Character

A film character is not a person. It is a small set of traits, chosen because the plot will need each of them, and shown early so the audience can start predicting. That is the textbook account. The interesting question starts where it stops: what a film does when the traits no longer explain the person. Some films let the character decide something the traits did not predict. Others change the character by decree, because the ending needs them to be wrong. Students tend to grade characters on realism, as if "round" were praise and "flat" a fault. The books are clearer than that.

Function, taxonomy, judgement

Film Art treats character as machinery. A trait exists to cause something later; Jill's marksmanship in The Man Who Knew Too Much sits idle for an hour and then fires the last shot (fa 78). The question to ask of any trait is what it is for.

Boggs (The Art of Watching Films) sorts instead: flat against round, static against developing. His caveat matters more than the categories. Round is not better than flat; the terms describe what a character is doing in the story, and a flat character serves an allegory better than a round one would (awf 59). He then files Charles Foster Kane, tentatively, among the static (awf 58).

Giannetti (Understanding Movies) quotes Welles on the same character and reaches the opposite place. Welles "refuses to place his protagonist in a tidy moral category"; the audience is meant to judge, and the film declines to (um 517). The disagreement is not about Kane. Boggs asks which box a character fits. Welles builds the character so that the box will not close. A film can assemble a person as a bundle of causes and still refuse the audience a verdict on him. That refusal is a design choice, not a failure of characterisation.

On the bench

Marion Crane is the functional model executed in full: goal, flaw, a moral decision on her last night, every trait doing causal work, and then the film removes her (Killing the protagonist at minute 47). Norman is built the other way, out of sympathy first, so that the reveal re-reads every trait the parlour scene gave him.

Travis Bickle is the Welles case. The film stays inside his head and never once agrees with him, and its most quoted scene is a performer supplying the character's own text in a room with nobody else in it (Taxi Driver — the mirror). Nancy Downs is the counter-case. The Craft needs her to be the reason the coven works and the reason it must be dismantled, and it converts her without giving her a decision that would explain the conversion (The Craft — Nancy's turn). Her wish was different in kind from the others' (Nancy is the only poor one), and the film punishes the difference. Psycho reassigns allegiance scene by scene; The Craft reassigns it by fiat.

What to look for

• What does the character's first scene ask you to predict, and does the film ever cash the prediction?
• Which trait turns out to be causal, and which is decoration?
• When the character changes, is the change a decision they make or a thing done to them?
• Does the film give you a verdict on this person, or leave you to make one?

In the books

In general, a character is given traits that will play causal roles in the overall story action.

— Film Art, fa 78

Round characters are not inherently superior to flat characters. The terms merely imply how different characters function within the framework of a story.

— Boggs, awf 59

It depends on who's talking about him. The point of the picture is not so much the solution of the problem as its presentation.

— Giannetti, um 517