Jen Spencer wonders where all the nice people went.
I recently watched the very fun, very silly film The Three Musketeers with Michael York, Oliver Reed, and Christopher Lee. It is a fine production and many dos were dared, and many buckles were swashed. However, as the film progressed I was struck by something which puzzled me, and that was, why, in a film of heroism and honour, is there only one sympathetic character? I'm referring here to Cardinal Richlieu, the sole beacon of sanity in the sex-mad in-bred herd of batty nobles and duel-hungry maniacs surrounding him.
The Musketeers themselves, the heroes of the story, are thieving vice-ridden bastards, including a drunk, a vain gambling addict, and a surprisingly vicious womanising priest who uses prayer to get his opponent off guard before stabbing him in the thigh. The supporting cast is no better, for example, the Queen is a batty trollop, and the King knows he's a frivolous lunatic; the Duke of Buckingham thinks nothing of waging war on France if it means he'll get his bit of Queeny-arse, not that his raging love for her will ever stop him cheating on her with the pretty useless Lady De Winter, and of course we can't forget the charming maid Constance, who is so devoted to her husband she's exchanging bodily fluids with D'Artagnan within five minutes of exchanging first words with him. This mixture of characters makes for a highly entertaining film, don't get me wrong, however I did find myself at times feeling very bad that the sole person I could have any sympathy for was in fact be the bad guy, when he does not really do anything that wrong, and his motivations are pretty clearly cut as being for the good of his country. He is even a good loser, unlike the "heroes" of the piece.
The more I think about it, the more I realise how many characters portrayed as positive and sympathetic in films really just aren't. And it reaches into surprising genres. For example, in the Disney film Beauty and the Beast, what has the heroine, Belle, achieved towards her goal of an amazing adventurous life by the end of the film? She rejects one suitor (admittedly not a very nice one) on the grounds that "she wants adventure in the great wide somewhere", and by the end of the film has ended up marrying a guy five miles down the road and is blissfully happy with this. Of course a life as a princess may be mildly more adventurous than that of a peasant inventor's daughter (though obviously any player of WFRP will argue the point) but it's still not quite what I call a sympathetic message to give to children: that a girl can fulfil all her ambitions by finding love and settling down to marriage, even if this is obvious to the adult audience as being a rather dubious outcome. Another example is in the recent Star Wars films, where the Jedis, revered as a great force of good and balance, go about merrily using mind tricks to rip off merchants and go into suspiciously dark-side rages at people they accuse of being evil. We are meant to excuse such behaviour as being for the greater good in the long run, but it's still a pretty shitty way to go about things. And of course, just because I like shooting fish, how much can you honestly sympathise with James Bond when he's spreading weeping sores over the continent and being smug at his superiors because they're female or ugly? Tis not sympathetic, I say! He's meant to be our dashing hero, but if you ever met him, you'd want to club him with a dead seal within five minutes, or at least spit in his Martini.
One interesting genre that the unsympathetic cast problem often crops up in is horror. In a horror film the characters have to endure horrible circumstances or events, often beyond their control. You would think that such a genre would be the easiest to find sympathetic characters in, because essentially all they have to do is try to stay alive and not be arseholes. But oddly enough it is in horror that I have often found exist totally unsympathetic casts of characters to the point where you really don't care what happens to them. This used to be the intention of some horror films: the audience would be presented with a cast the audience just couldn't wait to see meet their fate in truly hideous ways, and would even go so far as to provide a sympathetic monster for them to root for; a good example of this is the cannibal preying on the in-bred "Rah rah rah we're going to smash the oinks" hooray-Henrys in The Ghoul made in 1975. Modern horror, especially that focusing around teenagers is by far the worst offender for not offering us up a single sympathetic character. Writers seem too preoccupied with making their characters edgy that they forget the point of horror is to scare you through drawing you into the hideous situation of the victims, which you just can't do if you look at a character and say, "Wow, they're an asshole". Examples of this are prominent in The Hole(2001), and The Blair Witch Project (1999).
