The Protagonist’s Dramatic Goals, Wants and Needs

JOSC 1 (1) pp. 83–97 Intellect Limited 2010

Journal of Screenwriting | Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.83/1

PATRICK CATTRYSSE Emerson College European Center; Antwerp University; Université Libre Bruxelles

The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

Screenwriting manuals tell us that narratives should have a protagonist character design and that a protagonist should ha ve an important dramatic goal to achieve. protagonist With respect to this goal, manuals often mention another common distinc- dramatic goal tion, that between a protagonist’s ‘want’ and ‘need’. Wants are generally want understood as external and/or conscious dramatic goals, whereas needs need are defined as internal and/or unconscious dramatic goals. This essay empathy argues that these tools could be made more powerful if defined in a more precise way. Whereas wants refer to the goals of characters at the level of story, needs play at the level of the interaction between plot and real audience. This re-definition links the wants and needs debate with the much wider and far more complex study of audience involvement and its relationships with the value systems expressed in a narrative and those experienced by a viewer; a subject which stretches far beyond the limits of a single article.

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1. Few exceptions confirm the general rule; see Bordwell (1985:13ff.; 2006: 247–248), who does also consider the study of screenwriting manuals. 2. For more information, see http://ec.europa. eu/education/ policies/educ/ bologna/bologna. pdf. Accessed 5 June 2009. 3. For example the Catholic University of Louvain association, or the University of Antwerp Network connecting Belgian Universities with colleges. 4. I understand narrative studies in its broader post-1980s sense, that is as ‘post-classical’ (Herman 1997) or ‘contextual’ (Fludernik 2005: 44) narrative studies involving the input from a whole range of disciplines such as rhetorics, pragmatics, cognitive studies, psychology, cultural studies, etc.

INTRODUCTION

Although screenwriting manuals on the one hand and academic narrative studies on the other have both dealt with storytelling, they have managed to do so by largely ignoring each other for many decades. 1 As a consequence, both practitioners and theoreticians have missed opportunities to learn from each other. One can surmise several reasons for this situation. Screenwriting manuals serve a purpose that is very different from that of narrative studies. As a consequence, the terminology developed on both the practical and the theoretical side of storytelling is considerably different. From a practitioner’s point of view, academic jargon is often considered too sophisticated and not practical. From an academic’s point of view, the practitioner’s terminology is considered imprecise and confusing. However, bridging the gap between theoreticians and practitioners would benefit both parties. Several initiatives may assist in achieving that goal, though needless to say there is still a long way to go. For example, the Bologna decision to restructure European higher education according to the bachelor-master (BA-MA) structure compels non-university tertiary education institutions (TEIs) to reinforce the academic component in their objectives.2 At the same time, it requires universities to consider more and new aspects of vocational training. Following the BA-MA Bologna indications, institutional collaborations and networks have been set up between uni versity and non-university TEIs.3 In the particular case of screenwriting it is worth mentioning the international conference on ‘Re-thinking the Screenplay’ held at the University of Leeds in September 2008, to be followed by another at the Helsinki University of Art and Design in September 2009, with a third being planned for 2010. These conferences and other initiatives could launch (or perhaps re-launch) a discipline called Screenwriting Studies, where both ‘traditional’ academic research and practice-oriented research could join forces. More concretely, this implies that know-how from practical writing classes can encounter academic narrative studies.4 Such a meeting represents a typical interdisciplinary situation with all the complex problems and obstacles associated with a clash of different cultures: that is, different mentalities and attitudes, different intra-disciplinary points of view, differences between what is commonly known and what is not, different discourses or language use such as register and terminologies, etc. Consequently, academics will have to find ways to communicate better with practitioners, and the latter will also have to make efforts to meet the former half way. In order to bridge the gap between theory and practice, some sort of new ‘interlingua’ may have to be developed which is sophisticated enough to meet academic standards of precision, but not so sophisticated as to appear pedantic to the practice-oriented writer or trainer. Since a language never functions outside specific user contexts, some common ground will have to be developed in order for that ‘interlingua’ to be used socio-pragmatically and culturally in common (and therefore more efficient) ways by both practitioners and academics.

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The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs

It is within this larger context that I venture a very modest contribution. It deals with one, rather widespread, terminological confusion in the normative discussion about protagonists, dramatic goals, and more specifically in the use of the terms wants and needs. Screenwriting manuals tell us that narratives should have a protagonist and that a protagonist should have an important dramatic goal to achieve. Why this is so is not always clearly explained but one may assume that it is less difficult to interest audiences in someone rather than in something – hence the protagonist of the story – and that it is easier to interest audiences in someone who wants something than in someone who does not want anything; hence the dramatic goal. The types of problems or dramatic goals protagonists may run into have been widely discussed in screenwriting manuals. Dramatic goals can be concrete or abstract, external or internal, short term or long term, temporary or final, static or dynamic, simple or layered, conscious or unconscious, etc. With respect to this goal, screenwriting manuals often mention another common distinction, that between a protagonist’s want and need. In what follows, I claim that these tools could be made more powerful if defined in a more precise way. At the same time, what follows puts into practice a shift towards the aforementioned ‘interlingua’ between academic and practitioner, in the hope that the over-specialized academic and the imprecise practitioner may begin to find their common ground.

