20
Exceptional, but Opaque Characters in Flattened Scripts
In the first fifteen minutes of The Hurt Locker (Katherine Bigelow, 2008), three members of a bomb squad serving in Iraq attempt to disarm a bomb. Their dialogue is tense and clipped; their fear covered by crude sexual humor. When they fail to destroy the bomb by robot, one of the soldiers, Thompson, must approach it in a bomb suit. The stage directions read, “Constrained by the eighty-pound suit, sweat in his eyes, Thompson LUMBERS down the road. . .”1 We imagine the three characters feel much like we might in this situation—frightened, on the edge of losing control, counting the seconds before it is over. None of them stand out as distinct, unusual, or particularly driven. We wonder how these characters will sustain a narrative feature. The bomb is triggered before Thompson can clear the area and he is killed.
A replacement team member, James, is introduced. But when he approaches a bomb, it is described differently: “James heads downrange, a jaunty bounce to his step. . . In stark contrast to Thompson’s cautious, lumbering gait, he seems eager, almost happy, to approach the bomb.”2 Unlike the others, and those of us who are not addicted to combat, he finds energy and purpose in the danger. He is the exemplification of the quote that opens the film, “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”3 James provides the energy that sustains a narrative feature. Yet he is presented as opaque, distant, and unknowable by us.
We have talked in this book about flattened documentary style. This style tilts the balance between the individual and society, which in mainstream film tends to be weighted toward the individual, in the direction of the more impersonal forces of society. It allows the writer to use fiction to explore this abstract material, focusing on how the external forces of society tend to shape individuals rather than the other way around. To write this way requires a rethinking of character presentation. Rather than developing characters in the more traditional manner, with their individual internal decisions explored and driving the story, the writer in the flattened style has to find a way to keep them at a distance, inviting the viewer instead to pay attention to the external, impersonal forces shaping them.
The danger with this style is that these flattened characters may not have sufficient energy to carry the story. One way to overcome this is to create exceptional, driven characters, but to still present them at a distance, keeping them opaque, in order to allow the story to maintain its context. These characters frequently make up for the viewer’s lack of access into their internal life by the force of their will. This chapter will look at four such characters, and ask how well this balance is maintained.
Winter’s Bone
Written and directed by Debra Granik from a novel by Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone (2010) is set in an isolated Ozark community. All the external circumstances of her life—the male dominated community in which she lives with its excessive intermarrying, isolation, and code of silence—are stacked against the main character, seventeen-year old Ree. Further, because of her mother’s depression, Ree must care for her two siblings, Ashlee and Sonny, while foregoing her own life. Yet, when she learns that her father, Jessup, has put their house up for bail and may not appear at his hearing, she does not hesitate. She sets out to find him. Ree eventually learns that not only is her father dead, but that he has been killed because he has violated the community’s code of silence. Yet she ultimately succeeds in saving the house and finally assures her anxious siblings that she isn’t going anywhere. “I’d be lost without the weight of you two on my back.”4
If we examine Ree’s growth in the course of the script, we find a deepening of her character, an increased sense of her own power, a greater understanding of the double-edged bind of kinship, but little that we would call significant character change. She willingly sacrifices for her siblings both at the beginning and at the end of the film, while her personal strength is also evident throughout. We see it as soon as she learns that Jessup is missing. When the sheriff warns she might lose the house and worries whether she will have another place to live, she refuses to consider that possibility, instead insisting, “I’ll find him.” “Girl, I’ve been looking,” the sheriff says. “I said I’ll find him,” Ree corrects him.5 She fearlessly confronts her meth-using uncle Teardrop who knows what has happened to Jessup and attempts to discourage her. This lack of significant character change adds to the flatness of the story, dampening events that could have been presented as an action film, and keeping the focus on the world in which Ree lives.
A second element that does this is that—despite her character strength and distinct from a mainstream film—Ree is unable to resolve the dramatic conflict on her own. Having learned that her father was a snitch, Ree retreats into a period of mourning. Resigned, she burns her father’s belongings and ponders a love note that he sent to her mother. It is at this point that Merab, one of the central antagonists in the story, offers her help. Merab promises to take Ree to Jessup’s body, allowing Ree to retrieve the needed evidence proving that her father’s absence from his hearing was because he had died.
