David McGrogan writes interesting roleplaying games, and he had some interesting thoughts about fictional characters in his most recent 'blog post. You can read it here. If you're lazy and want me to just tell you what it says, his main point is that the urge to bolt a backstory onto archetypical characters (like James Bond or Darth Vader or The Mad Hatter) is all the rage in current media, because it's a way to "monetize the franchise" or whatever the buzz phrase of the week is in Hollywood. The obvious current example is the forthcoming film about Young Han Solo, but we've also seen Young Sherlock Holmes and Young Indiana Jones and even multiple competing origin stories for the Wicked Witch of the West.
The problem, of course, is that adding the backstory diminishes the very archetypical quality that makes the character popular in the first place. How many Star Wars fans would be just as happy not knowing young Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker's opinions on the topic of sand?
Mr. McGrogan isn't the first to notice this. His 'blog post reminded me of something the legendary screenwriter William Goldman wrote in his book Which Lie Did I Tell?, about the lion-hunting film he wrote, The Ghost and the Darkness.* The movie was not a huge success, and Goldman identifies one reason as Michael Douglas's desire to explore the backstory of his enigmatic expert hunter character.
Douglas (and, after some arm-twisting, the director) thought about the hunter as a character rather than an archetype, which in Goldman's opinion weakened the role and the film, because instead of a super-cool lion hunter he turned into a guy with a string of failures in his past. In his book Goldman uses another example: would it really improve Casablanca if we found out exactly why Rick Blaine is an exile? Our vague imaginings are better than what the writers could ever come up with. "I like to think you killed a man," says Renault, and that's good enough for us.
Know when to stop explaining.
*About the real-life horror-movie killer lions of Tsavo. If it wasn't true nobody would believe it.
Comments