When Bad Guys Go Too Bad

by Holly West

Before I begin this week's post, I'd like to announce that Thomas Pluck will be sharing Wednesdays with me starting next week. I always enjoy when Tom writes a guest post, so I think we can all look forward to some insightful and entertaining content from him. Welcome, Tom!

The following post will be a bit spoiler-y, particularly if you haven't watched the last-ish seasons of House of Cards, Nurse Jackie, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos and Orange is the New Black. No plot revelations, but I'll be discussing character development of these shows.

I'm sure I've said this before, but I love a flawed protagonist. They are, in fact, my favorite kind of protagonists. I'm attracted to misfits and characters who walk the thin line between good and bad. Characters who are fundamentally good but for some reason do a lot of bad things--maybe because they can't help themselves or they can't get ahead in life or they don't feel they have a choice. Maybe it's their job. Characters who are somehow able to justify the bad things they do in such a way that the audience is able to root for them in spite of their flaws.

Oh, how I loved Tony Soprano.

Take Tony Soprano. In the beginning, he was the perfect flawed protagonist. Admittedly, he was more bad than good, but that works for me. He did terrible things, but dammit, he really loved those baby ducks. And his struggles with his mother? I'd watched my own father have similar ones with his mother. I could relate. Tony was so simple and yet so complex and I loved him completely.

And while we're talking The Sopranos, what about Nurse Jackie (played brilliantly by Carmela Soprano--er, Edie Falco)? Another superbly flawed character whose drug addiction causes her to lose nearly everything. At first, the awful things she does are balanced out by her brilliance as a nurse but eventually, she hits bottom and we're left to wonder if redemption is possible. Has she pushed us too far, like she pushed away everyone else in her life?

Which brings me to the point of this post: what happens when characters go so bad they're no longer enjoyable to watch/read? I'm not talking about the bad guys--the guys whose job it is to be terrible. I'm talking about the so-called good guys. Flawed or not, the ones we tune in for each week (or turn each page or buy each book in a series) because they're compelling and sympathetic in spite of the bad things the do. In some cases, because of it.

In Tony Soprano's case, it became increasingly harder to empathize with him as the series wore on and that made him less interesting. There was no chance of redemption for him as a character because he'd pushed me to my limit and he wasn't giving enough back. Where are the baby ducks when you need them? I was ready to let him go before the series actually ended (though I loved him so much in the beginning, I still wanted him to live on in some kind of alternate universe, even if I no longer wanted to watch him).

Oh well.

I'm not saying that a character shouldn't, over the course of a series, become unredeemable. Often, that's a compelling arc and I'm into it. But as writers we need to be cognizant of when a character has reached the pinnacle of his/her evil and not let it drag on too long. Know when to cut him off at the knees. He can't go on indefinitely without consequences (and sometimes, the consequences are the end of the series).

A good current example is House of Cards. At the end of season three, I wondered if perhaps the Underwoods had become truly evil and whether I wanted to watch them any further. They no longer seemed to have any moral dilemmas--their only problems were keeping the power they'd gained and not getting caught for their many misdeeds. I'd watched for three seasons thinking they were working for some kind of greater good only to learn that they themselves were the greater good. Womp womp. But then, the season three finale ended with a good cliffhanger so I watched season four. Unfortunately, I think I'm through with the Underwoods--the series should've ended this season (and if you've seen it, you know they had the perfect opportunity).

I also mentioned Orange is the New Black. We're half way into the latest season I'm having trouble with the main character, Piper. Perhaps the goal was to harden her as the series proceeded (because let's face it, she is in jail and even if the inmates are magically able to have sex whenever they want it's still taxing) but she's lost most of the vulnerability that was so appealing at the beginning of the series. She's one-dimensional now. Not complex and not interesting.

Want an example of a show that did it right? Breaking Bad. The series ended at precisely the right time. I could still root for Walter because he was in the end stages of his disease and well, that's got to fuck a person up, but really, he'd turned so bad that having him live on would've been tedious. His story was finished and it was time to kill him off and move on.

I'm aware that I've only discussed television shows here. But these rules apply to books, though maybe not in the same way, unless you're talking about a series. Thinking about these issues reminds me to work harder at character development. Add some subtlety. Maybe a quirk or two. Good fiction demands we magnify some of qualities for effect, but no one is all good or all bad and we need to keep this in mind. We're creating characters here, not caricatures.

Who Killed the Chauffeur (and who cares?)

Russel D McLean

Check out Russel's new website (and blog) at www.russeldmcleanbooks.com

In The Big Sleep, there’s a great moment when Marlowe is called out to the murder of the Sternwood family Chauffeur. It’s a great scene and one that serves to move the story forward, but rumour has it that when Howard Hawks was filming the movie, he called Chandler and asked,

Who killed the Chauffeur?