A third element that focuses on the larger social world is the film’s treatment of gender. Winter’s Bone is a story in which women play roles that have traditionally been assigned to men in more mainstream films. This has particular power given the patriarchal community in which it is set. For most of the script, Ree herself drives the story. As she begins her quest for her father, her friend Gail’s husband refuses to let Ree borrow his truck. She confronts Gail about this, “Man, it is so sad to hear you say he won’t let you do something, and then you don’t do it.”6 But women also become obstacles, at least initially. After being discouraged by her uncle Teardrop, she visits other power brokers in the community; however, the gatekeepers to all these male characters are women. Protecting the community’s most feared man, Merab first refuses Ree’s access and then beats her up when she returns—yet Merab ultimately guides Ree to Jessup’s body, bringing the story to resolution. Although the women may have originally disposed of Jessup’s body, they project a richer sense of concern for the community than do the men. From their perspective, getting rid of a snitch may be necessary to preserve social order and that necessity is something that Ree may come to understand. The women step in when the community is at risk, but their concern is over cohesion rather than violence. Merab says, “We need to put a stop to all this nonsense talk about us we’ve been having to hear.”7
There are many ways to interpret Winter’s Bone. One reviewer reframes the argument about active female characters we make in the paragraph above, noting that the film is about the feminization of poverty, “illuminating how poverty’s vice is harder to escape and more likely to ensnare when one is female.”8 From this perspective, what we are celebrating as the women’s support of their community may be better understood as merely their maintenance of the town’s male-dominated, status quo.
How we interpret this is up to the viewer. But no matter our interpretation, what is important for our purpose is how the treatment of character allows the larger ideas discussed above to so powerfully come to the surface.
The Hurt Locker
The other soldiers in his company count the days until they return home, but not James. When his tour is over, he has a short run of domesticity. He shops for cereal with his wife, washes mushrooms, puts his son to bed, and then cannot take it anymore. He returns to Iraq after three script pages as a civilian.
A vital, energetic solider, James is the embodiment of the quote that begins the film. He enjoys taking on missions that no one else wants to touch: defusing a daisy-chain ring of bombs, a car packed with explosives, or a bomb lab. He saves bomb parts that might have killed him and fights with his fellow soldier Sanborn to prove he is the toughest. The one discordant element in his characterization is his fascination with Beckham, the boy who sells him DVDs and whose body James is convinced has been made into a human bomb. The script describes James’s attempt to find and avenge Beckham as a “jihad.”9
The term “jihad” is important because the language that screenwriter Mark Boals uses in the script may raise some questions about the balance we are discussing. James’s character description reads,
In a world of outgoing young men, James seems markedly selfabsorbed. Sanborn notices this trait instantly and is puzzled by it. The truth is that after so many years downrange, racking up kills and disarming bombs, James has lost some of the ability and most of the need to connect to other people.10
The first sentence is the kind of descriptive language appropriate for a screenplay. The second sentence, detailing Sanborn’s reaction, also works to reinforce James’s impact on the other soldiers. However, the last sentence reads more like a writer’s note than a description in a screenplay—a projection of what the writers plan to accomplish in the course of the script. As a description, it raises a number of questions. How do we know that James has lost the ability to connect to other people? Why has he lost it? Did he once have it? Maybe more importantly for the purpose of his character—why has James lost it when Sanborn has not? Understanding this is important because it describes James’s behavior not only with the other soldiers, but ultimately with his family. Yet, this characterization of James, which will chart his whole story, is presented as having already been decided, dramatized in the backstory.
The one present-tense hint that might help us understand James is his quest for Beckham. James’s initial feelings for Beckham are demonstrated by the affectionate headlock he puts on the boy, the second time he sees him. This seems like a nice gesture, but hardly a sign of a deep friendship. Yet, when James believes Beckham’s body has been turned into a human bomb, the script describes it with the italicized phrase, “The war has finally reached him.”11 His subsequent attempts to find Beckham—his threatening of the older Iraqi now manning Beckham’s table and frightening the professor that he assumes is Beckham’s father—are aggressive and personal in contrast to his coolness when defusing bombs. Building on this, the script describes James’s reaction when he comes upon a blown up tanker truck like this, “His faces hardens now in a way we haven’t seen it before, and as the fire flicks on his features he seems lost in a private war of his own.”12 Finally, when he discovers Beckham alive, the description is, “His jihad was pointless. Insane.”13
This suggests Beckham speaks to a deeper conflict in James. Given the technique of keeping the character at a distance, this would not need to be explained at this time, but we might assume that the boy reminds James of his own son. If true, this would make his subsequent return to Iraq more difficult. Yet, after all this investment in Beckham, James quickly returns to his old self. Nothing is made of the intensity of his reaction to the boy. And when James returns home, he appears only marginally interested in his son and does not seem to struggle over leaving him again.
