Is the three-dimensional Wonka the "better" Wonka?
Last Wednesday on Overthinking It, Stokes published a fine post, “Archetype or Stereotype,” in which he talked about whether his creating a character for a writing project a bunch of years ago was sexist:
“If I’d invented this character out of the whole cloth, we might have something to talk about. But I can’t be accused of sexism just because I draw on a broadly internalized aspect of our cultural heritage, can I?”
As the corrected article now states, Stokes didn’t create this character himself; not only was it based on a long tradition of mythological and literary figures, it was part of a long-time collaboration between the two of us. Stokes left me out of the article so as not to indict me publicly with his self-criticism, but I certainly didn’t want to lose out on my share of the credit or blame! So I told him I’d write a response. Also, readers love conflict. Right? RIGHT? (Tell me I’m wrong in the comments.)
Hopefully, Stokes and I will someday return to the project (or, more likely, something like it), but in the meantime, here’s some of my perspective on this character, and, more importantly, on the self-and-mutual-flagellation that appears to be surrounding Mlawski’s excellent Female Character Flowchart — as well as the last hundred and fifty years of performing arts in general.
More on truth, the powers of art, one- and two-dimensional characters (SPOILER: There’s no difference between them), feminism, self-awareness and the moral obligations of writers, after the jump —
Social construct.
Are You a Feminist, or a Feminisn’t?
A quick note up front – I keep reading in various places (not just at OTI, but more across the web) statements about whether something is “feminist” or not, as if being “feminist” were a discernable quality of, say, a person, or an action, or an individual opinion. These statements are then often followed by tons of “true-scotspersoning” and “staw-personing” as everybody argues about what exactly the definitions are of all the terms everybody is using.
Such conversations are tiresome and miss the point. “Feminism” isn’t a virtue or an ethos; it’s a broad area of intellectual inquiry. It’s a way of talking about something — a characteristic of an ideal, not an ideal in itself, that sometimes forms a small part of an actionable political ideology or an ethical or moral framework.
It’s not like anybody just watched Raging Bull and then decided that he was going to become a lifelong domestic abuser – a boxer, maybe, but then that person also probably has to have a preexisting fondness for jumping rope and having people yell at you while you do sit-ups. Right and wrong are still decided by complex, messy, comprehensive sorts of judgements that take a lot more into consideration than Green Lantern comics.
I’m going to go out on a fountain, small wooded hill, or similar yonic symbol and say no one character, no one statement, no one discrete thing, is ever “feminist” or “anti-feminist” (or even “sexist”). What is feminist or anti-feminist is the way we include how we talk about and associate discrete things in a broader discourse, and then what that has to do with how some actual group of people thinks, acts and behaves.
The reason certain characters are seen as sexist is heavily informed by their prevalence in the culture and the role that prevalence plays affecting the choices people make in real life. If a fiction never affected what people did in meatspace, then feminist discourse would have no context in which to operate with regards to fiction. Relationships between perception of things like art and the way people live are often referred to as phenomenology, but usually by the time we start using words like that, we lose touch with how the rubber meets the road in our lives (as we perceive or understand them to be), which creates a problem when we stop speaking in academic contexts and try to overthink things that are closer to our hearts.
Take, for example, the television show Mad Men. Social critics are obsessed with this show. Is it feminist? Does it offer token nods to social progress while titillating us with alluringly-framed anti-feminism? What sort of phenomenology is it representing, creating or reinforcing? We could, and will, talk about it for years! In fact, we have on this very site, here, here, here, and in a bunch of other passing references.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t. I’m very pro thinking and talking about Mad Men, definitely! Overthinking, even. I want to watch the fourth season really badly so I can talk about it to anybody who will listen. But the broader discussion about the effect of the show on gender politics is a big part of what is feminist or anti-feminist about this show. Much less overthought discussions about it are a big part of it as well. So are all the other shows that are on TV, and the prevailing attitudes and reactions of the people who are watching them. It becomes very hard, almost impossible, to ascertain what a show like Mad Men accomplishes in a political or phenomenological context without stepping back and considering a very large picture.
