In earlier posts, I’ve talked about protagonists and heroes at length. Yesterday Michael Goldenberg offered a a new description that I love:
The protagonist is the character that suffers the most.
In one sentence, both definition and practical advice. Perfect.
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June 24th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Unless of course, your protagonist is a ruthless oil baron. :)
June 24th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
I’m not sure I like this. Especially in “killer” movies:
I think the skinny dipper and the decapitated dude suffer more than Hooper, Quint and Brody.
June 24th, 2010 at 4:14 pm
I’d say that just about every classic western defies that idea of the protagonist. Usually the villagers were the ones suffering the most. The sentence itself sounds good, but it’s far too reductionist. If I were to boil what a protagonist is down to a formula I’d say the protagonist is the character that undergoes the bigger transformation in the story. But then there are plenty of films where the main character stays the same. Most of these are lousy films, by the way.
June 24th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Two Words: Oceans Thirteen
June 24th, 2010 at 5:13 pm
Brilliant! This even holds true for pornos. I mean, having sex with that many slutty nurses counts as suffering, right?
June 24th, 2010 at 5:54 pm
Nelson, you are 100% right, a protagonist is the character who “transforms” the most. Following Goldenburg’s rule is a surefire way to write bad scripts by forcing on the page events to make a so called protagonist “suffer” rather than “grow”.
And there are so many technicalites to this with examples of Robert the Bruce vs William Wallace in Braveheart. Rosewood vs Foley in Beverly Hills Cop or Red vs Andy in Shawshank. All have examples of a character who grew more than a character who suffered more. So what would Goldenburg call the character who grows more?
Mr. August needs to clarify Goldenburg’s rule or elminate this misleading tip from the site and writers minds.
June 24th, 2010 at 7:21 pm
Then of course, the antagonist is the character that you want to suffer the most. :-)
June 24th, 2010 at 7:27 pm
@Nick
If you consider psychological and existential suffering as well as physical then the definition holds up for most movies.
June 24th, 2010 at 7:44 pm
If the protagonist takes it upon herself/himself to correct the situation that causes others to suffer, every pain inflicted upon the other characters is sympathetically inflicted on the protagonist. The protagonist carries the weight of the suffering of others because the decision to be the protagonist in the first place makes everything personal. By extension, the audience suffers the same trauma.
I think of the protagonist as the Audience’s nerve ending.
June 24th, 2010 at 8:12 pm
@Nick
I agree with DougJ. Those who die – their suffering is over.
June 24th, 2010 at 11:01 pm
“Agonist” is one who suffers agony. The protagonist is the one that suffers the most, and antagonist one who causes suffering. I prefer the terms “suffering” and “agony” over “conflict”, which in my mind is restrictive to physical violence and fisticuffs.
June 24th, 2010 at 11:14 pm
Well, not necessarily.
June 25th, 2010 at 12:09 am
DougJ – Yes!
(Heck, I’d leave physical suffering mostly out of it.)
June 25th, 2010 at 12:55 am
Nice! – Its a little zen, and it works for Casablanca and Coyote Ugly at the same time… which kinda makes me enjoy not poking a hole in it.
June 25th, 2010 at 4:15 am
Yes, or ‘the protagonist is the character who experience the most conflict’. Very useful.
June 25th, 2010 at 5:00 am
Was it Campbell who wrote: “The Hero is the one who comes to know.”
June 25th, 2010 at 6:15 am
The cocoon phase of development is where all the violent struggling happens. This phrase works really well for the protagonist.
Especially with the previous post, because I was wondering how my main character/hero was going to fill his protagonist role when someone else seemed to be wearing it so well.
Great advice!
June 25th, 2010 at 7:55 am
I agree that suffering is key to making a movie (or any story) interesting, but I can think of too many counterexamples to really make this work for me. In pretty much any James Bond film, Bond barely suffers at all, whereas the bad guy and his associates suffer all manner of indignities and injuries.
However, what’s key is that when Bond suffers we are concerned, but when badguys suffer we are jubilant.
So I think the aphorism should be modified to include what the audience wants. Something like…
The protagonist is the character that suffers the most but whom the audience wants to suffer the least.
Or, rather gracelessly…
The protagonist is the character for whom the gap between the audience’s ideal level of their suffering and the actual level of suffering which they endure is largest.