5. This is also part of this ‘other’ practitioner’s culture. Trainers pass on knowledge and expertise in workshops such as the European programme ‘North by Northwest’ (which included tutors from University of Southern California) who ‘mention’ this in their workshops. Unlike the academic tradition, the oral tradition prevalent in such workshops does not have written references.

WANTS AND NEEDS: EXAMPLES

According to oral tradition,5 the terms want and need originated with screenwriting guru Frank Daniel, but since then several other screen writing commentators have applied the terms, adapting them sometimes to their particular needs. Table 1 shows some examples taken from Trottier (1998: 24–28), Cowgill (1999: 45–46) and McIlrath (2004: 36). I add two more examples in order to support my argument. The definitions of want and need given by the sources mentioned above reveal two recurring parameters: external vs. internal and conscious vs. unconscious. One parameter does not necessarily exclude the other. EXTERNAL WANT VS. INTERNAL NEED

Several critics use the concepts want and need to distinguish an external goal from an internal one. For example, in The Screenplay: A Blend of Film Form and Content , Margaret Mehring writes ‘a character can be driven to achieve one goal while being simultaneously compelled to seek a very different and conflicting goal. It is this warring between the external and internal goals that is the essence of great drama’ (Mehring 1990: 195). Mehring associates the want with an outer, physical struggle and the need with an inner, psychological one. This distinction is taken up by several other commentators such as Vogler (1992: 17), who distinguishes a protagonist’s external journey from his 85


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Title

Want

Need

Gone with the wind (1939)

Scarlet (Vivien Leigh) wants (among many other things) Ashley, who is married.

Scarlet needs Rhett Butler, who is not married.

Casablanca (1942)

Rick (Humphrey Bogart) wants to forget about Paris and bury himself in Casablanca.

Rick needs to discover what happened in Paris (in order to regain his proper self).

Some Like it Hot (1959)

Joe (Tony Curtis) wants to cheat Joe needs to love Sugar (‘tell her Sugar into a relationship. the truth’).

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)

Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) wants the custody of his son.

Romancing the Stone (1984)

Joan (Kathleen Turner) wants to Joan needs to find love. find the stone.

Witness (1985)

John Book (Harrison Ford) wants to catch the corrupt cops.

Moonstruck (1987)

Loretta (Cher) wants to marry Loretta needs to marry Ronny Johnny because he is a safe bet. whom she loves.

Twins (1988)

Vincent Benedict (Danny De Vito) Vincent needs the love of a family. wants $5 million.

Pretty Woman (1990)

Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) wants to further his career.

The Devil’s Advocate (1997)

Kramer needs to become a good father.

Book needs to relate more compassionately to others.

Lewis needs to follow his heart.

Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) Kevin Lomax needs to seek moral to continue his profes- justice and not prevent perverts sional career as a lawyer who and gangsters from escaping their never lost a case. rightful punishment.

wants

Traffic (2000)

Robert Wakefield wants to fight the drugs cartel on an international scale as a politico-judicial problem.

Robert Wakefield needs to fight the drugs problem on a family scale as a medical or a healthcare problem.

Analysis: the author

Table 1: Protagonists’ wants and needs in Hollywood films.

internal journey, or Lucey (1996: 51ff.) who refers to an A-storyline which deals with an external problem – winning a law suit, destroying the monster – and a B-storyline dealing with internal problems, usually of a psychological nature, such as regaining self-esteem, acquiring independence or love, etc. Finally, a similar distinction can be found more recently in Batty (2006: 12) who explicitly titles his article ‘Wants and Needs: Action and Emotion in Scripts’. Batty also associates the want with a literal, 86


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physical journey and the need with an internal, emotional one (see also Batty 2007: 45). CONSCIOUS WANT VS. UNCONSCIOUS NEED