For my money, a sympathetic character will have four basic characteristics: they'll be nice when it is reasonable for them to be so, they'll have positive motivations for their actions, and they'll have understandable reasons for their actions, and reactions that I can empathise with. This fourth point is an important one, as I have felt any sympathy I have had for a character drain away in a moment when they've reacted to something in a completely unforgivable/irritatingly stupid manner. A huge offender for this kind of sympathy-destruction are the women who briefly escape their tormentors in horror films. From the depths of 80s cheese, like Sorority House Massacre, to slick, otherwise excellent productions like Wolf Creek, let a woman have her captor vulnerable and prone before her and, without fail, using the nearest blunt instrument she will give him the equivalent of a gentle shiatsu on the back. This vexes me more than words can say. I appreciate that they are scared, tired, hungry, weak, etc. but when the maniac you have witnessed do hideous things to you and/or your friends is in any kind of vulnerable position, if you have the mental strength to make an aggressive move towards them (I would stay sympathetic if they just fell over and cried, this is a perfectly understandable response to the stress of the situation) then you will not gently buff them about with a blunt instrument in non-vital parts of their body. If you want to make an aggressive move towards someone you find the sharpest/heaviest object you can and you insert it into their neck/head/eye/mouth/groin/knees/arse. In my opinion it is not worth destroying the sympathy an audience has built up for a character just for the convenience of setting up some tense chase scenes. If you want tense chase scenes, get them over with in the beginning, and once the villain is down, give the main characters a bit of credit and let them bash their skulls in. This is why you find this kind of leniency offence less often in situations with multiple maniacs, such as The Hills Have Eyes.
I realise that particularly in historical films, all characters' behaviour must be considered in conjunction with the expectations of the time as far as customs, culture and manners go, but I despair of the kind of writing that favours style and, in role-play terms, party in-fighting due to angsty backplot or edgy characters, or even thoughtless pretty vs ugly good and evil over the experience of the film as a whole, and giving the audience a decent emotional anchor to latch onto to bring them into the story. People often have complex motivations for their actions, but you can have a character who is both complex yet sympathetic. Just because a character is not "the bad guy" it does not automatically make him a hero, or excuse his motivations or actions. I hope that when I eventually get round to writing the film script buzzing round my head that I wont fall into the same traps, and might give the audience the opportunity to care about my characters.
The Musketeers themselves, the heroes of the story, are thieving vice-ridden bastards, including a drunk, a vain gambling addict, and a surprisingly vicious womanising priest who uses prayer to get his opponent off guard before stabbing him in the thigh. The supporting cast is no better, for example, the Queen is a batty trollop, and the King knows he's a frivolous lunatic; the Duke of Buckingham thinks nothing of waging war on France if it means he'll get his bit of Queeny-arse, not that his raging love for her will ever stop him cheating on her with the pretty useless Lady De Winter, and of course we can't forget the charming maid Constance, who is so devoted to her husband she's exchanging bodily fluids with D'Artagnan within five minutes of exchanging first words with him. This mixture of characters makes for a highly entertaining film, don't get me wrong, however I did find myself at times feeling very bad that the sole person I could have any sympathy for was in fact be the bad guy, when he does not really do anything that wrong, and his motivations are pretty clearly cut as being for the good of his country. He is even a good loser, unlike the "heroes" of the piece.
The more I think about it, the more I realise how many characters portrayed as positive and sympathetic in films really just aren't. And it reaches into surprising genres. For example, in the Disney film Beauty and the Beast, what has the heroine, Belle, achieved towards her goal of an amazing adventurous life by the end of the film? She rejects one suitor (admittedly not a very nice one) on the grounds that "she wants adventure in the great wide somewhere", and by the end of the film has ended up marrying a guy five miles down the road and is blissfully happy with this. Of course a life as a princess may be mildly more adventurous than that of a peasant inventor's daughter (though obviously any player of WFRP will argue the point) but it's still not quite what I call a sympathetic message to give to children: that a girl can fulfil all her ambitions by finding love and settling down to marriage, even if this is obvious to the adult audience as being a rather dubious outcome. Another example is in the recent Star Wars films, where the Jedis, revered as a great force of good and balance, go about merrily using mind tricks to rip off merchants and go into suspiciously dark-side rages at people they accuse of being evil. We are meant to excuse such behaviour as being for the greater good in the long run, but it's still a pretty shitty way to go about things. And of course, just because I like shooting fish, how much can you honestly sympathise with James Bond when he's spreading weeping sores over the continent and being smug at his superiors because they're female or ugly? Tis not sympathetic, I say! He's meant to be our dashing hero, but if you ever met him, you'd want to club him with a dead seal within five minutes, or at least spit in his Martini.
