Characters and Plot

by Bill Johnson

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids offers some good examples of the relationship between a story's characters and its plot. Because Honey is straightforward and transparent, it offers an opportunity to discern very easily the story movement the movie's formula creates.

The premise of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: "Overcoming a shared catastrophe leads to growth."

Within that premise, each character has their own, individual movement. The story's plot is the structuring of the situations the characters must pass through and overcome to move the story forward. The story's plot operates on different levels. On one level, it places obstacles before characters that force them to act in a way that reveals their states of emotions. On another, it creates drama over the outcome of scenes and the story. In that way the story's plot serves to make the movement of the story toward its fulfillment dramatic and potent in a pleasurable way.

Honey opens with a pretty teenage girl, Amy, on the phone concerned about having a date for an upcoming dance. She also needs to spend some time watching over her young brother, Nick, a budding scientist (his identify is completely wrapped around this). Nick wants to know, "When is Mom coming home?" Amy doesn't know. Wayne, working in the attic on some outlandish machine, strives to get ready for an important show and tell.

In this brief opening scene, we're clued into what's at stake for several characters. Another important point, the family is in crisis as the story opens. It's not something that's developed. We enter a story already in motion, with characters reacting to what's at stake in their lives -- the family breaking up. Characters reveal themselves and their concerns as they react to this situation.

The next door neighbors are then introduced. A father is in conflict with both his sons, one whom he wants to be more athletic, the other a younger boy who wants attention and recognition and will do just about anything to get it. Both families think the other is the height of strangeness, which has brought the families into conflict. Again, the conflict is ongoing as the story opens. The movement of the story will bring the conflict to an acute stage.

Harried, Wayne ignores Nick as he tries to get his machine functioning successfully to meet a deadline for a presentation. The machine fails. Diane, the estranged wife who's been living apart from the family for a few days because she can no longer tolerate Wayne's behavior, calls and talks to Wayne. Wayne tells her if he can get the machine to work, everything will be all right, the family will get back together. This sets up Wayne as being unobservant of why the family is in distress in the first place. His character movement, then, will be to really see that the love of his wife and the safety of his children mean more to him than building a successful machine. As the story opens, he feels he can only be viewed as a success if his machine is a success, so when the machine fails, he's well into a crisis of character.

Next, Nick, the scientist in the mold of his father, sets up a neighborhood boy to mow the lawn with a radio-controlled lawnmower. (A plot device.) Ron, the neighbor boy, taunts Nick, that he is a nerd. Nick taunts Ron that he's a pest.

The father next door confronts his son, Russell, and tries to talk him into working out to develop muscles so he can be like the father. Russell clearly is disinterested in that, but he is interested in Amy, who doesn't seem to know he exists.

In these brief scenes, all the major characters have been established, their inner conflicts established, outer goals clear, all within the context of the story moving forward. It's formula, but well done. Syd Field talks about all the major characters and the scope of the story being introduced by page ten. He was addressing that underlying issue that the story be clearly established and moving ahead by that point It's well done here.

When Ron sends a baseball into the attic, it affects Wayne's machine, which shrinks a couch. Russell takes Ron in tow and marches him over to make a confession to Amy and Nick. It's clear Russell is enamored of Amy.

The scene then cuts away to Wayne's compatriots challenging him to prove his theories during his presentation. Without a working demonstration from the machine, he is considered a failure. Worse, he's laughed at. He leaves the meeting distraught, faced with what he will do now with his life. He decides to concentrate on his family.

At that point, Amy, Nick, Russell and Ron go up to retrieve the ball and are shrunk by Wayne's machine. This visible shrinking matches up to what these children are already feeling: Amy and Nick feeling small and powerless to control what's happening in their parent's lives as it affects them. Russell and Ron, for different reasons, also feel small and powerless in their own lives. What we're seeing on the surface of the story is literally true to what's happening on an inner level of feeling for the children. It's smooth and well done.

When Wayne comes home, he's so absorbed in his own problems he can't hear the children, and he smashes the machine. He compounds the problem by sweeping up the broken machine parts, including in the debris the "broken" children. He then puts them in a trash bag that he carries to an alley at the rear of the house. The children have been trashed, as often happens to children with parents who are divorcing, or with parents who are emotionally unbalanced. This is plot point one. The children clearly must do something. They are committed to a course of action.

What they decide to do is make a physical journey across the back yard. But there is also a second journey, a journey of feelings, that they undertake. The children, as developed, each have issues at stake. Amy, estranged from Nick, worried about her parents, and, her most obvious goal, finding a date to an upcoming dance. Nick has to deal with being estranged from Amy and feeling like he's unimportant to his father. Russell's issues are being too small for his father, and socially awkward. Ron, feeling unimportant and unnoticed, is considered by the others to be a pest. Even the dog is presented as being afraid of a cat; something to overcome. These are all feeling states that the audience can identify with.

One other important point, at this stage a very fundamental aspect of a good story kicks in. Call it: Answering the questions the story poses.

What's going to happen next to these kids?

How will their dilemma be resolved?

The film's viewers have been set up to care about these characters and their situation, to want to know what's going to happen next. It's very basic and primal, this urge to know how things will turn out when it concerns characters whose actions we've internalized. But the story must be in motion, with dynamic characters in action around the central issue at stake in the story, before this can happen. If the actions of the story's characters do not revolve around what's at stake, such a story only raises weak or confused questions.

Notice also as we pass through plot point one in this movie that many dramatic incidents have brought us to this point, but plot point one takes us to a higher level of danger/conflict. Characters now offer strong feelings that in other circumstances might be kept muted or below the surface. This process of characters sharing stronger and stronger states of feeling continues from plot point one to plot point two. The conflicts and states of feeling escalate. As the obstacles become more desperate and seemingly insurmountable, they call on ever deeper states of feeling. Not just for the story's characters, but for its viewers, as well. That's the purpose of the story's plot, to create situations that call for character to act, and reveal themselves, in dramatic ways that moves the story itself toward its fulfillment.

