As for police procedurals, I thought the new cliched backstory was “My wife was killed so I became a cop to try to track down her murderer and get revenge on humanity (but maybe learn something about myself along the way?). Luckily I turned out to be REALLY good at it. Like, much better than anyone else of those ‘by the books’ guys– especially my boss.”

Belinkie and I watched “Bourne III: With A Vengeance” (I can’t remember the Latinate noune for #3) the other day, where the backstory is in fact the McGuffin. (MacGuffin?) We split on whether it works — he thought it was too little payoff for the setup; I thought that, for an action movie, it was an uncharacteristically deep parable of choice and responsibility.

But the point in Bourne is that he’s separated from his psychology — he’s actually brought up short when it becomes clear that there *IS* a reason for his actions. Up until that point, he had been a cipher even to himself. (Much like modern man. But I digress.)

Backstory fails when it’s a lazy shorthand for other, richer kinds of character development. Not surprisingly, you see it in TV all the time. For whatever reason, the examples that leap immediately to mind are from police procedurals: “You know, when I was 8, I saw a robbery in progress and nobody stopped it. That’s when I decided I was going to be a cop. And that’s why I have to solve this completely unconnected case.”

It also depends on a kind of simplistic psychology, a one-to-one correlation between a character and her history. And it fails to take into account the myriad other factors that affect behavior or interfere with agency. (The Departed actually took up this question pretty directly, pitting individual history against family, ethnic, and group loyalty.)

“Rick Begins.” I like it.

Imagine you’re watching Casablanca and Rick’s just been introduced. Then someone in the bar says, “Man, why is Rick so cynical all the time?” In response, another character (maybe Renault) explains something along the lines of, “Oh, well, he had a family in America but then lost them in a car accident so he got depressed and moved to Paris and then met up with this girl but the girl turned out to be married so he got fed up and moved to Casablanca to get away from his problems.”

Makes Rick look like a total loser. No more mystery.

I agree and disagree. Backstory can work, but it has to be pulled off in an appropriate way. Just having a third character explain the soap opera history of a protagonist is clunky. But we have no problem watching the flashback in Casablanca, which essentially IS Rick’s back story. Seeing Rick waiting for Ilsa and knowing she won’t come is heartbreaking. It makes us understand his motivations (or lack thereof) and bitterness, but for some reason it doesn’t make him look like a loser who runs away from his problems.

This is all a long way of saying it depends on how it’s done.