One interesting genre that the unsympathetic cast problem often crops up in is horror. In a horror film the characters have to endure horrible circumstances or events, often beyond their control. You would think that such a genre would be the easiest to find sympathetic characters in, because essentially all they have to do is try to stay alive and not be arseholes. But oddly enough it is in horror that I have often found exist totally unsympathetic casts of characters to the point where you really don't care what happens to them. This used to be the intention of some horror films: the audience would be presented with a cast the audience just couldn't wait to see meet their fate in truly hideous ways, and would even go so far as to provide a sympathetic monster for them to root for; a good example of this is the cannibal preying on the in-bred "Rah rah rah we're going to smash the oinks" hooray-Henrys in The Ghoul made in 1975. Modern horror, especially that focusing around teenagers is by far the worst offender for not offering us up a single sympathetic character. Writers seem too preoccupied with making their characters edgy that they forget the point of horror is to scare you through drawing you into the hideous situation of the victims, which you just can't do if you look at a character and say, "Wow, they're an asshole". Examples of this are prominent in The Hole(2001), and The Blair Witch Project (1999).
For my money, a sympathetic character will have four basic characteristics: they'll be nice when it is reasonable for them to be so, they'll have positive motivations for their actions, and they'll have understandable reasons for their actions, and reactions that I can empathise with. This fourth point is an important one, as I have felt any sympathy I have had for a character drain away in a moment when they've reacted to something in a completely unforgivable/irritatingly stupid manner. A huge offender for this kind of sympathy-destruction are the women who briefly escape their tormentors in horror films. From the depths of 80s cheese, like Sorority House Massacre, to slick, otherwise excellent productions like Wolf Creek, let a woman have her captor vulnerable and prone before her and, without fail, using the nearest blunt instrument she will give him the equivalent of a gentle shiatsu on the back. This vexes me more than words can say. I appreciate that they are scared, tired, hungry, weak, etc. but when the maniac you have witnessed do hideous things to you and/or your friends is in any kind of vulnerable position, if you have the mental strength to make an aggressive move towards them (I would stay sympathetic if they just fell over and cried, this is a perfectly understandable response to the stress of the situation) then you will not gently buff them about with a blunt instrument in non-vital parts of their body. If you want to make an aggressive move towards someone you find the sharpest/heaviest object you can and you insert it into their neck/head/eye/mouth/groin/knees/arse. In my opinion it is not worth destroying the sympathy an audience has built up for a character just for the convenience of setting up some tense chase scenes. If you want tense chase scenes, get them over with in the beginning, and once the villain is down, give the main characters a bit of credit and let them bash their skulls in. This is why you find this kind of leniency offence less often in situations with multiple maniacs, such as The Hills Have Eyes.
I realise that particularly in historical films, all characters' behaviour must be considered in conjunction with the expectations of the time as far as customs, culture and manners go, but I despair of the kind of writing that favours style and, in role-play terms, party in-fighting due to angsty backplot or edgy characters, or even thoughtless pretty vs ugly good and evil over the experience of the film as a whole, and giving the audience a decent emotional anchor to latch onto to bring them into the story. People often have complex motivations for their actions, but you can have a character who is both complex yet sympathetic. Just because a character is not "the bad guy" it does not automatically make him a hero, or excuse his motivations or actions. I hope that when I eventually get round to writing the film script buzzing round my head that I wont fall into the same traps, and might give the audience the opportunity to care about my characters.