You don't see politicians blaming video games for making children wear awful button-down shirts.
Another great example of something like this is Grand Theft Auto. Is Grand Theft Auto pro-violence, because it portrays violence as fun and has children act out and imitate violent acts, giving them shots of adrenaline and positive reinforcement? Or is it anti-violence, because it shows the awful consequences of violence (including the death of yourself and other people) and gives children a context for understanding and taking control of their aggressive feelings and placing them in an appropriate place in the culture, so that they don’t lash out at their friends? Is somebody who enjoys or even habitually commits virtual violence more likely to commit violence in real life when they have perfectly good fictional violence at home? What about catharsis – is that a legitimate social purpose for art or not?
These all sound nice. These frameworks all make sense. But they all have a missing piece — you actually have to go and figure out what is happening in the real world for any of them to matter. Then, you have to prove causal links between those things and art. Without evidence, there is no way of really knowing whether Grand Theft Auto is politically pro-violence or anti-violence.
When a political group makes a commercial, you bet they think about how it will affect people’s attitudes in the real world, and they go out and obsessively measure it. Same with private companies that make commercials. For art that is produced outside of a political context, this almost never happens, at least in a reliable, confirmable, scientific, result-neutral, causally demonstrative way.
There’s a lot of nonsense tossed out by one or another political group where they guess what the effects might be, or they show a correlation that happens to reinforce what they already conveniently happened to believe, or they pick some other factor that is sort of related to what they think might be happening and test to see if there is some sort of small shift in statistical likelihood one way or another in how it affects people that they can then extrapolate to assume it affects everybody in the same way (which it straight-up doesn’t) and that it in turn has the more important effect they think it has, even if they have no evidence to support making any of these leaps in reasoning.
What we can do, though is look at the broader context, look at the broader discourse, make a feminist or pro- or anti-violence critique of the larger system at work here, and try to determine from there maybe what we ought and ought not to do from a political and ethical standpoint if we happen to align with some vaguely defined “feminist” political coalition.
A great example of this is Christopher Nolan’s “woman problem,” which we’ve talked about on the site, and which I’ve already remarked on in the comments for that post. Yes, in a bunch of Nolan’s movies, women are hurt or killed in horrible ways, and the male protagonists are tormented by their memories. This sort of trope seems like it would have a phenomenology of reinforcing female victimhood. Maybe. But the movies also heavily undercut the authority of the male protagonists, depicting them usually as mentally unstable to the point of being literally insane. That seems like it would prompt people to question the wisdom of seeing the heroic man as the proper “other” in which to invest leadership. Maybe.
Look at Mal, and Inception seems terribly sexist. Look at Cobb, and Inception seems very feminist. To get a meaningful result, you have to step back and look at the whole picture, which includes the way the audience interacts with the film.
This is, by the way, why exclusively political and social criticism of art fails so, so hard at understanding art (seriously, there is no more beautiful baby thrown out with the bathwater than when somebody considers a great poem or book or play or movie strictly on its laundry list of phenomenological advocacies), why curricula and canons that are any good are full of politically objectionable material, and why artists really can’t be primarily concerned with the specific political effects of their art if they want it to be vital or interesting.
Oh, you can be inspired by it, sure. You can even have an agenda that drives you or an idea that you seek to propogandize. But it’s very likely that your art, if done sincerely and with skill, will have effects on people you could never anticipate. If you want to change people’s minds or advance a political agenda, art is not the best business for you to be in. Even when you do art for the politics, the result usually ends up being more the former than the latter.
“Is Scarface a pro-drug movie?”
Even more than that, Scarface the character, though he lives a cautionary tale of a life gone horribly wrong that ends in a brutal, lonely, violent death, inspires people in ways I can’t believe its original authors ever intended. He has a broad cultural appeal that runs counter to the message of the film.