 
And it’s a fair question. No one really knows. And the rumour is that Chandler himself responded quite blithely that he didn’t either, making it just another instance of his maxim that when the plot slows down you have a man walk through the door with a gun*

It’s a massive plot hole, or at least certain readers may consider it as such. But you know, I like it. I like it a lot because it makes me think of life.

In life nobody knows everything.

And nobody gets to know everything.

I like to leave a few loose ends in my novels. Of course, given that I’m writing a sequence in the McNee books, one or two of those get picked up later. A few questions from The Lost Sister will be answered in Father Confessor (but yet a few more might be raised), but sometimes there are things that you don’t need to know. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know them. And its more fun if you can argue or conjecture about what really happened.

Moving up to the modern age (ish), one of my favourite ever episodes of the Sopranos (me and ten million others) was the one where Paulie and Christopher take a Russian out to the woods to kill him. He escapes, they think they shoot him in the head, but then they can’t find the body. They get lost in the woods. They go through real bad times. But they don’t find the Russian. They don’t know if he’s dead or alive. But the point of the story is not the Russian, but how they cope with being lost in the cold and alone with each other. Oh, and by the way, if you have never watched the Sopranos here is your spoiler alert.





 Lots of people spent the rest of the series conjecturing whether the Russian was really dead, and what might happen if he returned. But he never did. And nothing ever came of the fact they killed this guy. Because it didn’t matter. And because, well, why would anything have come of that? It’s a fine dramatic line between thematic webs and daft coincidence. And the fact that we never really did know about the Russian was brilliant. Because it felt real. Because sometimes in life, you do things, or you see things, and they don’t come back to haunt you in some ironic way or have any real impact on anything again even if, in a made-up, all-the-dots-connect-world they surely should have.

Now I’m not saying I do anything as well as either of these examples, or that I use such extremes, but I do believe that sometimes you don’t have to know everything for a story to work. In fact I’d rather not be told everything and be able to imagine a world that continues beyond the confines of what I’ve seen of it.

And, really, I don’t care who killed the Chauffeur, but I do care that it got Marlowe to the right place at the right time to answer the bigger questions. And that while we never found out who did it, it didn’t feel forced or unnatural. In fact, it felt real.

*metaphorically speaking

Character.... It's all about Character, except in film..

Like just about everyone else (EXCEPT YOU), I saw THE DARK KNIGHT RISES this weekend. I really liked the film and for the most part felt it was a quality movie and a well-done end to a superb trilogy.

But, it wasn't without its flaws.

Most of its flaws came at the cost of character. The movie--hell, the series--takes its time setting up aspects of Batman and his surrounding characters and then in the last ten minutes of the movie ignores them. It was enough to set off alarm bells in my brain, and knocks the movie from AWESOME HOLY CRAP SPECTACULAR down to well, I really enjoyed that.

But the problem is even bigger than the Batman series, it's a film problem.

It strikes me that film is more about the moment. Whenever people talk about movies they always talk about "that scene." "REMEMBER THAT PART WHERE?" Ignoring the fact that that part is only so cool because it ignores everything that came before it for the sake of the scene. Character motivation doesn't matter. Reality doesn't matter.

All that matters is the shot, the scene.

Head of a horse in movie producer's bed? Nevermind that Tom Hagen had to sneak back into the estate, chop off the head of a horse without anyone noticing, then sneak back into the mansion... WITH A BLOODY HORSE'S HEAD.. and put it in the bed without the movie producer waking up.

But come on, everyone remembers that point and points to it as cool.

And we're used to it. The scene outweighs the character. It's so cool, that you can get into years long arguments because there are a clues in a scene that make no sense in to the character or even the plot.

Take, for example, the end of THE SOPRANOS.

There are a lot of people who think Tony dies at the very end. That when the screen goes blank, it's because Tony does. They point to a painting on the back wall of Holsten's (which is 3 minutes from my house... great ice cream... painting isn't really there though). They point to the communion style way the Soprano family eats their onion rings. They point to Members Only jacket. Tony dies, they say. There's no other answer.

.......

What???

No other answer?

Did you listen to the entire episode before that? Did you pay any attention to the fact that Tony and crew take place of all family business? That everyone is either dead or struck a deal with Tony to end the mob war? That no one is left to kill Tony? That hired killers do things for money, not revenge...? That the Russian didn't know Tony existed? That the two hired guns from season 1 were taken care of? That we didn't even know Frank Vincent had a brother, so how could Members Only be Frank Vincent's brother out for revenge? If you look at the end of 90% of all the other episodes, the theme of the series, and what the characters, believe... LIFE GOES ON?

But that doesn't make the scene cool.

So he has to die. That's a cool scene.

Movies... TV (which is changing as it's becoming more of a writer driven medium) have to become about more that a shot, an angle, or a scene. Reviewers need to focus on the whole picture. Directors need to sacrifice their wonderful shot if it doesn't fit who the characters are.

Focus on story.

Focus on character.

It will be better off.