I agree, the original was pithier.
June 25th, 2010 at 8:08 am
When it comes to those who die in horror films or ancillary characters suffering at the hands of some great evil, keep one thing in mind: Their pain is great, but brief – especially with regards to screen time. The protagonist’s struggle lasts throughout the story. In my opinion, the meaning is multi-layered, with regards to degree as well as quantity.
June 25th, 2010 at 8:13 am
I have seen a few films where it is the audience who suffers the most.
June 25th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
You could replace “protagonist” with “screenwriter”. I certainly feel that way after hearing about the new heads of our most important funding insitutions here in Canada/Quebec (the banana republic of Canadian provinces). Readers are welcome to visit my blog to read my published rant.
June 25th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
Well, the Bond example above proves wrong that the protagonist is the one that transforms the most: Bond is pretty much the same guy in every Bond movie. Exceptions to a rule mean the rule is a piece of… nonsense.
The only sure way -until somebody else proves me wrong again- that I can think of to define the protagonist is that it is the character at the center of the main conflict of the story, fighting this conflict -be it a situation, be it an antagonist-. I think this holds true to every story told in a dramatic way.
June 25th, 2010 at 2:21 pm
If there’s a fast and loose definition I’d say its the character who is the most torn between choices or who suffers the most morally. Obviously, you could have a character in a story tied to a chair and being tortured throughout the whole movie. This person would suffer the most but would make a bad protagonist/hero.
June 25th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
In revenge stories, the protagonist is often the one who suffered the most in the past, and makes the bad guys suffer in the present.
June 25th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, John stated that Charlie is the hero but not the protagonist; that Willie is the protagonist. But his suffering was mostly internal angst from a rotten childhood. If a writer believes that a protagonist is the one who suffers the most, doesn’t he risk creating a reactive character? One who has suffering inflicted on him. Everyone suffers. We just happen to focus on the protagonist’s suffering because it’s his story. He’s the one who decides to act or react to that suffering.
June 25th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Most of the James Bond movies don’t follow a lot of basic screenwriting/storytelling principles, for better or worse. However, I’d like to point out that in three of my favorite Bond films — On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, License to Kill, and Casino Royale — Bond truly does suffer, and the story is better for it.
June 25th, 2010 at 3:49 pm
Nelson, I don’t know if the post was meant as a rule as much as it was a description. I suppose there are other ways to describe the protagonist.
I follow your disagreement with the Bond films, yet I can’t help feel like they’re just different than most. All the movies are sequels with a long established protagonist. There is never much long-term suffering in Bond films anyway. When there is, 007 seems to take the brunt of it. Isn’t he the one who gets chided by HQ, then beat-up or drugged and ultimately ends up facing the business end of a laser beam, table saw or hanging over something nasty?
June 25th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
I think the statement holds true about the Bond movies. Women that Bond falls for are always getting killed off. Why do you think that happens? So he can SUFFER.
June 25th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Yeah, as I think about this more, I remember that Brody’s fear of water makes that entire third act aboard the ship a “suffer in silence” episode.
June 25th, 2010 at 10:58 pm
@Keith Alexander: I was disagreeing with my own rule about protagonist being the one who is transformed the most, not the one about suffering.
In the end all this is quite pointless: if a story is well constructed everyone can tell easily who the protagonist is without any need for a definition. You learn to create good stories by being exposed to other good stories and making up your own theories of why they are good or not, and of course by practising. It happens the same with painting: you learn to paint well by practising and being exposed to good art. All artists that have made it into the history books had a deep knowledge about art before their time and about their contemporaries.
Kurosawa’s advice to aspiring filmmakers was to study the great works of literature and think what was it that made them good. And Kurosawa stands at one of the highest places, if not the highest, in the history of filmmaking. I’d like to add: you can learn a few things reading bad screenplays, but you can learn a lot more reading good screenplays and good novels and stageplays.
Somebody said that while all bad scripts are the same, all good ones are different. I think that if we agree with this statement -and I do- we’ll be reluctant to reduce any character or story to a formula or paradigm.
June 25th, 2010 at 11:18 pm
@Script Doctor Eric
I disagree, Eric. Daniel Plainview definitely suffered a lot in that movie, almost exclusively from events stemming from his greed.