“Dude, Scarface isn’t even a pro-Scarface movie!”
The writer decided one thing, but the broader context decided something else, and the tail wags the dog. Oh, we can look back in hindsight and cherry pick the qualities of Scarface that made this possible, but it’s not reasonable at all to expect people to see these things while they are actually making them, and I very much question the sincerity or accuracy of this kind of hindsight, which seeks to retcon our essential ignorance of the random effects of our actions.
This should not be a good thing that somebody actually wants. But it is.
This is why we should be very very cautious when we evaluate art on strictly political terms. It’s like evaluating a chessboard by the quality of its wood — there is so much going on that we miss if we use that as our primary criterion, and it gives us less information than we think about how people are actually going to use it.
Okay, to get back to the topic, let’s define one- and two-dimensional characters versus three-dimensional characters.
He's not as easy on the eyes as Christina Hendricks, but who is?
Dimensia
Depending on who you ask, a one- or two-dimensional character is a character that lacks history, flaws, depth, emotional complexity or a familiar human texture – basically, all the qualities you would require of the contemplative hero or heroine of a 19th century parlor drama. Characters in these sorts of plays spend most of their time talking about what they think about stuff that relates to very familiar situations for the audience, so if this information isn’t handy, there isn’t going to be much of a play.
Some people seem to think being three-dimensional means there are a lot of specific details about the character that are unrelated to the story but said out loud during a scene for some reason (Like, “Hey, I know we’re in this underwater scientific research facility, but I sure do like quilting.” Ooh, you’re so three-dimensional!). Some people lump having a motivation or objective with being three-dimensional, although that’s usually part of a different sort of framework.
Some people seem to think being three-dimensional means the character needs to change in a meaningful way during the story. This a) is entirely genre-dependent; not all kinds of stories involve people changing — and b) implies a philosophy about humanity and human nature that I think is too narrow and suffocating for any writer to commit to seriously and still be able to do their best work.
My criticisms aside, If you have any training in the theatre, you should recognize this stuff right away — all these qualities are actor-centric. These are things an actor wants to know as the actor is approaching a part so that he or she can approach the part with believability, because there are certain techniques that involve having all this information that make it easier to produce believable characters.
One of my favorite, favorite writings about the theatre is “The Theatre of Good Intentions,” an essay written by Brooklyn playwright Mac Wellman (I’ve linked to a Google Books preview of an exerpt, here is a place where you can purchase it from the publisher – you can also read an interview with him here). It’s a useful piece for both actors and writers, because it calls into question and indicts the cozy relationship between acting and writing, and how the threatre drifts into a space of complacency, where writing is made easy for actors to perform and actors rely on techniques that they think they have to rely on and go with their scripts. My favorite paragraph from the essay:
The somber, generalized, sleepwalking gait of so much American playwriting is directly attributable to the fact that any writer who is produced with any frequency at all must sooner or later come to terms with the obdurate and implacable dogma of method acting. And since no American playwright can boast anything like the mystique and cachet of the famous (mostly method) actors of our time, an insidious dilution occurs in the writing itself, which becomes more pat, symmetrical, generalized, and rationalized, and less sharp, specific, smart and quick-footed. Writers are responsible in this strange pas de deux of acquiescing to what — from any dispassionate point of view — is only a vast artistic and cultural sham.”
– Mac Wellman, “The Theatre of Good Intentions”
The language of three-dimensional characters is written in the bankrupt vocabulary at the lazy nexus between acting and writing. There are certain things acting does well that writing does poorly. There are certain things writing does well that acting does poorly. Dramatic art is a collaboration between, among others, actors and writers. Why can’t the actor do the actor’s work and the writer do the writer’s work?
If a character lacks depth and believability on the page, the actor can provide it. If a character lacks a motivation and seems to not commit to actions with purpose, the actor can provide it. If the character’s language doesn’t reflect an obvious, obvious change in the character, the actor can still do it. You’ll still see it on the stage or screen, you just won’t hear them come out and say it, which is disquieting to critics and producers even if it doesn’t matter at all to the audience or the overall effect of the work.
