by Philip Meyer
“Flat” characters may have some aspect or trait that makes (and keeps) them interesting or compelling, but what they lack, typically, is psychological complexity or the ability to change; they are fixed entities and typically do not develop or change in the course of the plot. Flat characters display no distracting internal conflicts; their actions embody and manifest the single-sentence idea that makes them come alive and gives them purpose. Often, the character is brought onstage, especially in film, to advance a crucial sequence of the narrative design. Afterward, this flat character may simply disappear. This does not mean that flat characters are intrinsically uninteresting as characters. Indeed, just the opposite may be the case; there may be some compelling aspect to a flat character that makes him come alive momentarily, or allows the image and identity of the character to linger in the mind of the audience long after the character fulfills her purpose and departs from the story. Further, flat characters often have great utility within the story; the books of some classical novelists (e.g., Charles Dickens) and that of many effective legal storytellers are populated with vivid flat characters cast into crucial secondary roles within the story.
Forster observed subtly about flat characters in the novel:
One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognized whenever they come in—recognized by the reader’s emotional eye, not by the visual eye, which merely notes the recurrence of a proper name.… It is a convenience for an author when he can strike with his full force at once, and flat characters are very useful to him [in doing this], since they never need reintroducing … and provide their own atmosphere.…
A second advantage is that they are easily remembered by the reader afterwards. They remain in his mind as unalterable.… We all want books to endure, to be refuges, and their inhabitants to be always the same, and flat characters tend to justify themselves on this account.22
These observations are, in large measure, also applicable to flat characters in legal storytelling practices, making the use of well-formed flat characters invaluable.
Forster also speaks of “round” characters.23 Typically, round characters are located at the core of the story; they are more fully developed than flat characters and reveal different aspects or facets as the story develops. The narrative logic and the constellation of secondary flat characters circulate around these core round or complex characters. The story is, in large measure, often—but not necessarily—“their” story. A round character is “[a] complex, multidimensional, unpredictable character.”24 Forster observes that “[t]he test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way.”25 To create convincing round characters and to make them come alive, it is necessary to provide sufficient information about the character’s internal tensions, contradictions, and complications so that the audience will understand the character’s actions as “the product of several different drives or conflicts derived from more than one level of the personality.”26
There is a second important aspect about understanding and depicting round characters. In addition to their psychological complexity, these characters are typically not static within the structure of the plot; they tend to move or evolve or change internally just as the plot develops. As Hemingway observed, when asked about characters and characterization in his novels, “Everything changes as it moves.… Sometimes the movement is so slow it does not seem to be moving. But there is always change and always movement.”27 The change in characters in most legal storytelling, akin to the trajectory of character arcs of many round characters in films, is more scripted and predictable than in the classic novels that are more about character development than plot.
Nevertheless, complex characters may change during the course of a legal story or even the typical commercial popular entertainment film. They mature or degenerate, they have an epiphany or at least an attitudinal shift, or they gain control or lose control of their actions. Regardless, their actions and choices affect their worlds causally and, more important, determine the movement of the plot and the outcome of the story. This is especially so in law stories that, like the popular entertainment film, employ the model of “the unique, autonomous individual responsible for his or her own acts.”28
The transformation or character shift in law stories typically occurs on a clearly identified and circumscribed trajectory, in Hollywood screenwriting terminology a “character arc.”29 This shift or clear and apparent movement signifies more than the fact that the audience simply knows more about who the character is at the end of the story than at the beginning. Rather, the plot works internally on the character, compelling the character to make crucial choices or take actions that, in turn, shape the plot and the outcome of the story. In doing so, the story compels important internal changes or personal transformation within the character’s psychology so that the character is not the same person at the end of the story as at the beginning, as is apparent, for example, in the transformation of the “complex” characters of Helen Ramirez and Amy Kane in High Noon. The story inevitably works upon the character’s character, and the audience observes and perceives the “reverberations”30 of the plot within the story.
Other characters are static. They remain frozen in the same mold from start to finish. There is some apparent relationship between the flat-character–round-character taxonomy and the static-character–evolving-character taxonomy. Flat characters must also be static. Round characters can be either static or evolving. And especially in legal stories, the character arc of a round character, especially the protagonist, is often left intentionally incomplete.
The next section, as an illustration of this terminology, offers one suggested analysis of how some of the important characters from High Noon fit into this typology.
B. The Heroic Protagonist—Will Kane
The protagonist is typically at the center of a Hollywood movie (akin to a law story told about a plaintiff in a tort case or a criminal defendant). The story is typically his or her story; the plot is “protagonist driven,” and the movie is primarily about the protagonist. The film is usually “shot” (told) from the “point of view” (perspective) of the protagonist, and, although there may be some scenes or sequences of scenes without the protagonist in them (e.g., the perspective may temporarily shift away from the protagonist), the protagonist’s experiences are usually at the center of the film. Even when there are scenes, or sequences of scenes, where the protagonist is not present, these are typically about the protagonist and fill in important pieces of the protagonist’s story (or backstory). The protagonist is, invariably, the subject of these scenes. Other characters develop through their relationships with the protagonist; characters diminish in significance in the plot as they orbit farther away from their interactions with the protagonist, who remains at the center of the constellation of characters.