A second group of screenwriting experts associate want and need with a conscious vs. unconscious dramatic goal. This is believed to be how Frank Daniel originally understood the concepts. Others have picked up this definition, such as Robert McKee (1997) who uses want, need and goal interchangeably, but who indicates that a protagonist may have a conscious desire and a self-contradictory unconscious desire: ‘the most memorable, fascinating characters tend to have not only a conscious but an unconscious desire. Although these complex protagonists are unaware of their subconscious need, the audience senses it, perceiving in them an inner contradiction’ (McKee 1997: 138). David Trottier indicates that if the central character has a conscious goal, beneath it may loom a great unconscious need: The need has to do with self-image, or finding love, or living a better life – whatever the character needs to be truly happy or fulfilled. This yearning sometimes runs counter to the goal and sometimes supports or motivates it. The Crisis often brings the need into full consciousness. (Trottier 1998: 24) Finally, in a similar vein, Mark McIlrath (2004: 35) distinguishes between a want as a conscious objective and a need as an unconscious one. In agreement with Trottier, he argues that the need may become visible to the main character in the end. As a consequence, the need may become the explicit objective in Act 3 (see McIlrath 2006; 2007: 40). SOME PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS

The examples script-experts advance to illustrate their concept of need – finding love, fighting a low self-image – show how a need defined as an ‘internal goal’ may easily shift into (or be associated with) a need defined as an ‘unconscious goal’, even though an internal goal need not necessarily be unconscious. Physical actions are often associated with a conscious goal whereas character evolutions are frequently treated as evolving in an unconscious way. That is why some authors even combine both parameters to distinguish a want from a need. David Trottier connects the conscious want with what he calls the ‘Outside/ Action Story’ and the unconscious need with the ‘Inside/Emotional Story’; ‘usually the need is blocked from within by a character flaw. This flaw serves as the inner opposition to the inner need. This character flaw is obvious to the audience because we see the character hurting people, including himself’ (Trottier 1998: 25). In a similar way, Cowgill suggests that ‘the character’s need… refers to his unconscious motivation and comes from a depth of his psyche of which he is often 87


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ignorant’ (Cowgill 1999: 45), and that ‘what a character needs is often the psychological key to understanding his inner obstacles’ (Cowgill 1999: 47). Furthermore, irrespective of the parameters used to define the concepts of want and need, the examples mentioned above show two more common aspects of the want and need dilemma. Firstly, the development of a conflict between an inner and an outer or between a conscious and an unconscious goal can help to establish more psychological depth and to ‘dimensionalize’ characters (Lucey 1996: 52) so as to avoid the narrative becoming too cartoon-like. Secondly, when a conflict is written in between the want and the need, it is shown to the audience that the more protagonists go for their want, the further away they drift from their need. Hence, applying the want vs. need terminology, a story with a happy ending is a story where the main character abandons his want in time to go for his need, whereas a tragedy represents a narrative where the main character sticks to his want and thereby loses his need. A ‘Hollywood happy ending’ then is, as the joke goes, when the protagonist exchanges his want for his need in time and therefore ‘deserves’ to obtain his want in the end after all. In spite of these common features, I would argue that the respective parameters external vs. internal or conscious vs. unconscious are not accurate enough to describe the aforementioned examples of wants and needs in a precise way. PROBLEMS WITH THE EXTERNAL VS. INTERNAL PARAMETER

To associate want and need with an external vs. internal goal or journey appears to be problematic in more than one way. Firstly, a dramatic goal refers to an intention, an objective. One may therefore assume that all intentions are internal. That is why beginner screenwriters are often advised to watch out for intentional writing, and not to write intentions that readers of the script (e.g. director, actors) will not be able to see, hear or dramatize, e.g. ‘He wants to buy cigarettes’. Furthermore, a closer look at the examples given as external vs. internal goals reveals that to verbalize dramatic goals in narratives is subject to interpretation. Sometimes the dramatic goal is very clear, concrete and visual; at other times it is not (and for the sake of my argument I discount those narratives which do not seem to present a dramatic goal). Consequently, the external vs. internal nature of the goal often depends less on the goal itself than on the interpretation or perception of the goal, that is, on the level of abstraction of its expression. For example, if we consider The Devil’s Advocate (1997), we could say that Kevin Lomax’s want is to further his professional ego while his conflicting need is to develop his moral judgement. In this case, both want and need would be considered as internal. However, one could also say that his want is to win the case against the paedophile while his need is to abandon the defence of the client, in which case both want and need could be seen as external. 88