All the rules of three-dimensional character creation are acting rules, not writing rules. I say, if an actor wants to work at their craft, make them work. There’s no reason why a writer has to make it easy on them. Maybe it’s because I’m an improv performer, but the barrier between having and not having the information you need to perform a character is one of fear. All actors should be capable of just making up information they need to perform their characters well that isn’t spelled out in the script.
After all, we are not Constitutional scholars of strict constructionism here. Acting has the mother of all Commerce Clauses – if the paper in front of you doesn’t explicitly say you can’t do something – go ahead and do it. Act. It’s in the name of your job.
In film (or video), the camera can also provide information not provided by the actor and writer. Even if all these things were necessary (and they probably aren’t), looking at what is written down and applying a rubric to it is funny. I think it’s one of the things that’s funny about the Female Character Flowchart. When answering basic questions about what is demonstrably true about the characters, we know we’re being reductive, but it’s fun to pretend everything is so simple when it’s really quite complex.
These “three-dimensional” qualities also lend themselves to character development scenes, which are an important part of the paradigmatic structure of modern dogmatic Hollywood-style screenwriting. You have to have X number of scenes “about your character,” then the rest are the plot, which is dictated by the genre.
Again, as an improv performer, this seems trivial, and the descriptor seems like a waste. I can do other stuff while “developing my character.” We can put in the pages on it and still have scenes that are good, plus, I can make up any old sort of crap about a character if the scene calls for it. If there’s a scene where you learn a bunch of ancillary information about a character, the stuff you learn probably isn’t what was important about the scene.
“Oh, hi, I like ketchup. Yum, ketchup. Best thing ever on a pastrami sandwich! My mom used to make it for me before she died of cancer. I’ve decided that, because she died of cancer, I’m going after this tobacco company, and you’re either with me or against me.” Congratulations, plucky news reporter on the wrong side of the law, your character has been developed.
Is this ketchup stuff and mom stuff actually important to your character? The producer who insists you have a three-dimensional character thinks so. Is it important for the audience to know this about your character? The social critic thinks so.
But if you met me on the street and we had a conversation that didn’t involve ketchup or pastrami, I don’t think you’d necessarily find the conversation lacking, and if the words I said didn’t happen to reveal any information about my history with cold cuts or condiments, I don’t think it would make me less believable as a human being in that context.
After you’ve seen it for the millionth time, this character development stuff smells an awful lot like crap. Do I really need to see another flashback to this person’s childhood? Do I really need to hear him talk in impossibly straightforward, if emotionally terse terms about his psychological baggage? People you come across in life don’t tend to provide you with this information before you interact with them, and yet somehow when a fictional character holds back this information, it’s unrealistic. Really?
I’ll cite Wellman again on this:
Paradoxically, it may be precisely the habit of writing characters from the inside out, as it were, that leads to this impasse: characters made up of explanations become creakingly artificial, emotional automata who never, but never, resemble people as actually experienced. Rather these characters — and I would offer the entire cast of Death of a Salesman as example — are merely theoretical. They are aggregations of explicated motives, explicated past behavior, wholly knowable and wholly contrived. They seem animated by remote control, as if from another planet. Representing, as they do, a theoretical view of life (and there is none more theoretical than contemporary American naturalism), they cannot hold back any nasty little secrets, they tell no lies, do not surprise us too much, and, in fact, are capable of very little that is interesting.”
– Mac Wellman, “The Theatre of Good Intentions”
So, that’s a definition of one- and two- vs. three-dimensional characters, as well as my own take and a more successful, famous writer’s take (yay, Appeal to Authority!) on why it’s probably bullshit from an artistic perspective, and why writers shouldn’t really pay attention to it. It’s artifice, it’s lazy, and it leads to slower, more boring, more predictable, dumber stories.
