you? Do your characters have lives beyond FADE OUT?
For the rest of the Film School Rejects article, go here.
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