Will Kane is the protagonist in High Noon; the story is his story. He is a somewhat complex character. The plot is about his internal development (his character arc) as he moves from honoring his pledge to Amy and leaving town to desperately attempting to enlist the assistance of the townspeople, to finally doing what the hero must do—standing up alone against the evil Frank Miller and the villainous Miller gang. Most of the film is not about the final confrontation and showdown; it is about what happens (or fails to happen) as Kane awaits the arrival of Frank Miller and the Miller gang.
Will Kane, and Gary Cooper’s portrayal of Kane, is clearly not a “flat” or “static” character. He has some depth and complexity; it is apparent that he is not a two-dimensional or stereotypical Western melodrama hero. But is he a fully realized, “complex” character—in Forster’s literary sense in that his actions in response to the progressive complications of the plot are unpredictable in a way that is both convincing and sometimes surprising? In the end, Kane must respond to his plight and fulfill his heroic narrative destiny; Kane must resolve his internal conflicts and rise to meet the challenges of the melodramatic plo
t and the expectations of the audience. Kane is an archetypal hero and must do what heroes always do; he is not free to choose to do otherwise. Here, the novelist Edith Wharton’s observations about heroes are relevant: the protagonist-hero “tend[s] to be the least real” of characters because the protagonist is a “survivor … of the old ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’ whose business it was not to be real but to be sublime” and also because the story being “about them, … forces them into the shape which its events impose.”31
Kane’s actions are constrained by his role in the story; Kane must fulfill his narrative destiny and the “logic” of the plot. As a Western melodramatic hero, he must act to save the community, and he must do what a hero must do. Likewise, his internal life and his psychological characteristics—that is, his character arc—are ultimately shaped by his role and by the expectations of the audience. Michael Roemer reflects thoughtfully on how actions inform the character of the Western hero:
The Western hero often saves an entire community. He guides wagon trains through Indian territory, knows how to ford raging rivers, and protects women, children, and the infirm. But while he is the leader, he remains a “common,” democratic man, and his actions, unlike those of King Lear or Julien Sorel, meet with the approval of the audience. If he opposes his fellow townsmen to prevent the lynching of an innocent prisoner, the community will eventually see the light. Conflicts and problems are invariably solved by courage and reason, and there is no need for suffering or self-division.32
Superficially, Kane presents the psychological and physical characteristics of the stereotypical Western hero; he is handsome, strong-willed, fair-minded, and willing to sacrifice himself in service of the community. But Will Kane also possesses certain psychological and physical characteristics atypical for the traditional Hollywood Western hero; Gary Cooper plays Kane “against type.” Will Kane is a much older man than the audience is used to seeing Cooper portray. He is also a more complex character, capable of betraying the women he loves, Helen and Amy, and capable of contemplating self-betrayal as well. Kane is initially fearful—he races out of town upon hearing of Frank Miller’s anticipated arrival—and then must overcome his fear to act heroically at the end of the movie, regardless of the consequences. He is certainly a much less commanding figure, and not a pure heroic archetype, as the more comfortable and predictable heroes Cooper frequently portrayed in earlier films.33
C. Amy Kane and Helen Ramirez: Complex “Round” Characters
There are other vivid, fluid, and complex characters in High Noon. As Edith Wharton observes, these subordinate characters are often freer than the protagonist to “mov[e] at ease,” changing and developing within the “interstices of the tale, and free to go about their business in the illogical human fashion.”34 Amy Kane and Helen Ramirez are such complex characters, although their “movements” are not so “free” and never so “illogical” as in Wharton’s estimate of the movements of complex characters in the novels of an earlier time. In popular movies, akin to legal storytelling practices, all characters, including complex characters like Amy and Helen, exist on much tighter narrative tethers, constrained in their movements by character arcs established in service of, and subservient to, the plot. Like Kane, Amy and Helen are both compelling characters. They represent oppositional archetypes: the blonde, patrician, and initially dependent Amy; and the darker, street-smart, mercurial Mexican businesswoman Ramirez. Both women are betrayed by Kane. These betrayals, and the women’s responses to them, are at the core of their characters’ “character” and the form of their respective developmental arcs.
Both Amy Kane and Helen Ramirez have complex inner psychologies revealed through their dialogue and, more important in film, through their choices in action. Both are “fluid” rather than “static” characters who develop and change through the course of the movie. However, this development is shaped in a clear progression of a purposeful and carefully composed character arc typical of the conventions of cinematic—and of legal—storytelling practices. As Margaret Mehring explains about characterization in the popular movies: “Character traits have to be compressed and condensed. All non-essential character traits must be eliminated and [the essential ones] then compacted—layered—into a denser form.”35 This is also typical of legal storytelling practice: the depiction of character is streamlined; there is simply no narrative “time” allotted for psychological digression. Character arcs are economically developed in law stories; character is visible and apparent.