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Conflating external and internal ‘goal’ with external or internal ‘journey’ as some critics do (e.g. Mehring 1990, Lucey 1996, Batty 2007) may be even more confusing because the goal generally refers to the end point of the journey, while the journey (whether external or internal) refers to the process, i.e. the way(s) to reach that goal, or not, entirely or partially. The distinction between an external and an internal journey of a character is, I suggest, a very useful one (and also a very old one). Whereas in ‘external journey’ the word ‘journey’ is used in a literal sense to indicate a real voyage or a series of events and actions, the ‘internal journey’ refers to a metaphorical journey indicating psychological changes a character may or may not go through. In other words, the outer and inner ‘journey’ refer to the old distinction between plot (understood here as the course of events) and character design. Both plot and character represent the two inseparable sides of the same dramatic coin. Obviously, between the two, numerous relationships can and probably should develop. If the distinction is clear between character change understood (in a metaphorical way) as an ‘inner journey’ and the external, literal journey, the concepts want and need – which seem to refer to goals rather than to journeys – may be confusing here. Also, to the extent that the concepts internal and external goals describe very well some differences such as the internal goal ‘to become a better father’ (e.g. Kramer vs. Kramer , 1979), and the external goal ‘to nuke a meteorite’ (e.g. Armageddon , 1998), the terms want and need may not be required at all. PROBLEMS WITH THE CONSCIOUS VS. UNCONSCIOUS PARAMETER

To define want and need as the respectively conscious and unconscious dramatic goals of the main character is also problematic for more than one reason. Firstly, several critics (e.g. Trottier 1998, Cowgill 1999, McIlrath 2007) acknowledge that near the end, the unconscious need may become conscious. If both the want and the need are conscious, how does the conscious vs. unconscious parameter help to distinguish want and need in a precise way? Secondly, in some examples the need not only becomes conscious towards the end of or in Act 3, but it is as conscious within the character’s mind as the want, and from the very beginning. The Devil’s Advocate (1997) starts with country lawyer Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) who has never lost a case and who is defending a child rapist. When, in a not too subtle way, the suspect is shown masturbating in court while the D.A. is questioning his victim, Lomax is outraged and asks the judge for a short recess. He runs into the bathroom and confronts himself in front of the mirror. At that moment, Lomax experiences an inner conflict, made obvious to the audience through the cliché of having him looking at himself in the mirror: what shall he do? Follow his want or his need? Go left or right? Continue his list 89


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of wins in court and let this pervert go free or abandon his client and allow justice to run its due course? The stakes of the dilemma are raised because if Lomax abandons his client now, he will be barred from his profession as a lawyer. Both journeys, both choices, may be perceived and described as equally external or internal (as mentioned above) but, above all, in the mind of the protagonist they are both very conscious from the very beginning. In Some Like it Hot (1959) one may assume that Joe (Tony Curtis) is also very conscious of the fact that he should not lie to Sugar, that he should tell her the truth. However, when Daphne (Jack Lemmon) confronts him with his immoral behaviour, Joe(sephine) replies that one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. Thirdly, when looking at the examples mentioned in screenwriting manuals it is not always clear how conscious or unconscious protagonists are about their need. For example, is Scarlett (Gone with the Wind, 1939) conscious of the fact that she should marry Rhett Butler? Probably not. Is Rick (Casablanca, 1942) conscious of the fact that he should discover why Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) abandoned him in Paris? At first he is not, but as the narrative progresses, he is. In Traffic (2000) judge Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) wants to become President of the United States of America and in order to achieve that goal he accepts a high profile job to fight the international drugs cartel in Mexico. This represents his want. However, about thirty minutes into the movie, the audience discover that Wakefield’s daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) is taking all kinds of hard drugs. When the audience see how one night a boyfriend collapses after an overdose and she and a couple of her friends dump the boy on the street in front of a hospital, the audience realize that there is a conflict between what the main character Wakefield wants to do and what he needs to do. Wakefield wants to fight drugs on an international scale as a politico judicial problem but he needs to tackle the drugs problem at a family level, i.e. in his own family, and this as a medical healthcare problem. At that moment, however, Wakefield is not so much unconscious of his need as entirely unaware of it; he does not experience any inner conflict. In fact, he is convinced that his daughter is doing as well at school as at home. It is only forty minutes later when Wakefield discovers his daughter taking drugs in the bathroom that the protagonist catches up with the level of knowledge of the audience and is confronted with the conflict previously shown to the audience; the conflict between his want (to fight drugs on an international scale) and his need (to fight drugs on a family scale). A fourth problem is that ‘knowing’ or ‘being conscious’ of a need that conflicts with a want offers no guarantee of continuous inner dramatic conflict in the character. In Casablanca (1942), Rick realizes along the way that he should hear Ilsa out in order to learn what happened in Paris, and that inner struggle is dramatized through action (drinking) and dialogue. However, in Some Like it Hot , Joe knows that he should not lie to Sugar but he puts this knowledge aside without great difficulty 90