James’s opacity has the effect of shifting the focus of the story to the two other characters who attempt to understand him. “He’s a rowdy boy,” says Eldridge.14 Sanborn calls him reckless. They are positioned as we are, outside, watching, trying to make sense of James’s behavior. When Sanborn asks him why he takes the risks, James answers, “I don’t know. I guess I don’t think about it?” Then he asks Sanborn, “Do you know why—I am the way I am?” Sanborn does not. Instead the stage direction tells us, “They exchange a long look. Brothers at last.”15 Yet Sanborn is different than James. He has other things that matter.
This question of how to read James only deepens when we regard him as an embodiment of the opening quote, “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” If war is a drug, it must be strong enough to draw us away from other things that matter. Yet if nothing else matters to James, his addiction to war’s power has limited significance to the rest of us. If James’s reaction to Beckham is a glimpse into his character before the need for human contact had been burned out of him, we would like to see it further developed.
Goodbye Solo
Solo, the Senegalese cab driver featured in Ramin Bahrini’s Goodbye Solo (2008) also has a powerful will. Yet unlike James, Solo learns to regain human contact by relinquishing some of it. When the film begins, we learn that Solo has already promised to drive his fare William out to Blowing Rock and to return without him. Blowing Rock is an overhang in the Blue Ridge mountains, so situated that air currents blow twigs up against gravity, and which in myth blew a suicide jumper back up to his lover. Realizing William’s intention to jump, Solo spends most of the rest of the film attempting to talk him out of it. At the same time, Solo’s own life falls apart. He separates from his Mexican wife, Quiera, and moves into William’s motel. There he pries into William’s past, seeking a motivation for his suicide. Furious at the intrusion, William replaces Solo with another driver, but Solo persists and succeeds in driving William. The film ends with Solo and his stepdaughter Alex leaving William at Blowing Rock and, subsequently, testing whether the wind currents are strong enough to blow back small sticks that Alex throws into the wind. They are not.
We do not fully understand why Solo’s life is deteriorating at this time. On one hand, his wife is angry with him for seeking to become an airline steward, allowing William to spend the night on the couch, and leaving his disabled cab in the front yard. When she makes good on her threat to have her cousins fix the cab, Solo flees to William’s motel room and fights with her on the phone. William, who has been kicked out by his wife thirty years before, is an unwitting witness to the conversation. We subsequently learn that William has now returned to his hometown to get a glimpse of his grandson who works in a local theater, his only connection to his family. On the other hand, Quiera wants Solo back, and it is he who has chosen to bring their relationship to a head. When Solo visits her at the hospital to see his new son, she comments on how happy he seems holding the baby and tells Solo that he cannot leave. He confronts her, explaining that he has always done things her way and now he wants to do things his way. This question of whose will is going to dominate, or more specifically Solo’s initial inability to accept that relationships must always involve navigating differing wills, becomes the theme of the film.
We also never explicitly learn why Solo becomes obsessed with William in particular. Ramin Bahrini in his director’s notes explains Solo’s kindness is due to his cultural background and compares it to his own Iranian heritage.16 The friendship causes Solo to begin to change, to accept another’s will as no longer a challenge to his own—at the end of the film he stops trying to talk William out of his suicide. A key moment for Solo is when he finds and reads William’s notebook, which contains observations of Solo. The observations are not revelatory in themselves—they merely report on Solo’s activities— but the fact that Solo realizes that he exists in someone else’s thoughts seems like a discovery to him. Like in The Hurt Locker, the observations of another, even those which fail to enlighten, give depth and presence to the opaque character—a depth that may ultimately be recognition as to how hard it is to penetrate another person’s world.
Goodbye Solo consciously evokes Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 Iranian film Taste of Cherry about a man, who, having already dug his own grave, drives around Tehran seeking someone to cover him with dirt after his suicide. The man never discusses his reasons for wanting to kill himself and the film clearly is not interested in them. Goodbye Solo reverses the intended suicide—but both suggest that human connection requires the recognition, if not the acceptance, of the divergence of the other’s will.
Our view is that Goodbye Solo works the balance between the individual and the social more deeply than does The Hurt Locker. James’s lack of connection is established before the film begins and is reiterated, rather than developed, throughout. His reaction to Beckham suggests some opportunity for insight into his character, but this is ultimately not explored. As a result, its thematic resonance seems more static, determined by the opening quote. In learning to respect William’s will, and maybe to escape framing the rest of his life as a battle of wills, Solo’s movement through the story seems to demonstrate his growth. Yet the film never surrenders to the internal. The fact that Solo’s change is presented at a distance allows the film to retain its resonance about an outsider attempting to find his place in a new country. We can infer that will for Solo is a tool, a way of engaging America. Paradoxically, it allows him to both explore the country while keeping it at a distance. His ability to finally relax it becomes a step in his coming closer to finding a new home, without the risk of losing where he came from.
