Creating Unforgettable Characters (11 page)

This lack of trust in childhood prevented Charlie Babbitt from being able to love as an adult.

Erikson says that adulthood is a time to resolve the issues of intimacy versus isolation—to learn to relate closely to each other in order to form marriages and friendships and alliances. If these issues have not been resolved—problems of mistrust, doubt, guilt, can all come into a relationship, impeding the potential to be intimate.

"Charlie is in an uncommitted relationship with Susan," Ron Bass continues, "with someone he doesn't have to worry about hurting because she can take care of herself. She's not asking him to marry her; she's cool. She's as able to leave him as he's able to leave her and that's a real Charlie Babbitt relationship that doesn't demand commitment or anything real. He's smiling. He's charming. He's got her convinced that he really cares about her and that's all she's asked for. But if it hadn't been for Raymond, he could have lost that woman two months earlier and he wouldn't have missed her. It's the change that starts to occur in him as he goes on the road. As he begins to change, he realizes what a terrific lady he lost, and how much he didn't want to lose her. He calls, and that melts her because she had never seen him that way."

It is Charlie's transformation that helps him reconnect with the positive influence from his past—his brother. In one of the beautiful surprises in the film, Charlie discovers that Raymond had been his childhood playmate, and that there had been a healthy emotional tie between them.

In fact, this transformation is what the story is about. Ron says, "The hope is that you walk out of the theatre feeling that Charlie will be able to love Susan and others and to have children and to join the world of caring people because of what he's learned about himself through his experience with his brother."

If these issues had not been resolved with Charlie, he would have reached another crisis—the crisis Erik Erikson calls "gen-erativity versus stagnation." This occurs when a person has not lived up to his or her talents. Sometimes this becomes the midlife crisis, where people have to confront where they've come in their lives, and what they've accomplished.

When someone reaches forty and fifty and beyond, there is another crisis, one of "integrity versus despair." This crisis is not just one of accomplishments and professional contributions, but of meaning and value. At this point, people confront whether their lives mean anything, whether they've had depth. The consequences of not resolving these issues can lead to despair, alcoholism, depression, even suicide.
The Verdict
and
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
—despite the broad differences in their genres—were both about resolving issues from the past, confronting a crisis in the present, and learning to become involved and caring as a result.

EXERCISE: Imagine creating a story about a future Charlie Babbitt. What might he be like if you set the story at his midlife crisis, when Charlie is about forty and still failing because he unconsciously felt his father was correct about his inability to succeed? What might Charlie do to compensate?

What would Charlie be like if he were sixty, trying to find meaning in life while still being controlled by his father? How might he express his despair?

What might he be like at these stages if he had resolved his mid-life crisis? What would you expect his relationship with his brother to be like, if the film continued into the future?

HOW THE UNCONSCIOUS DETERMINES CHARACTER

Many psychologists believe that our conscious awareness makes up only about ten percent of the human psyche. What drives and motivates us comes more from the unconscious, which consists of feelings, memories, experiences, and impressions that have been imprinting our minds from birth. These elements, which are often repressed because of negative associations, drive our behavior, causing us to act in ways that might contradict our conscious belief systems or our own understanding of ourselves.

Many elements in our lives, although not known to our conscious minds, drive our behavior. These forces can cause us to act in ways that contradict our belief systems or our own identities.

We have all had conversations with people who come across as though they understand themselves. But as we listen to them, we sense that their impression of themselves is quite different from the one we have of them. A woman may tell us what an open person she is, when in truth she's defensive, resistant, closed. A man may appear gentle, but later betray a violent nature that even he may not have known was there. Some of these people may be driven by an unconscious drive for power, or a desire to control, or by maliciousness or cruelty.

People usually have little knowledge of how these unconscious forces influence their behavior. Often these are negative elements that are denied or rationalized. Psychologists call this "the shadow" or the "dark side of the personality."

We've seen a number of examples in the news of the unconscious shadow operating in people's lives. Jimmy Swaggart is a

"moralist" who was brought down by his "denied sexuality." Nixon, a president for "law and order," was brought down by the illegalities committed by his administration.

Within the shadow side of the unconscious can be found rage, sexuality, depression—or, to define it in another way, the seven deadly sins of anger, gluttony, sloth, pride, envy, avarice, and lust.

These unconscious forces achieve more power when they are repressed or denied. Unacknowledged, they can drive people to do and say things against their will. Suppressed, they have more potential to get people into trouble.

Sometimes writers decide that this shadow side is the side that they want to explore. Barry Morrow says: "My stories
Bill
and
Bill on His Own
explored the positive human aspects. I wanted
Rain Man
to be about the opposite—the darker side of human motivation, about greed and avarice, and shortsightedness and impatience. Charlie is the dark side of me—the dark side of everybody. I had a feeling that Mother Theresa gets angry every once in a while. I'll bet the Pope gets awfully impatient with some of the bowing and scraping. I know everybody has both the good and the bad, the light and the dark, the yin and the yang inside of them, and
Bill
was all about the light and the hopefulness, and
Rain Man
was about the opposite."

Exploring the dark side doesn't mean that your story ends on a negative note. "I challenged myself," Barry says, "to believe that the story would end up the same way—a sense of making human connections and about piecing back together your life and winnowing out the pain and going on."