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until the very end. In The Devil’s Advocate , Kevin Lomax ‘knows’ very well what he should do but after a few seconds he decides not to follow his need and to go for his want by defending the pervert. After that, the moments of inner conflict are rare even though he runs into an increasing opposition from his need. As the narrative progresses, Lomax’s relationship with his religious mother becomes troubled, his wife is raped, turns mad and kills herself, and finally Lomax has to commit suicide in order to prevent the antagonist – the Devil himself – from achieving his satanic goal. In Trottier’s (1998) terminology, the audience see how Lomax’s inner ‘flaw’ develops into a growing opposition to his need. It is only at the end of the narrative, when it has been shown how the path of his want leads to total loss, that, at least temporarily, the protagonist chooses the path of his need. Finally, if the need is, and remains, unconscious to the character (as in many gangster movies and crime stories), i.e. if characters find themselves in a dilemma of which one part remains unknown or unconscious to them, how can there be an inner conflict? The answer to that question is simple: there cannot. Still, intuitively screenwriting manuals recognize a conflict, but to the character that conflict is neither internal vs. external, nor conscious vs. unconscious. It plays on an altogether different narrative level.

6. Here I adhere to the common narratological distinction, generally ignored in screenwriting manuals, between story (or fabula) understood as the diegetic content which through some act of narration is represented in a plot (or sjuzet ) understood as the narrated story. 7. Obviously not all narratives present characters with inner conflicts between wants and needs. For example, in one-dimensional hero stories such as James Bond or Indiana Jones, the respective wants and needs coincide.

PROPOSAL FOR A RE-DEFINITION

Some critics already hint at a possible solution to the terminological problem. McKee, for example, remarks that while the protagonist may be unaware of his subconscious need, the audience sense it (1997: 138). In a similar way, Trottier signals that whereas the need may be unconscious, blocked from within by a character flaw, this character flaw is obvious to the audience (1998: 25). The common feature that binds the examples mentioned above does not lie in the conscious or unconscious nature of the character’s want or need, or in the external or internal nature of it. As we have seen, the conflict is not always played at the level of the character, that is, at the story level. However, the conflict does always play at the level of interaction between plot and audience.6 The conflict (if there is one) 7 plays between what a character wants to do and what they should do. While what the character should or should not do may (or may not) correspond to a more or less concrete idea within the character at the story level, what the character needs to do or should do is always meant to be clear in the hearts and minds of the audience. It is the audience who judge what a character should or should not do, and they do that (consciously or unconsciously) on the basis of another well-known ancient Greek concept called ‘doxa’ (from Plato) or ‘endoxa’ (from Aristotle). Doxa or endoxa refers to the dominant opinions, norms and values shared by a group of people in a specific time-space context. Trottier’s ‘flaw’ (1998: 24) already hints at a moral aspect of the want -need dilemma. If the want deviates from 91


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8. Another of Frank Daniel’s concepts (see Howard 2004: 52ff.) 9. For the sake of clarity I need to specify here that the concept of ‘audience’ refers to real, empirical audiences, not to imagined ‘implied readers’ or ‘narratees’ as is often the case in structuralist narratology.

the reigning endoxa, a moral conflict may arise between the want and the need. If all goes well – that is, if the audience empathize with the main character – this conflict may reinforce the ‘hope/fear’8 that the audience are experiencing vis-à-vis the protagonist.9 If the audience empathize with the main character, they hope that the protagonist is going to abandon their want and go for their need, but at the same time they fear that because of reasons such as an inner flaw, material profit, etc., the protagonist will choose their want and thereby lose their need. If we consider the want-need dilemma as a conflict between the character and the audience rather than between the character and herself/himself, this shifts the central focus of the conflict from the story level to the level of interaction between the plot (as a narrated story) and the audience. At the story level all kinds of options remain open: the character may never learn about a conflict between their want and their need or may learn about it after the audience do, or they may be informed at the same time as the audience. The character may be more or less (un)conscious of an inner conflict, feel troubled by the conflict and act upon it or not. The inner conflict at story level may play immediately or start only later on. THE IMPLICATIONS OF THIS RE-DEFINITION

Does a re-definition of wants and needs solve all possible problems with respect to dramatic goals? Certainly not, because the concept of endoxa represents a rather slippery notion which is linked with another ghost-like idea, the audience. Whereas critics and journalists often like to pretend there are only two types of audiences – the mass audience and the cinephiles – it is now generally accepted that there exist many different types of audiences who should be considered as complex, heterogeneous and ever-changing groups of individuals. Consequently their respective endoxas show not only common features but also important differences. One may assume therefore that public expectations about what a character should and should not do differ accordingly. In other words, redefining the concepts of want and need as suggested above links the discussion with the interesting but very complex and quite different problem of audience interpretation and audience involvement. Since Plato and Aristotle, scholars in sociology and cultural studies have of course suggested several mechanisms to describe (en) doxas in more specific ways. The Greek concept has similarities with Bakhtin’s theory of ‘heteroglossia’ and Volosinov’s account of ‘multi-accentuality’ (as in Fiske 1992: 298–299). It also recalls Stanley Fish’s ‘interpretive communities’ (Fish 1976), Pierre Bourdieu’s study of taste, ‘field’, ‘capital’ and ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1979) and Stuart Hall’s ‘preferred’, ‘negotiated’ and ‘oppositional’ readings (Hall 1980). What these and other so-called poststructuralist theories have 92


