This week’s rebroadcast expands on a short question about main characters and character arcs from 2011 with some thoughts from Episode 535 of Scriptnotes.
I have read countless things about what makes a screenplay sell, however, when I look at a film like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off I can’t help but wonder how a screenplay like this sold.
All I’ve heard from the experts is that you need character arcs and all that jazz but I just don’t see that in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He wakes up and gets back in bed the same person, right?
Obviously it’s a great film, an instant classic but it just seems to defy everything a “great screenplay” should have by today’s standards. Any thoughts?
— Nick
Rhode Island
You could spend a semester studying what makes Ferris Bueller such a classic, but the character arc thing is easily answered:
Ferris doesn’t change. Cameron does. Cameron is the reluctant protagonist, literally dragged along by Ferris. By the end of the story, Cameron has changed a little, with plans to stand up to his father. Arcs don’t have to be epic.
As I’ve said before, the main character doesn’t have to protagonate. Yes, in most movies, your hero is the protagonist and it’s all cut and dried. But it’s not the only way a story can work.
If you’re ever confused, refer to Michael Goldenberg’s advice: The protagonist is the character that suffers the most.
In this case, that’s Cameron.
Ashley Ward on TikTok: You have to start romanticizing your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character, because if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by, and all the little things that make it so beautiful will continue to go unnoticed, so take a second and look around and realize that it’s a blessing for you to be here right now.
John: That’s main character energy. Main character energy is that sense of life is a movie and you are the central character and you just start acting like the central character in your movie. It’s different from I think a thing that I’ve advocated a lot on the show, which is treating yourself as a protagonist and recognizing the protagonist struggle.
This is really almost more about an aesthetic series of choices that you’re making about how you’re going to present yourself and how you’re going to perform as the character in a movie. Looking into a little bit of the history of how this came to be, but hopefully also really look at how screenwriting invented this problem and the weird way in which we now have characters who are aware that they are characters in a drama and are living their lives this way. Emily In Paris is an example of a character who has main character energy and she’s actually the main character of a show.
This is from Coco Klockner’s essay:
Main characters have an impeccable magnetism to them. They’re creative. They don’t play by the rules. They’re a little ugly, but in a hot way. They’re full of themselves, but humble in the right moments. They’re self-aware, but unanxious. They’re not perfect, but if they stumble, a lesson is learned. Perhaps foremost, a main character emerges as someone who can pull off the paradoxical feat of conveying interiority in a world of surfaces.
Craig: Oh god.
John: “Main character energy is not a matter of being individualistic or singular, but rather a matter of being extremely legible.” What I think they’re pointing to here is that it’s projecting interiority, it’s projecting an inner life, only through these surface manifestations.
What as screenwriters we’re trying to do is trying to expose an interior life through what we can see on a film and TV. In this case it’s real-life people trying to present that they’re having this interior life just through all the outward trappings and through the Instagram stories and the trips they’re taking with influencers.
Craig: I’m legitimately horrified by this. I guess maybe movies and television just got too clever for their own good, because what we’re supposed to be doing is creating... Drama is not meant to be life at all. In fact, that was the point. When they created created Western drama in Greece—There was certainly drama predating Greece—The idea was we’re all aware this is not life, right? Get it? There’s a stage. Or you’re sitting in a room watching a fricking piece of glass on the wall. It’s obviously not real.
In this unreal representation of the world, you will learn some interesting things that might actually be thought-provoking or make you think about stuff in your regular life, or maybe they’ll make some sense of things in your life, or maybe you’ll just feel like you’re not alone in your emotions and that other people have felt the things you have felt.
In no way, shape, or form should anyone ever want to live their lives like a, quote unquote, “main character.” That’s insane. You’re not a character. Help.
John: We could talk about movies, which is a easier way into it, because there are characters in movies who seem to be aware they are characters in movies and are living their life that way, so Ferris Bueller from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off seems like he’s aware that he’s a character. He’s performing with main character energy, because he’s literally stirring stuff up and creating adventure around him at all times.
Emma Stone in Easy A has main character energy, and it’s not just because she’s narrating. I think narrating is an important part of this. She’s also presenting herself on video in a pre-TikTok way and communicating what her arc is and what her change is, what’s going on. Fight Club has it. Emily In Paris we talked about before. The whole series Search Party is all about “I have to be the central character driving the story.” Girls is about that.
We had Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge on to talk about Deadpool and Fleabag. Those are both characters who are aware that they are characters and aware that they were being watched and how they’re being perceived by audiences.
Craig: Yes. They’re all characters. If you actually met somebody like Fleabag, you would be repulsed and go running, because that’s awful. It’s amazing when you watch it on television. The reason why, and Phoebe’s a genius, because what she’s done is create an externalization of the inner ticker tape in her mind, the hamster wheel that runs, the self-commentary that we go through, but we never go through it in the moment.
