Throwing Your Characters Over The Edge
Setting Out What's at Stake in a Story

When a story's action shatters the lives of its characters, those characters are thrown over the edge into new worlds. They become dramatic characters because the choices that face them are stark: how will they, can they, survive in these new worlds? How will they change? Can they avoid changing?

In the last year, several movies found different ways to throw characters over the edge: The Sweet Hereafter, The Five Senses, and Last Night.

The Sweet Hereafter begins with a man, woman and baby girl sleeping in an idyllic setting. This quiet, peaceful opening begins a story about loss, by starting with a scene that suggests the opposite, a loving, fulfilling moment in life.

We then cut to Mr. Stevens, played by Ian Holm, a lawyer, who takes a call from his estranged daughter. She's a drug addict and also, we later learn, the baby in the first scene. Because of her drug addiction, he has 'lost' his daughter even though she's alive.

We go from Mr. Stevens, to a father watching his teenage daughter, Nicole, getting ready to perform at a country fair.

Each of these scenes takes place at a different time, but each carries embedded meaning that serves the dramatic purpose of the story. The chronology of the events of any story is not linear. A storyteller chooses those moments in time that best evoke a story's journey.

Mr. Stevens arrives in a small Canadian town as a lawyer seeking to represent the parents of children who died in a tragic bus accident. Because he's tormented over the loss of his daughter, he's focused his life on using others to prove that someone is at fault for every tragedy, that every tragedy has a root cause that can be known and understood. He says to a potential client, "You're angry, aren't you? That's why I'm here. To give your anger a voice. To be your weapon against whoever caused that bus to go off the road."

As we learn more about each parent and the children involved in the accident, the scenes that lead up to the accident develop more and more dramatic power. But when the accident finally happens, we see very little of it. What we see is the shocked look on a father's face as he watches the accident unfold, then later sees a blanket put over the bodies of his dead children.

Then he looks up and sees them laughing, running toward him in the snow. At the moment of their deaths, they are more alive to him than ever.

Later, as he looks at the hulk of the bus after the accident, he hears the screams of the trapped children. This is a motif that recurs several times. People looking at the bus hear the screams.

The loss for Nicole's father is not that she ends up in a wheelchair, but that he loses his dream of helping her become a rock star, a dream he wants to share with her in an intimate way.

As the story advances, one thread occurs years later. On a plane, Mr. Stevens finds himself sitting next to a young woman who was a childhood friend of his daughter. This brings us to a revelation of what happened in that opening scene. In that idyllic bed a hidden menace struck; baby black widow spiders bit the baby girl. As she began to swell, there is a long ride to the hospital during which Mr. Stevens holds his daughter in his lap, a knife ready to cut into her throat if she can no longer breath. Was this the turning point that turned his daughter against him? He can't know, only wonder and grieve.

The story turns when Nicole is asked to testify at a deposition. When she balks, Mr. Stevens tries to manipulate her by telling her that people feel sorry for her because she's in a wheel chair, and testifying is her chance to be angry and get revenge.

She appears ready to go along, but instead, she lies at the deposition, and there is no longer the basis of a law suit against the town or bus manufacturer.

Nicole's reason for lying is set out by her voice over recital of the Pied Piper, in part, "One was lame and could not dance the whole of the way/and after years, if you would blame his sadness/he was used to say/it's dull in our town since my playmates left/I can't forget that I'm bereft/of all the pleasant sights they see/which the piper also promised me/for he led us he said/to a joyous land...where waters gushed and fruit trees grew...and everything was strange and new."

Nicole has left behind the world she once knew. As she narrates at the end of the story, about Ian, "I wonder if you understand, that all of us, Delores, me, the children who survived, the children who didn't, that we're all citizens of a different town now. A place with its own special rules and its own special laws. A town of people living in the sweet hereafter."

Unlike many films, the Sweet Hereafter does not suggest grief and loss can be resolved. It only suggests that life goes on for the grieving, and that we all grieve in our own way.

A beautiful film.

Another recent film uses a great device to throw its characters over the edge: it's the end of the world; it's happening at a clearly defined moment; no one will be spared.

Each character in the story reacts to this situation according to what's important to them. Some simply want to gather with family like it's a Christmas dinner and pretend all is well. Others riot. Another character arranges to have sex with every woman he's ever had a fantasy about, including his high school English teacher. Another man spends his last hours calling people to let them know the local gas utility has appreciated their patronage.

The story's main character, a young man, wants to die alone. The natural question, why? Fate brings him together with a young woman desperately trying to find her way home to a lover. This also naturally raises a question, why her desperation to get home if the world is ending?

He tries to help her, because helping her means he can die alone. But fate keeps bringing her back. And as the time draws near the end, we find out why he wants to die alone: the loss of his wife who taught him about love has left him bereft. He doesn't want to go through that loss again. Then it comes out why she's so determined to go home: she doesn't want to die a death at the hands of a common fate; she and her lover have made a suicide pact.

She asks him if he'll kill her. The catch is, she needs to fall in love with him to go through with her plan.

He doesn't want to get this involved, but the story ends with the two of them facing each other, guns pointed at the head of the other. But instead of killing each other as the world ends, they do something else that acts out what each was really looking for, what each really wanted to share with someone else.

This story raises a question that has stayed with me, what would I do if the world were coming to an end in the next 24 hours?

A lovely film.

The Five Senses has a plot that revolves around a missing little girl. The mother of the young girl blames a masseuse whose daughter was supposed to be watching the little girl. The mother's feelings of grief, loss and anger are deeply felt.

There are many beautiful scenes in this film, but several stand out. In one, a young man begs the masseuse for a massage. The masseuse at first refuses, then gives in. During the massage, the young man begins to cry. The only time he's touched is when he pays for a massage. Something in his life has thrown him over the edge, outside of normal human contact, and he craves being touched.

Another character is a doctor who eavesdrops on the conversations of others in the office building. The natural question, why? It comes out that he's going deaf and he's trying to store as many auditory sensations as he can. After he admits his situation to someone, he's taken to a concert and shown that he can 'listen' to the music by feeling its vibration on church pews. This moment allows him to feel he can survive in what to him would be the most barren of all worlds, one without sound.

In a turning point, the mother of the missing girl accepts the masseuse in her life as someone who understands how she feels. The lost girl is found, and what else is found is the relationship that had been lost between the masseuse and her teenage daughter.

This is a beautifully told story about how we perceive the world through the senses, and through the memories of our sense experiences.

* * *

One way to discover what drives a character is to ask, what is the one thing a character would miss the most if he or her were to lose everything? What a character craves most in life might be a commitment to the truth, a loving relationship, a sense of justice. Throw that character over the edge into a world where what they value most is taken away from them, and that character must react.

Another way to frame this question, what is most important to YOU, the reader, in life? Create a character who loses that, and you can explore your own feelings and thoughts to understand what drives your character to act, to gain some goal, to discover how to exist in the new world you've created.

* * *

The Sweet Hereafter. Writing credits, novel by Russell Banks, script, Atom Egoyan. Directed by Atom Egoyan. Released 1997.

Last Night. Written and directed by Don McKellar. Released 1998.

The Five Senses. Written and directed by Jeremy Podeswa. Released 1999.

(This article appeared in ScreenTalk, The International Magazine of Screenwriting.)

©2000 Bill Johnson