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in common is the notion that texts do not have one fixed meaning and that different people may ‘read’ texts in different ways – ways that were not always intended by the writers. Among other factors, people’s socio-cultural position for example co-determines the interpretation process in different ways (Fiske 1992: 292). In order to illustrate this, Fiske describes an interesting experiment about a group of homeless men who watched the movie Die Hard (1988) on a VCR in their church shelter (1992: 302). These men rarely watched television because it generally advocates values such as family life, work and leisure, which are irrelevant to them. Fiske describes how these men enthusiastically cheered when the villains destroyed a police armoured vehicle and killed a ‘good’ guy, but switched off the VCR before the end, when the hero and the police force restored law and order and reconfirmed the dominant ideology they so much despised. Fiske’s anecdote and the aforementioned theories link the discussion of audience interpretation with that of audience involvement. Instead of rooting for the main character and its dramatic goal, Fiske’s viewers experienced what in German is called ‘Schadenfreude’;10 they hoped the protagonist would lose and they turned off the VCR when he started to win. This also suggests another line of research that is of interest to this study: the study of narrative empathy and other types of cognitive-emotional audience engagement with narrative fictions.11 The cognitive-emotional impact of a narrative plays at different levels. While reading or watching, readers-viewers consciously or unconsciously react to the ways a narrator behaves, the ways an agent acts at the level of story and the ways the narrator assigns features to the ‘narratee’.12 Narrators may behave in a sympathetic and agreeable way, but also in sexist, racist, unreliable, and other ways. These ways may or may not motivate the reader’s or viewer’s interest in the narrative. As explained above, ‘events’ and ‘existents’13 at the story level may refer to characters wanting things that are on a par with the reader’s or viewer’s hopes and fears, or not. And finally the use of any narrator, whether through telling or showing, not only creates a diegetic world, but also ‘creates’ an addressee or, in narratological terms, a narratee. The very act of narrating suggests features of a narratee. These features concern what a narratee does or does not know, likes or dislikes, feels or thinks, etc. For example, in the novel The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1998) the narrating character, Stevens, addresses his narrative to a ‘you’ in the text, the narratee. When Stevens talks about butlering, he assumes the narratee knows certain things about the subject, and so does not explain these elements. Stevens also assumes other items may not be known to the narratee – hence he explains these things. The same goes for certain assumptions with respect to ‘normal’ social, political, economical and cultural values or ideas that are ‘taken for granted’ by the narrator. When in Romeo is Bleeding (1993) the narrating character Jack Grimaldi (Gary Oldman) is enjoying the

10. Malicious delight (trans. the author). 11. See for example Zillmann (1991), Smith (1995), Tan (1996), Grodal (1997), Coplan (2004), Keen (2006) and Keen (2007). 12. The concept is well known in structuralist narratology but generally ignored in the world of screenwriters and screenwriting trainers. It refers to the person to whom the narrator is narrating/addressing. As the narrator is to be distinguished from the flesh and blood writer, so the narratee must also not be confused with the flesh and blood reader/viewer. 13. See Chatman (1978).

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14. See for example Lavandier (2005: 43, 45), Iglesias (2005: 61ff.), Williams (2006: 93ff.), etc. 15. See for example Vogler (1992) and especially Vogler (2007), who concentrates on the story of a hero with a moral dramatic goal and a happy ending. 16. See for example Armer (1993: 5ff.), Iglesias (2005: 61ff.), Lavandier (2005: 44ff.).