Fish Tank
Unlike Solo, Mia, the fifteen-year old lead character in Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009) does not have the option of seeing herself reflected back through another’s conscious. In the world of the film, written and directed by the English filmmaker Andrea Arnold, such sharing is not possible. Constantly jealous of her, Mia’s mother throws at Mia the news that she planned to abort her daughter. Her mother’s lover, Connor, flirts with Mia and eventually seduces her. After he runs off, Mia follows and discovers he lives a parallel life with a wife and child in a more comfortable suburban housing estate. Unable to express her rage in any other way, Mia pees on his carpet and then entices his young daughter, Keira, into the marshes of the Thames. In a subsequent fight, Mia first throws Keira into the river and then rescues her. The film is framed by Mia’s attempt to free a horse from a traveler encampment and her subsequent relationship with Billy, the younger brother of the horse’s owner. Learning that the horse has died near the end of the movie provides her the only moment to break down and cry. After a shared dance with her mother and her younger sister, the only connection that seems possible between them, she flees with Billy to go to Wales.
In some ways, Mia is the most disturbing of the four characters we have met because she is the most impulsive and the least self-aware. She is caught between adolescence and adulthood in a world that offers her no comfort or support. One of the most powerful scenes is paradoxically the most physically painful. Ignoring her mother’s jealousy, she wades into a stream, catching a fish barehanded with Connor before slicing open her ankle. Connor bandages it and then carries her on his back across a grassy field. She lays her head on his. The scene is both childlike as we see the parental care that she is missing and sexual in the delicate intimacy of her head on his. But since ultimately Connor is not a character who Mia can trust, this moment is ephemeral—it merely serves as a contrast to the rest of her life.
In some way, Mia is the best example of the balance we discussed in the beginning of the chapter. Her drive—her attempts to free the horse, her competition with her mother, her decision to submit an audition tape to become a dancer, her almost uncontained rage toward Connor—all make us interested in her character and allow her to carry the story. The fact that the script proposes no explanations for the emotions driving these actions, however, keeps the story from becoming internal or psychological. We concentrate instead on the surface of her world—the cramped size and lack of privacy in their apartment, the blood on her head when she butts one of the girls dancing on the corner, the chained white horse in the middle of the city, the contrast between the urban world with the fishing stream meadow, the ferocity of the Thames, the way she dances with her mother and sister. We watch Mia drag Keira away from her home, stunned by the extent of her rage. In an unbearable world, it gives Mia life. When Mia leaves with Billy at the end of the movie, it does not seem like a change in her character as much as a momentary escape from an impossible reality. We do know not what change for her would be.
Summary
In this chapter, we discussed how characters presented with greater distance work well in flattened films because they allow the impersonal forces of society and culture to compete with characters’ individual internal conflicts. But just because a character is presented to the viewer as distanced does not mean that she should be opaque or flat to the writer. In fact, working with such distance requires the writer to work harder in order to convince the viewer that the character has been fully imagined. Further we suggest that in order to sustain feature films, such opaque characters work best when they carry a great sense of drive and will.
References
1. Boal, Mark. “The Hurt Locker Shooting Draft June 7, 2008.” Accessed June 10, 2012. http://content.thehurtlocker.com/20100103_01/hurtlocker_script.pdf, 8.
2. Ibid., 23.
3. Ibid., 1.
4. Granik, Debra and Anne Rosellini. “Winter’s Bone.” Accessed June 10, 2010. http://moviecultists.com/wp-content/uploads/screenplays/wintersbone.pdf , 73.
5. Ibid., 10.
6. Ibid., 14.
7. Ibid., 66.
8. Wilson, Natalie. August 3, 2010. “Chilling Truths in Winter’s Bone,” Ms. Blog. Accessed June 10, 2012. http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2010/08/03/chilling-truths-in-winter’s-bone/ .
9. Boal, op. cit., 102.
10. Ibid., 17.
11. Ibid., 84.
12. Ibid., 96.
13. Ibid., 102.
14. Ibid., 22.
15. Ibid., 113.
16. Bahrani, Ramin. “Director’s Statement.” Accessed June 10, 2008. http://www.raminbahrani.com/pdf/GoodbyeSolo.pdf , 4.