So, for example, Amy begins the film as a Quaker who does not believe in violence. She has her good reasons for her deeply held pacifist beliefs; her motivations are sketched in through the backstory provided in dialogue in just a few simple lines: both her father and her brother were killed in gunfights. She has married Kane, the marshal, but her marriage vow is conditioned on Kane’s promise to hang up his guns after the ceremony, give up violence, and leave Hadleyville to become a shopkeeper in another town. Initially, Will Kane honors his promise, and literally hangs up his guns; the two newlyweds leave town in their buckboard before Frank Miller’s arrival. But they don’t get far before Kane turns his rig around and heads back to Hadleyville ready to resume his job as marshal. He declares to Amy: “I’ve got to go back.… They’re making me run. I’ve never run from anything before.”36 Amy is thus betrayed. Amy leaves Kane, and plans to leave Hadleyville. But when she is already on the train and preparing to depart (it is the same train that brings Frank Miller to town), she undergoes an apparent character reversal: at the sound of the gunfire she rushes off the train to assist her man. Although Amy is a pacifist, she picks up a gun and shoots the outlaw Corey in the back to protect Kane. And when Frank Miller takes her hostage, Amy defends herself. She claws at Miller’s face—freeing herself physically and perhaps also liberating herself from the constraints of her pacifist beliefs—so that Kane has a clear shot at Miller and can kill him in the final shoot-out. She makes a choice that redefines her character. At the end of the movie, Amy leaves town with Kane, completing her character arc. She has moved from dependency and passivity to strength and action, her internal beliefs and convictions modified and tempered by the knowledge that she has gained from experience. This enables her to overcome her past, change her beliefs, and reconcile with her beloved.
D. Frank Miller (Antagonist/Villain): A “Flat” and “Static” Character
The villain in High Noon is Frank Miller, the leader of the Miller gang. He is the primary oppositional force, the force of antagonism, that creates the conflict and compels the other round characters to act and to change. He is the crucial character; the plot of the film could not develop without him. Yet as is typical of villains, Frank Miller is a flat and static character. Miller’s obsessive single sentence, his uniform motivational mantra throughout this movie, might be stated: “I’m gonna get Will Kane for sending me to prison and take back the town, my mistress, and all that was once mine.” His strength, like the shark’s obsession for human flesh in Jaws, is in his evil nature and in his ability to impose his will upon the story: his single-mindedness of purpose. Peter Brooks puts it nicely: “Melodramatic good and evil are highly personalized: they are assigned to, they inhabit persons who indeed have no psychological complexity but who are strongly characterized. Most notably, evil is villainy; it is a swarthy, cape-enveloped man with a deep voice.”37 The aesthetic question is how to keep the audience interested in a true villain for the course of the entire plot. In Jaws the answer is to have the shark become ever more evil and brazen in its rapacious attacks on vulnerable townspeople, and even to focus meticulously on the details of these attacks, allowing the audience to become voyeuristically engrossed, participating in the attacks often viewed from the underwater perspective of the shark. In the Silkwood closing argument the structure builds, shifting the identity of various underlings until the identity of the true culprit is revealed; the devouring corporation rises up from beneath the mud springs.
In High Noon
the aesthetic solution sustaining the compelling power of the villain is just the opposite: the villain is kept offstage until just before the ending, building the villain’s power and strength by employing the reactions of the community to his memory and to the prospect of his return. His identity and character are established consistently by what others say about him, by his reputation, and by the townspeople’s (and Kane’s) fear of him. Visual imagery (ticking clocks, railroad tracks pointed toward town, black smoke, and meetings of the outlaw gang) foreshadow and set the stage for Miller’s arrival, and the ultimate showdown and final confrontation between good and evil that is at the core of melodrama.
The final movement of the plot (the “third act” or the climax and resolution) takes place when Miller steps down from the train and moves out of the shadows and into the sunlight. His power and villainy is anticipated by the audience; we are confident that Miller will prove a worthy adversary for Will Kane. Although Frank Miller is a flat and static character, he maintains a compelling interest for the length of the movie; he serves his purpose in wrapping up the plot of a Hollywood Western melodrama. In legal storytelling the effective use of compelling flat and round characters is equally important to moving the audience forward in resolving the story’s plot.
IV. Techniques of Character Development and Characterization: Excerpts from Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life
Closely related to the subject of types of characters is the subject of how to develop vivid and compelling characters, that is, the use of techniques for effective “characterization.” We can identify three primary techniques for character development. These techniques are common to all forms of popular storytelling, regardless of whether the storyteller is writing a brief, short story, or novel, employing an oral storytelling form as in the depiction of character to a judge or jury at trial, engaging in visual storytelling as in a movie, or, ever more often these days, a mixture or blend of various forms. These three basic storytelling techniques for creating and developing effective and compelling characters are: (1) selective use of physical detail and physical description, (2) employing dialogue to reveal character, and, most especially, (3) use of action to reveal character.