Cutting back to Wayne and Diane, they realize what's happened and start a frantic search for the kids. The neighbors, too, begin a search for their children. Eventually, Wayne tells the neighbors what's happened; the two fathers seem ready to come to blows.

On the children's journey, Russell rescues Amy from drowning and must apply mouth to mouth resuscitation. When Nick asks Russell where he learned to do that, Russell replies "In French class."

The journey across the back yard proceeds via a formula. First something dramatic happens, some external event, an attack, a sudden flood, some conflict among the children. Then the children react on a feeling level. As the physical journey continues, the children's feeling journey goes forward, too, becomes deeper, more clear as to what's at stake for them. Russell and Amy draw closer together. Ron finds a friend in an Ant. Nick, shedding his facade of being a boy wonder scientist, begins to bond with the others; he becomes a frightened little boy needing love and reassurance.

As night falls, Wayne and Diane rebond; facing this catastrophe together begins the process of bringing them back together again, giving them a renewed sense of what's important in their lives.

Their dialogue:

Diane: "It's all our fault."

Wayne: "My fault."

Diane: "That's not what I meant."

She's talking about all those moments of missed connections of feeling, that sense of having a shared bond and shared purpose, that, when it broke down, allowed the family to drift apart. The children, too, as they settle in for the night, talk about their innermost feelings. Amy and Russ kiss, then...a Scorpion attacks! The Ant which Ron befriended helps the children fight off the Scorpion, but it dies in the battle, and Ron weeps. The tough young boy has passed a threshold of emotion on his journey of feelings, and we grieve for his loss and feel his pain.

In the new day, Diane finds Wayne exhausted, after his being up all night working to repair his machine. Diane to Wayne, "I love you." Then, bang, the neighborhood boy shows up and starts mowing the lawn. To escape death, the children must hold to each other (a way of acting out their inner bonding).

Then, Wayne almost sees the children, but doesn't. Nick cries desperately. Amy comforts him. They bond deeply. Russ comforts Ron, who is afraid they'll never be found or returned to their world. Plot point two, by Syd Field's formula. All seems lost. The children will not be rescued.

Then the family dog appears and gives the children a lift into the house, scowling aside the once frightening cat (I mention it because of the care to which every character's concerns are dealt with in the course of the story). The children end up on the breakfast table, and Wayne almost eats Nick, suggestive of the way unstable adults consume their children as a way of dealing with their own issues. Wayne, saying, "Gotta keep our eyes open," finally sees what is under his nose, his son.

The children are taken back to the attic, but the machine must be tested. The father from next door, he of false bravado, volunteers to be a test of the machine. True courage. He is willing to be shrunk, the worst possible fate in his eyes, to save his sons. A deeply felt moment.

The children are brought back. Amy and Russell will go to the dance. The neighbor father accepts his sons for who they are. Diane and Wayne and the kids rebond as a family. The two dads shake hands. Then, the final frame, Nick finally gets how Russell learned about mouth to mouth resuscitation in "French Class." Nick has completed his own inner journey to being not a facade he presents to others, but a feeling human being in touch with his peers and their concerns.

Again, to recap this:

While the formula this movie uses to create its movement is transparent, it also creates a well-realized movie, an enjoyable, clear journey of feelings the audience can share, particularly the story's uplifting fulfillment. This happens because the story's premise clearly shapes the actions and dialogue of its characters. They reveal their concerns by how they react to the pressure of what's at stake in the story. If different children had been created for the story, their different concerns would have called for subtle changes in the plot and story line, but the story and its premise would have remained the same.

Because Honey is a story that was true to its premise, because it answered the feeling questions it raised as well as the physical ones (what steps will these people take to resolve their problem), it created a pleasurable feeling journey and found its audience. Its world, for all the special effects, is simple and uncomplicated, but deeply felt. A family is breaking apart. What can be done to bring them back together again? Two neighbor boys, one feels small and unloved, the other has taken in others notions that he is simply a pest. How can this be changed?

The story's clever effects serve to energize the story, make it fresh. All or in part, they do not create the story, or move it forward. They simply serve to heighten the states of feelings of the characters and the viewers, even with the story's light tone.

Returning to Honey, its story is not its plot. The story is about two families rebonding as they overcome adversity, and we engage in that story. It's material that evokes rich feelings. The plot is what these characters do to overcome the obstacles in their path that they have no choice but to overcome. If Wayne could go back to giving the machine one more chance, if Diane believed that if she can just sell a house, she'll be able to tolerate Wayne, if Amy... Etc., etc.

If the characters don't have to engage in what's at stake in the story, have no reason to engage in what's going on, there is no story, no movement, no drama, no conflict. When the characters have a choice not to confront those painful feelings, have a choice not to overcome those painful obstacles, that's clear to the audience.

All of this is not to say that a writer who thinks in terms of plot can't start with a plot idea and use that as an entry to explore a world they wish to tell a story about. Or a writer might start with a character. Or with an idea, and use that as their entry point into the world of their story. But stories that fail to please their readers, or that are well-written and then deconstructed by someone who doesn't understand what a story is, don't ring true. They don't engage their readers, or engage in a faulty way. They break that unwritten contract that says a story will be played out in a way that offers the reader a dramatic journey of feelings and thoughts leading to the story's fulfillment around a dramatic issue.

In the case of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, this is a story that tells us love and courage can heal wounds and overcome the most dangerous obstacles: giant scorpions, a marriage breaking apart. It's a story that, true to its premise about how overcoming a castastrophe leads to growth, found its audience.

©1995-2013 Bill Johnson