With this in mind, if we’re writing well, a lot of characters who are one- or two-dimensional in the traditional sense should turn out to be pretty interesting, and we shouldn’t worry so much as writers if our characters don’t have “depth,” per se, at least if we’re writing plays or movies. Depth in the generally agreed-upon sense is of questionable value.
The Wonkae
As a thought exercise, let’s look at two versions of the same scene, first with one-dimensional characters who have no depth or backstory, relatively little arc or explanation for what they are doing, and who have a lot of secrets they keep from the audience, and the other with well-articulated, deeper, more explained, “three-dimensional” characters:
Here’s the boat ride scene from 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory:
Wow – Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka is crazy, isn’t he?
Here’s the boat ride scene from 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In this version, Tim Burton was apparently unsatisfied with how enigmatic Willy Wonka generally was in the preceding movie and source material and added a bunch of back story so that the character made more sense and had more depth. This was supposed to hit that Burton combo of creepy/sympathetic, and you can definitely feel the difference in Depp’s performance, as well as the overall tone of the piece:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwI6ArRMqGk
I like the 1971 version a lot more. Oh, it’s a bit shabby, and the psychedelia leave a bit to be desired, but it’s immediate, it’s visceral, it’s a bit harsh and edgy, and the scene just plain functions better. This is the boat ride into the cave scene – where the people who have entered the chocolate factory as visitors are shown that the world they are in is quite different from the world they expected. The 2005 version is just too slow and staid and easily explained to get that same sense of alienation or suspension of the comfortable self that’s necessary to the story and at the heart of most of Roald Dahl’s writing for children.
Maybe you disagree. Say so in the comments! The movies as a whole also invite a lot of comparison. But I still have plenty of work to do on this topic before I move on to that …
QEII is a III-D monarch.
The Political Dimension
But that isn’t really why Stokes was anxious about whether our character was one-dimensional. He was anxious because of a belief that tends to kick around in the feminist discourse – I’ll summarize it as such and claim it only as my own. I’m not trying to put words in anyone’s mouth, and I’ll make it as robust as I can so as not to straw-person it:
- Female characters in fiction – especially in mainstream movies and television shows – are more frequently one-dimensional than male characters in a systematic way
- The abundance of one-dimensional female characters in fiction leads to a limiting discourse around the essential dignity, talents, personhood, and general value of women as fully realized human beings in real life
- If you create one-dimensional female characters, you are reinforcing this trend and, stepping back and looking at the broader context and the way people interact with this in society, you are being sexist in a politically and ethically meaningful (and damaging) way
So, even if it is artistically wise to discard some of our reservations about one-dimensional characters and spend a little less time agonizing over backstories, it might not be politically and ethnically appropriate to do this to women.
I’ll concede that if there is really hard empirical evidence that publishing work that has one-dimensional female characters in it, regardless of any of the other qualities of the work or of the characters, is definitely causing damage to people that is of a serious, immediate and quantifiable nature, it might be wise to stop until you can figure out what is wrong and how to fix it. No such evidence exists, as far as I know – nor does a workable model exist to go about telling stories while not including some form of reduction of the full scope of human experience in the creation of a fictional character, if we must use our 19th century method acting model for character creation. Even Hamlet can only have one person in it who is Hamlet. Everybody else is much simpler.
The comparatively easy fix is to work hard to create more commercially successful stories across a broader variety of genres that have female protagonists. As I’ve expressed before, I don’t tend to think that changing the gender of a character or the ethnicity of a character is a hard thing for a writer to do most of the time in a play or movie — the actor does almost all the work providing believability, and human experience is universal enough that most of what the writer changes is trivia. Ripley from Alien was written as a dude. Just flip the gender, clean up anything implausible, and even if we haven’t done much from an artistic perspective, we have addressed issue #1, on which issues #2 and #3 depend for their immediacy, and resolved our political problem.
