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 journal-ists 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 con-sidered as complex, heterogeneous and ever-changing groups of individuals.

Con se quent ly 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 interpreta-tion and audience involvement.

Since Plato and Aristotle, scholars in sociology and cultural stud-ies 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 ‘mul-ti-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

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 narrato logy.

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(trans. the author). screen writing 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).

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 fac-tors, people’s socio-cultural position for example co-determines the inter pre ta tion 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 enthu siasti cally 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 discus-sion 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 nar-rative fictions.¹¹ The cognitive-emotional impact of a narrative plays at different levels. While reading or watching, readers-viewers con-sciously or unconcon-sciously 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 sym-pathetic 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 nar-rating 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 butler-ing, 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 ‘nor-mal’ 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

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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 con-spicuous 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 socio-cultural and political level, in terms of moral and other values, opin-ions, 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 socio-logical 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’

protago nist 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 disconnect-ing with a narrative. Some viewers may continue watchdisconnect-ing 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 wants 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 homoge-neous audience, there is not one homogehomoge-neous 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.

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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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99 Journal of Screenwriting | Volume 1 Number 1

© 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.99/1

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In document Journal of Screenwriting 1.1 (Page 92-99)