Any Doctor Who fans out there? I've observed, on more than one occasion, that The Doctor is the oldest, wisest, smartest, idiot child in the universe. Sometimes driven and serious, but just as often clownish and disrespectful. I love that. I've discovered that I am intrigued by characters that contain contradictions. Gentle killers, shy exhibitionists, civilized savages, whatever.
Characters that carry their own contradictions can be unpredictable. They can take a wider range of actions without being seen as acting out of character. We know what the brave hero does when faced with certain peril. But the coward who sometimes finds his courage? We know what we want him to do but we don't know what he will do. And that creates dramatic tension.
Contradictions may be inherent in the personality of the character, as with The Doctor, or they may be introduced as the characters grow and overcome (or fail to overcome) challenges. A shy, unnoticed, habitually quiet person may find the strength to stand up and take charge when no one else will. A stone-cold assassin my hesitate when a child enters the kill zone.
These movements are tricky and must be handled with care. The goal is to surprise the reader or audience with something unexpected but not totally unbelievable for the established character.
If the character is changed completely, if they don't go back to whoever they were before rising to their particular occasion, then no contradiction is expressed. Their experience is merely a life-changing event. But they can't go back completely, either. They must now carry the potential to contradict their established pattern and the reader or audience must see that potential at least occasionally. Otherwise whatever happened was just an aberration, a break in character that was convenient to the author.
I will not claim, as some might, that characters who are always brave, heroic, steadfast, and true inherently boring. Like all other types of characters, they just want to be written well. At best, such characters can represent what we aspire to be. But characters that have contradictory natures? Characters that can be heroes today and still fail tomorrow, or who can be brave and uncertain, all at once? I think such characters are closer to representing what we really are.
1 comment:
One of the great things about Doctor Who was that throughout all of the Doctor's regenerations, he would remain wise and brilliant, but would have other interesting and/or contradictory characteristics that would change from one regeneration to the next, and would always seem to work. The original Doctor was a brilliant scientist, but also a cranky old man. The second was a clown, the third a fop, the fourth childishly playful, and so on. From what I've heard, the first version of the Doctor that someone sees (Tom Baker in my case) tends to be that person's favorite, which implies that they all worked well. They were able to keep that unpredictability that you're talking about in your post, until it was time for the ultimate "life-changing event" and the Doctor gained a new personality (and body).
Post a Comment