Normally we go through the day, we have these encounters. Then we go home and then we get into bed and then we start thinking about them and rummaging them over and over and over in our heads and reliving them and thinking, “I should’ve said this,” or, “That was weird.” She takes it, because she can, inside of art and makes it happen all in the moment contemporaneously as it’s happening. It’s fascinating to watch. It’s a really cool way of showing the way the human mind and heart function.
If you act like that actually in your life, you’re nuts and you’re awful. This just feels like a very fancy way of saying be a pointless, empty narcissist.
John: Narcissism is a interesting word for it, because you’re staring at yourself, but also we are all living in The Truman Show anyway, at least a generation is living in the Truman Show, because they are constantly performing and presenting themselves on YouTube, on TikTok, on social media, to present themselves as a certain kind of way. Megana was talking about people she knows who are especially, I don’t know if you want to say adept, or entrenched in this means of self-identification through self-promotion.
When I was doing my Arlo Finch book tours, I was visiting a whole bunch of schools, I would give the same presentation twice a day, sometimes three times a day for groups of 6th to 7th and 8th graders mostly. One of the things I tried to stress towards the end is that … We were talking about heroes and what heroes in stories do, what protagonists do in stories.
Protagonists are always struggling. They’re growing. They’re changing. They’re facing obstacles. They’re overcoming adversity, but it’s tough. They’re creating change by changing themselves.
I tried to just turn that around and say, “Listen, if you think about yourself as the hero of the story of your life, you’re going to face obstacles. Heroes also have principles, they have codes, they have things they learn to live by, they have rules they set for themselves.
Most importantly, they have allies, they have people who were on their side and they are an ally to somebody else.” What I find missing in a lot of this main character energy discourse is forgetting about the other people, forgetting that we live in a society.
Craig: There are lots of different kinds of characters. It seems like this main character energy is really focusing on poorly written characters. The quote that you played about romanticizing your life, I can’t think of a better way to encapsulate the exact opposite thing that I think about everything, than that quote.
Go ahead, start romanticizing your life. We’ll wait, because here’s the thing. Life is not romantic. You’re a big sack of slowly decaying meat that will eventually stop functioning. Everybody that you know and meet and love will eventually die. You are going to be sick. You are going to ache. You are going to have moments that are wonderful, moments that are terrible. You also don’t deserve everyone’s attention. You almost never deserve anyone’s attention.
The best thing that you can do with your life, other than fulfilling yourself and feeling like you’ve achieved something you wanted to achieve, is helping someone else. Go ahead and make a life or help a life or nurture someone or something, teach someone something or something. You know what’s not romantic? Teaching.
This romanticization is just really superficialization. That’s what it is. You don’t want to be a main character in a good thing. You want to be a main character in a soap opera that holds wine and looks out over the balcony or the boat railing.
John: Here’s a great example though of a character predating social media. This is from Sleepless In Seattle, which is a great script, Nora Ephron’s script. Meg Ryan and Rosie O’Donnell are talking. Rosie O’Donnell’s line to her is, “That’s your problem. You don’t want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.” Nora Ephron, thank you very much for that.
It’s the unrealistic expectations of how life is supposed to be, that life is supposed to be like a movie, that things should be as extreme, as beautiful, as perfect as that. It’s that desire for impossible perfection.
Craig: If the movie ever got this right, it was The Graduate. It’s the last shot of The Graduate. It’s brilliant. It’s the most wonderful thing. It still remains just like a little miracle to me.
John: He’s done this big dramatic thing that is such main character energy.
Craig: He stopped a wedding. He stopped a wedding by banging on glass and, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” and stopped a wedding and comes up to her, and she goes, “Yes,” and leaves the stupid guy that she shouldn’t be marrying. She runs off with him. They run out. All the adults are like, “What’s happening?” These crazy kids, they’re in love, and it’s the most romantic thing ever. They get on a bus and they sit down, full of just this romantic energy, and then the camera just stays with them, and you see the reality of what they’ve done slowly sink in.
John: As the adrenaline fades.
Craig: And now, “Where are we getting lunch?” and, “I guess we need an apartment,” and, “Yeah, I don’t have a job.”
John: I just want to make sure that we don’t become afraid of having your protagonists protagonate, but those are actual actions and choices and difficult things that they are doing to achieve the thing that they want.
The thing that they want is probably not to be a character in a movie. Hopefully they want something that is actually tangible and real that they need to pursue for their own inner being, and that as screenwriters, it’s our job to externalize these internal thoughts, but make sure the characters have internal thoughts and have internal drives and desires, because otherwise they’re going to just feel like empty puppets running around.
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