What makes a character in a book or a movie memorable? What makes the character interesting? Sometimes what attracts us to someone is a bit of a mystery, and good characterization requires a little mystery too.
Seeking the Carnivalesque
In the screenplay book I’m reading, Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay by Andrew Horton, the author uses the term carnivalesque when explaining how to develop real and memorable characters. Characters are never complete, set, or finished, but instead are always glimpsed in motion from a certain perspective, Horton says, and quotes Seymour Chatman, “The horizon of personality always recedes before us.”
In a carnival, people are thrown into a place of the unknown, where anything can happen. Carnival is the time when no rules hold, when one can become whatever they wish. And even if the writer knows a character’s core personality and uses this “core” knowledge to drive the plot of a story, there should remain a mystery, “a realm of the unresolved,” in Horton’s words, something neither the writer nor reader can fully know or understand.
The Appeal of Uncertainty
“The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty,” the poet Yoshida Kenko says. “Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth.”
In a good book or film, sometimes we understand something without being able to explain it; we feel it and don’t know why. When I read these ideas, I thought of one scene in Little Miss Sunshine. When the teenage boy who had all his hopes set on being a pilot finds out he’s color blind, he runs off from the family, screaming out his rage and frustration. He refuses to return to the family van. The sister eventually comes down the hill where he sits and squats beside him. Nothing is said, nothing explained, but we understand without explanation why he returns to the van.
Do any characters stand out as memorable to you? Are you able to pinpoint why? Did you understand them sometimes without understanding why you did?
I’ve started a list of characters who were memorable to me for a number of different reasons. Do you have a list?