He gains who he thinks is a brother, someone he can finally relate and open up to and the man turns out to be a fraud.
He drinks himself into a stupor and drives his “son” away, the only person he really only had any feelings for. He lives with money that can’t make him happy and he gives in to his rage and kills Eli, an act that most definitely will lang him in prison and no doubt, he’ll lose everything because if that, which he recognizes when he says, “I’m finished.”
I’d say that that is a lot of suffering to go through. Most people don’t realize it because we, the audience, are used to the protagonist suffering from exterior forces (Andy Dufresne in “The Shawshank Redemption”, Claireece “Precious” Jones in “Precious”), whereas Daniel Plainview suffered from internal forces of his own device.
Anybody agree? Disagree?
June 26th, 2010 at 1:09 am
@ Nelson #22: “Exceptions to a rule mean the rule is a piece of… nonsense”
That’s wrong. Any rule that can be written down in a sentence is going to have exceptions. That doesn’t mean that it’s not a valuable rule to use when thinking about a problem.
BTW – you can’t disprove my rule “Any rule that can be written down in a single sentence is going to have exceptions”. If you find an exception you have, of course, demonstrated that it works.
June 26th, 2010 at 11:27 am
A nice definition. I’ve always felt this way about Fargo, in which I feel that the “protagonist” and the “hero” are two separate characters. Jerry is the protagonist. His actions drive the plot, his twisting and turning trying to find a way out of his predicament constantly moves the story. Marge, who enters the story halfway in, is the hero. In most stories the protagonist and the hero are the same person, but they can be seperated. Or sometimes there can be no hero at all.
June 27th, 2010 at 8:41 pm
not Ferris bueller’s day off
June 27th, 2010 at 11:21 pm
@John August:
Along those lines, a famous producer of many commercial films once told me, “It doesn’t matter what kind of borderline (bad) things your hero does, so long as the villain does things that are ten times worse.”
He was referring more to the Steve McQueen anti-hero type, but I do think it fits in tune with what Michael Goldenberg said to you. And I believe what you are conveying is that we have to relate with the hero, and have a vested interest in rooting for him/her. And when we watch our hero suffer, what better way to give us a rooting interest.
As always love your posts, thoughts and advice. Good Luck on your new project, “Monsterpocalypse.”
SJB
June 28th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Speaking of protagonists, I just watched Tales From The Script. It’s badly directed and edited but it is super interesting.
Nice map, by the way.
And does William Goldman ever age??!!
June 28th, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Suffering is being torn between two equally bad choices.
June 30th, 2010 at 4:27 am
Suffers the most, wants the most, is attached to outcome the most. Think Jack Bauer.
July 1st, 2010 at 8:49 pm
tom #34 doesn’t seem to realize that Cameron Frye is actually the protagonist of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off :)
July 2nd, 2010 at 1:30 pm
@ Jane: Cameron is only the protagonist if the protagonist is solely the one who “suffers the most,” and possibly the character who changes the most. But the original meaning of protagonist (and the meaning its had throughout most of the history of drama dating back to the Greeks who invented the word) is simply the main or leading character. It’s hard to argue that Ferris isn’t the main character. He’s the one (the only one) who drives the plot forward. The one who makes all the decisions.
The hero who changes the lives of those around him, including his sidekick Cameron. I think it’s quite strange that in the past few years people have begun to posit that hero and protagonist can be different. It can cause one to break a fundamental law of drama, leading to a movie that’s about one character for the first half the film, and then becomes a movie about a very different character for the second half. I can think of two such films in recent years.
July 6th, 2010 at 6:43 am
@Nelson (#30,22): “In the end all this is quite pointless: if a story is well constructed everyone can tell easily who the protagonist is without any need for a definition.”
I’d go even further. There are some great stories where it is difficult to say who exactly the protagonist is.
All rules have at lesat potential exceptions. My only all-encompassing “rule” is: Everything in context.
For example: In the context of a perspective to build a framework for your narrative (or screenplay, specifically), if the “rule” John cited works, then it’s a good working rule.
July 9th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
working on a script with 3 main characters and 1 of them goes through all sorts of tough crap. Don’t ask me why, the characters seem to write themselves…so this makes me think perhaps she is the protagonist and the other 2 characters are just pivotal characters? Anyway, it may change, I’m only up to page 40. Thanks for sharing.