In this case, making the protagonist more “three-dimensional” makes it harder, because we have to rewrite all the bullshit retroactive psychological or childhood flashback explanations for why characters do things, and we’ll feel pressured to pick more typically “female” explanations for these things. But if we take Wellman’s advice and write from the outside in and allow our characters to have secrets, we have to change relatively little to turn a male character into a woman — the simple act of changing the gender at the top cascades down into all the interpretations from the director and actor to the audience, and the hermeneutical work scrambles to compensate, taking care of itself as far as we are concerned.
Remember, from a political, “feminist” standpoint, none of this exists in a vacuum, and the discourse depends on the broader context. So as long as we flip enough of the characters and shift the balance a little bit, and as long as the people who we want to have talk about it talk about it in the way we want them to (which is a tall order), we can have a profound political effect without changing much artistically — or maybe we won’t, because we can’t really predict how people will react to things or what art will really accomplish once it is out in the wild. But at least we’ve tried, and nobody can blame us for that.
But there’s another fix I want to address, because it deals specifically with the character Jordan and I wrote, and it’s the big thing missing from his article about the character, probably because the piece was unfinished, so maybe I had a very different idea of how it was going to look when it was done than he did.
Axes of Movement
The two things that Jordan left out of his article that I think complicate things the most are:
1) The context of the piece in general (I know why he left this out – he didn’t want to tell everybody what we were writing, and I support that)
2) The other female characters!!!
No character exists in a vacuum. Even if there’s only one character in a story, that character interacts with the audience, the readership, the memory of characters from works that influenced this work — every character invites comparison to other characters.
In the play I worked on with Jordan, there were three major female characters:
The Cassandra character — I still dispute she was “fridge-stuffed;” she was a generally nice if a bit boring woman neglected by her husband, and that neglect rises to comic proportions until she is killed by his negligence. This happens in medias res, at the beginning of the play, then we flash back and see their relationship until the killing happens again right before the intermission at the end of act I, and we see the events again at the beginning of act II from a different perspective. (this is a 2-act structure, not a 3-act structure)
The perfect housewife character — The Cassandra character and her husband are friends with another couple, who put a lot of pressure on them to be traditional and content in their suburban married life, while at the same time flaunting their money and apparent happiness.
The divorced neighbor character — The action of the play starts when an independent, unattached woman moves into the neighborhood and the Cassandra character’s husband starts considering having an affair with her.
The piece is a pessimistic social satire. None of the characters are very admirable, and a lot of them come to bad ends. But what I was trying to do with the female characters was set the three of them up on a continuum — here is the person who has bought into this specific sort of traditional lifestyle the most, here is the person who has bought into it the least — neither of them are too admirable, but this third character is going to be caught between them until it tears her apart.
I’d like to think that, seen in a broader context with the other sorts of art that exist in relation to this piece, this would be seen as progressive on the whole, sympathetic with the political case for greater dignity and self-respect and a more functional and empowering phenomenology for women – because it indicts the systems that treat them poorly and shows a false dichotomy that is often used against women to control them (“be happily married or be alone”).
The male character is on a similar continuum — he has one friend who is super-macho to the point of being sociopathic, and one who is very meek and reserved to the point of being dishonest to himself and others. It’s an analogous point about gender – we see genders as existing on continua, but often these continua are more constraining than liberating, because a choice between two bad choices feels like freedom even when it isn’t.
All the characters in the piece are deliberately one-dimensional. By combining a bunch of multiple one-dimensional characters and showing how they interact with each other, we articulate multiple dimensions of human experience. And we do it better than giving one character a monologue about his adolescent sexual feelings for his dentist while he molds a clay pot and considers moving to Spain.
Of course, this doesn’t work if all your one-dimensional characters are the same. But if they’re all different, you can have some really interesting, funny and insightful scenes.
“But Pete,” you say, “None of these characters are likeable!” I’d reply, they’re plenty likeable. You don’t have to be a good person to be likeable. And besides, Stokes and I are likeable, and we wrote ’em!