sight through his binoculars of a man having sex with two women, he addresses the narratee in a direct way: JACK GRIMALDI (V.O.) (Chuckles) I bet you know what he was thinkin’, don’t ya? You’d have done just what he wound up doing, I’ll bet. Some (actual) viewers of this scene may agree with his supposition and enjoy the view, others may not. Even though not all narratives present narratees in such a conspicuous way, the examples show that during the actual reading/viewing process a narratee may partly or entirely correspond with (or differ from) the actual reader/viewer on an individual as well as a sociocultural and political level, in terms of moral and other values, opinions, beliefs, sensibilities, etc. In turn these differences and similarities may have an impact on different types of empathetic engagement. In this sense, cognitive narrative studies meet the aforementioned sociological and cultural studies approaches. As Ralf Schneider explains, ‘[the] kind of emotion [that] results from empathy and how intense it is in each case depends on the recipient’s attitude towards a character, which is (sic) turn influenced by his or her value system in general’ (Schneider 2005: 136). Screenwriting manuals do not entirely ignore the problem. Several authors offer advice with respect to the so-called ‘un-sympathetic’ protagonist and how to increase the chances of obtaining audience empathy with that character and its goals.14 They suggest turning this main character into a hero and have him or her meet impossible challenges; or also assigning ‘positive’ features to the main character next to the negative ones, and to have other characters in the story admire the main character; or victimizing this ‘unsympathetic’ main character and making his or her antagonist(s) even ‘worse’ than (s) he is, etc. However, most screenwriting manuals focus on audience empathy with a protagonist and a dramatic goal that corresponds with what ‘the’ audience would like the main character to do.15 The re-definition of want and need offered above includes narratives that contain a character who goes after a goal the audience disagree with. Why audiences remain interested in watching characters who pursue something against the audience’s wishes is an interesting question. Why do audiences continue to watch Scarface (1983)? Or all those other crime stories and gangster movies for that matter? In order to experience criminal acts by proxy? Or to wait for that satisfying moment when the villain finally gets what (s)he deserves?16 The success of crime stories and gangster movies suggests that a gap between what a character wants and what an audience feel a character should want does not necessarily destroy viewer motivation. Fiske’s (1992: 302) anecdote about the homeless men watching Die Hard on a VCR shows

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at the same time that narratives with conflicting wants and needs hold some risks, including the risk that the value system of the character deviates so much from that of the viewer that the viewer abandons the narrative. As suggested at the beginning of this section, these questions stretch far beyond the limits of a single article. They fit in the even larger debate about aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic experience. Audience empathy with one or more characters should be considered next to other possible viewer motivations for connecting or disconnecting with a narrative. Some viewers may continue watching because of the choice of actors or actresses, or vice versa. Others may continue watching because of the music, or the photography or because the movie was shot in their hometown. Since the point of view adopted here is that of the screenwriter, the scope should be limited to those motivations that fall into the working field of the screenwriter. By way of conclusion, I turn back to the discussion about want s and needs. It should be clear to screenwriters that they may write conflicts between what a character wants and what she/he needs according to an audience. However, to the extent that there is not one homogeneous audience, there is not one homogeneous need. What screen writers intend does not always translate into what viewers interpret. One can doubt that the screenwriters of Die Hard intended to write a conflict between a want and a need with respect to their protagonist John McClane (Bruce Willis)? And who says that all viewers watching gangster movies experience a conflict between a want and a need? What should we think of the huge success of ultra-violent video and computer games where the dramatic goal of the player-protagonist consists in murdering as many people as possible as fast as possible? The links between the value systems of a narrative and those of a viewer on the one hand, and empathetic viewer engagement on the other continue to fascinate scholars. Further research will have to come up with more convincing explanations. The next challenge will consist in turning those findings into workable writing tools. REFERENCES Armageddon (1998), Wr: Oliver Stone, Dir: Brian De Palma, US, 170 mins. Armer, A. (1993), Writing the Screenplay. TV and Film, Second Edition, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Batty, C. (2006), ‘Wants and Needs: action and emotion in scripts’, ScriptWriter , 31, pp. 12–18. Batty, C. (2007), ‘Physical wants and emotional needs’, ScriptWriter , 32, pp. 45–51. Bordwell, D.; Thompson, K. and Staiger, J. (1985), The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bordwell, David (2006), The Way Hollywood Tells It. Story and Style in Modern Movies , Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, P. (1979), La Distinction. Critique sociale du Jugement , Paris: Éditions de Minuit. 95


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Patrick Cattrysse

Casablanca (1942), Wr: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch, Dir:

Michael Curtiz, US, 102 mins. Chatman, S. (1978), Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film , London: Cornell University Press. Coplan, A. (2004), ‘Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , 62:2, pp. 141–152. Cowgill, L. (1999), Secrets of Screenplay Structure. How to Recognize and Emulate the Structural Frameworks of Great Films , Los Angeles: Lone Eagle. The Devil’s Advocate (1997), Wr: Jonathan Lemkin, Tony Gilroy, Dir: Taylor Hackford, US, 144 mins. Die Hard (1988), Wr: Jeb Stuart, Steven de Souza, Dir: John McTiernan, US, 131 mins. Fish, S. (1976), ‘Interpreting the Variorum’, Critical Inquiry 2:3, pp. 465–485. Fiske, John (1992), ‘British Cultural Studies and Television’, in R. C. Allen (ed.), Channels of Discourse, Reassembled. Television and Contemporary Criticism. Second Edition , London: Routledge, pp. 284–326. Fludernik, M. (2005), From Structuralism to the Present , in J. Phelan and P. J. Rabinowitz (eds), A Companion to Narrative Theory , London: Blackwell