Charlie has no recognition that his actions and behavior are driven, to a great extent, by his need for his father's love and approval. According to Ron Bass, "Charlie's need is to be self-contained, to keep himself walled off from feeling the hurt of rejection. What drives Charlie is wanting his father's love, knowing he won't get it, knowing that his father might be right and that he's going to fail. The biggest problems in our lives are the ones we're always redoing, hoping that it will be different the next time, that we'll get it right. His biggest goal is to prove his father wrong, and yet deep down in his heart he keeps proving his father right. He could prove his father wrong by being a success, on his own terms in his own way, without his father's help or guidance. That would prove that he doesn't need his father's love."

The unconscious manifests itself in your characters through their behavior, gestures, and speech. All these underlying drives and meanings that are unknown to the characters will nevertheless affect what they say and do.

HOW PERSONALITY DIFFERENCES CREATE CHARACTER

Although we may all be of the same human species, we are not all the same types of people. Each of us experiences life in different ways. We have varied outlooks and perceptions about life.

Writers throughout the centuries have used an understanding of character types to help draw the broad strokes of their characters.

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, writers believed that the physical body could be divided into four elements, or humors, just as the physical world was divided into the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water. These humors included black bile, blood, yellow bile, and phlegm. One's temperament (or character type) was determined by the predominance of one humor.

The personality controlled by black bile was melancholic— thoughtful, sentimental, affected, unenterprising. Hamlet's gloomy indecisions and Jacques's brooding in
As You Like It
are instances of the melancholy temperament.

A personality dominated by blood would be sanguine— beneficent, joyful, amorous. Falstaff would fit this temperament.

The choleric personality, dominated by yellow bile, is easily angered, impatient, obstinate, and vengeful. Both Othello's jealousy and Lear's rashness show an extreme of choler.

And the phlegmatic personality is composed, undemonstrative, with a coolness and calm fortitude; for example, Horatio in
Hamlet.

The perfect temperament is one in which all four humors are perfectly balanced. Conversely, a serious imbalance could produce maladjustment, craziness.

Brutus in
Julius Caesar
possessed a nearly ideal balance. Marc Antony called him "the noblest Roman of them all":

. . . the elements
So
mixed in him that 'Nature might stand up And say to all the world, "This was a man!"

Ian Fleming, in
Octopussy,
updates these four elements in his description of a drunk. "The sanguine drunk goes gay to the point of hysteria and idiocy; the phlegmatic sinks into a morass of sullen gloom; the choleric is the fighting drunk of the cartoonists who spends much of his life in prison for smashing people and things; and the melancholic succumbs to self-pity, mawkishness, and tears."
¹

Shakespeare was interested in the relationships between characters. Some types get along well because they see the world in compatible ways. But other relationships cause conflict. For instance, someone who is choleric—who demands quick actions and responses—will be driven crazy by someone who is phlegmatic and wants to think things out. Someone who is sanguine will find it depressing to be around the melancholic.

During the last hundred years, there has been much re-interpretation of these personality types, and, as a writer, being familiar with the theories can be helpful in differentiating your characters, and strengthening character conflicts.

Carl Jung says that most people tend toward either extraver-sion or introversion. Social extraverts focus on the outside world, and introverts focus on an inner reality. Extraverts tend to be comfortable in crowds, easily relate to others, love parties and people. Introverts are loners, pursuing solitary activities such as reading or meditation. They look within rather than without for the center of their lives.

In drama, as in real life, most characters are extraverts. Extraverts move the action, and provide the conflict and the dynamic of the film. They are outer-directed people who function well with others and who actively interact with life. But
Rain Man
proved that an introvert could make a powerful character, when paired with a more active character to move the action.

Ron Bass says, "Raymond is most certainly an introvert. The classical autistic doesn't understand other people as being that different from trees or inanimate objects. He doesn't understand that people are people.

"Charlie is an introvert in extravert clothing. Charlie feels comfortable in a crowd because he feels he can manage it. He's gorgeous and charming, but I don't think he derives any real joy or fun from being in a crowd. He's always thinking behind his eyes, What do they want from me, what do I want from them? He's a kind of a loner in the sense that his true feelings are never shared. He is so walled off. His anger is at the surface, and he's talkative and he's aggressive and he's a take-charge guy, but he can't share his true feelings, they're hidden from himself as well as from others."

Carl Jung added four other categories to the introvert and extravert to further the understanding of personality types: the sensation type, the thinking type, the feeling type, and the intuitive type.

Sensation people experience life through the senses. They are attuned to their physical environment—to colors and smells, shapes and tastes. They tend to live in the present, responding to the things around them. Many sensation types make good cooks, house builders, doctors, photographers— any occupation that is physical and sensory-oriented. James

Bond would probably be considered a sensation type— sensual, a lover of fast cars, physical activities, and beautiful women.

Thinking types are the opposite. They think through a situation, figure out the problem, and take control to bring about a solution. They make decisions based on principles, not on feelings. They're logical, objective, methodical. Thinking types tend to make good administrators, engineers, mechanics, executives. Characters who have strong thinking functions include Perry Mason, Jessica Fletcher, MacGyver, and the Marquise in
Dangerous Liaisons.