But also, none of this is finished yet, even after working on it for a very long time, so, well, I guess a lot of that is just in my head. Let me use an example that more of you might be familiar with:
Each of the characters in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants franchise pay some sort of lip-service to complexity. They have their flashbacks and character building moments and all that, but they function as types. The idea of the franchise is you have these four different types of girls who are pretty reductive with regards to real human beings, who can all fit into the same pair of pants. The girls mail the pants to each other as a way of sharing their experiences in different places in the world when they are apart from each other.
This is a really elegant solution to one of the essential problems of character complexity — no matter how much background you give, almost no fictional character can ever really encompass everything it means to be a human being. Human beings are multideterministic – they do things for a wide variety of conflicting reasons all the time – they live with paradox, they don’t understand the way they think, sometimes they do things for profound reasons, sometimes they do things for no reason at all — the same person can laugh and cry and rage and think about ten different times in his or her life over as period as short as a couple of minutes. They spend about a quarter to a third of each day in incomprehensible nonexistence. Even when you do this in a play, it is hard to keep up with the real thing for even a little while — actually replicating a human being with a fictional character is an impossible task (this is part of the artistic failure of method acting and the kind of playwriting Mac Wellman is talking about).
The Traveling Pants solution to this, which isn’t that hard to grasp at all, is that, in the same way that all the girls wear the same pair of pants, each individual real girl is all these girls together — the sassy outcast, the curious good girl, the athlete, and presumably many more — we have these types within us, because they reflect to us part of ourselves, but only part.
The “Strong Female Character” in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is the pants.
A dimension is a direction of movement that is independent from other directions of movement. The mathematical metaphor for character “depth” is pretty lousy, but for this kind of interaction, it works pretty well. You can see how an interaction among multiple characters does create a shape with contours and complexity. Carmen and Lena have a relationship at the same time as Carmen and Bridget, and maybe in the function we’re graphing at the time these two things are related, but maybe they’re not. Maybe they just coexist. Some complexity is more causal than other complexity, and sometimes it’s impossible to tell.
I like one-dimensional characters. Obviously there are good and bad ones — there is a lot of information and complexity even to one-dimensional characters, even if the advocates for “depth” think that unless you come out and state the complexity, it can’t exist. I think one-dimensional characters are good for fast-moving stories; they can be more iconic, and their relationships can be more iconic and promote fun and interesting use of motif, which in turn lets you be more nimble in articulating ideas. I think the continuum between “depth/believability/real humanity” and “simplicity/allegory/unnaturalness” is false, because there is very little realistic or sincere about a person who has reasons for everything they do that they tell to you before or after they do it.
If we pay attention to others and what they are really like, we will learn that the three-dimensional character is a fairly forced and artificial construct, and that if we’re going to make a forced, artificial construct, we should free ourselves of the responsibility of doing it in this specific way.
And while I don’t think we should slow down our discussions of the political implications of art, I think we might want to undertake them with caution toward how much of it we actually believe. It would be wise not to overstate the degree to which art has an ascribed effect without evidence of it, and also wise to not impugn ourselves if there is no evidence of an effect we can reasonably control in our own work. Even if we do make judgements about our art that serve political purposes, we should be careful not to internalize them to the point where they makes us too cautious to write fearlessly.
I didn’t really address most of Stokes’s post, I know, because most of his post is about the character archetype and not the character we wrote, and because I agree with most of his post — except the part about me fridge-stuffing Cassie (I was pretty obsessed with the Cassandra character. I spent a lot of time staring at this painting, and I incorporated a lot of my ideas about her into a one-act play I wrote a few years later, called “The Bad News Bearers,” that was produced by the New Haven Theater Company).
Finally, I’m glad after the fact to be left out of the article at first, because this was a fun piece to write.
See? The effects of writing work in strange, unpredictable ways.
(Oh, and Tibby is the dimension that isn’t visible to the human eye, because she’s the rebel.)