Publishing, pp. 36–59. Gone with the wind (1939), Wr: Sidney Howard, Oliver H. P. Garrett, Ben

Hecht, Jo Swerling, John Van Druten, Dir: Victor Fleming, Sam Wood, George Cukor, US, 226 mins. Grodal, T. (1997), Moving Pictures. A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition , Oxford: Clarendon Press. Herman, D. (1997), ‘Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association , 112:5, pp. 1046–1059. Hall, S. (1980), ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language , London: Hutchinson, pp. 128–139. Howard, D. (2004), How to Build a Great Screenplay , New York: St. Martin’s Press. Keen, S. (2006), ‘A Theory of Narrative Empathy’, in Narrative 14:3, pp. 207–236. Keen, S. (2007), Empathy and the Novel , Oxford: Oxford University Press. Iglesias, K. (2005), Writing for Emotional Impact , Livermore CA: WingSpan Press. Ishiguro, Kazuo (1998), The Remains of the Day , New York: Vintage Books. Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Wr: Robert Benton, Dir: Robert Benton, US, 105 mins. Lavandier, Y. (2005), Writing Drama , Cergy Cedex: Le Clown & l’Enfant. Lucey, P. (1996), Story Sense. Writing Story and Script for Feature Films and Television , London: McGraw-Hill. McIlrath, M. (2004), ‘Creative treatments’, ScriptWriter , 17, pp. 34–37. McIlrath, M. (2006), ‘Beyond Aristotle’, ScriptWriter , 26, pp. 38–42. McIlrath, M. (2007), ‘Story Patterns’, ScriptWriter , 35, pp. 39–44. McKee, R. (1997), Story. Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of , New York: Harper Collins. Screenwriting Mehring, M. (1990), The Screenplay. A Blend of Film Form and Content , London: Focal Press. Moonstruck (1987), Wr: John Patrick Shanley, Dir: Norman Jewison, US, 102 mins. Pretty Woman (1990), Wr: J. F. Lawton, Dir: Garry Marshall, US, 119 mins.

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Romancing the Stone (1984), Wr: Diane Thomas, Lem Dobbs, Howard Franklin, Treva Silverman, Dir: Robert Zemeckis, US, 106 mins. Romeo is Bleeding (1993), Wr: Hilary Henkin, Dir: Peter Medak, US, 100 mins. Scarface (1983), Wr: Oliver Stone, Dir: Brian De Palma, US, 170 mins. Schneider, R. (2005), ‘Emotion and Narrative’, in D. Herman, M. Jahn, and M-L. Ryan (eds), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory , London: Routledge. Smith, M. (1995), Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema , Oxford: Clarendon Press. Some Like it Hot (1959), Wr: Robert Toeren, Michael Logan, Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond, Dir: Billy Wilder, US, 120 mins. Tan, E. (1996), Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine , Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Traffic (2000), Wr: Stephen Gaghan, Simon Moore, Dir: Steven Soderbergh, US, 147 mins. Trottier, D. (1998), The Screenwriter’s Bible. A Complete Guide to Writing, Formatting, and Selling Your Script , Third Edition. Expanded &Updated , Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. Twins (1988), Wr: William Davies, William Osborne, Timothy Harris, Herschel Weingrod, Dir: Ivan Reitman, US, 105 mins. Vogler, C. (1992), The Writer’s Journey. Mythic Structure for Storytellers & Screenwriters , Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions. Vogler, C. (2007), ‘Christopher Vogler and the Dark Side’, ScriptWriter, 36, pp. 34–38. Williams, S. (2006), The Moral Premise. Harnessing Virtue and Vice for Box Office Success , Studio City CA: Michael Wiese Productions. Witness (1985), Wr: William Kelley, Earl W. Wallace, Pamela Wallace, Dir: Peter Weir, US, 112 mins. Zillmann, D. (1991), ‘Empathy: Affect from Bearing Witness to the Emotions of Others’, in Bryant Jennings and Dolf Zillman (eds), Responding to the Screen: Reception and Reaction Processes , Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 135–168. SUGGESTED CITATION

Cattrysse, P. (2010), ‘The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs’, Journal of Screenwriting 1: 1, pp. 83–97, doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.83/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Patrick Cattrysse is Head of the Flanders Script Academy (FSA). He is a researcher and trainer in storytelling and screenwriting at different universities and film schools, among them the University of Antwerp, the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Emerson College European Center, the FSA, and the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (San Antonio – Cuba). To receive current information on courses available at the FSA, please email patrick.cattrysse@ telenet.be or visit www.vsa-fsa.org. Contact: Raamlolaan3, B-3120 Tremelo, België. E-mail: [email protected].

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                                                                         

                 

                                                                                                                                  

                


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The Protagonist’s Dramatic Goals, Wants and Needs

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