What makes a hero worth following? Dana Dorrity looks at heroes in film, parables and legends and how writers and actors build a hero who never quits.
A few weeks ago, a former student called me after seeing The Mist, and said I should write an article about heroes. He said, “A good hero never gives up!” And David Drayton, the main character in The Mist completely gave up at the end. I went to the mall a few days later and saw The Mist, and even though Drayton’s decision was set up in the story, I agreed with my student that Drayton was not much of a hero.
In Screenwriting terminology, the main character, or protagonist of a story, is always called the hero, no matter what the series of obstacles happens to be. In Mike Figgis’s film, Leaving Las Vegas, the hero is an alcoholic screenwriter who is going to Las Vegas to drink himself to death. He is a hero who is “giving up” on his career and on life itself, but as he continues on his suicidal journey, he overcomes obstacles, falls in love, saves a girl, makes allies and enemies, and in the end, he dies. It’s a doomed journey, but a heroic one.
Another unlikely but extremely bold hero is Dawn Weiner in Welcome to the Dollhouse. Dawn is a nerdgirl, who is despised by her peers and ignored by her parents, but she doesn’t let her limitations stop her. When a bully threatens to rape her and tells her to meet him after school, she shows up and faces him. She flirts with an attractive older guy who sings in her brother’s band, even though she’s wearing little kid pajamas. And finally when her sister gets kidnapped, she takes a bus into the city to find her. None of us would choose to trade places with Dawn, but when we find ourselves inside of her story, living her life through the vicarious magic of narrative filmmaking, we realize that she is a great hero, bold and resourceful.
Great heroes surprise us. Just when we think that they are going to give up, that the odds against them are too overwhelming, they find a way to succeed. And since we are them for those two hours that we sit in the dark theatre watching the movie, the hero’s ability to tap into hitherto unknown resources and overcome the obstacle gives us a feeling of confidence that someday in a perilous situation, we’ll be able to do the same thing. Max Durocher in Collateral is just a humble cab driver that dreams of an island in the Caribbean, but then he picks up Vincent, a contract killer, and he has to use his wits to survive and to save the woman he loves. In one of the best scenes in the movie, Vincent sends Max into a nightclub to negotiate with his client, Felix the drug-trafficker, who is paying for all the murders. No one has ever seen Vincent, so Max has to pretend he is the killer. Since Max is our point of view character, we see the world through his eyes and have no idea how he’s going to face off with these criminals, but he does it. He’s resourceful, he’s bold and he doesn’t give up.
This is precisely why we go to movies. Most of us won’t have to face off with drug-dealers and killers or survive a giant, mutant insect attack. For most of us the worst threat on the average Saturday afternoon is boredom. Movies enable us to experience extreme situations as the characters in the movies experience them, and then we get to go home confident that maybe we do have some tricks up our collective sleeves.
So what was wrong with David Drayton? First off, the attack, the mutant mist full of monsters, arrives when David and his neighbors are shopping at the local grocery store. This is a small town store that supplies everything from hardware, shovels and tiki torches, to canned food. With these supplies at hand, a hero like MacGyver could probably build a nuclear weapon, get rid of the monsters, and then rebuild civilization. And given that they are in Maine, a state of rugged individualists, I think they could have come up with more of a strategy. In one scene, they light the torches and hold them up to the window and seem surprised that the killer bugs are attracted light. Anyone who has spent an evening on a Maine porch knows that light attracts insects. Even though these creatures are mutants from a military experiment, the central conflict in The Mist is man against nature, and man is losing not only to the bugs but to other unreasonable people.
My absolute favorite hero up against nature is Charles Morse, played by Anthony Hopkin’s, in The Edge, written by David Mamet, and directed by Lee Tamahori. Charles is a billionaire, a man who owns his own private plane, but he’s a city guy, a business man, who only knows about the world by reading books. He’s smart, but his money and social standing have always protected him from any real challenge. In The Edge, it’s all stripped away when his plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness and he needs to match wits with a man-eating Kodiak bear, brilliantly portrayed by animal actor, Bart the Bear.
Writing the Hero in Your Script
Heroes are not victims. Open Water, another film about people in conflict with nature, was based on a true story about a couple who were accidentally abandoned by their tour boat on a scuba diving trip in the Caribbean. No one really knows what happened to this couple, because their bodies were never found, so the writer/ director, Chris Kentis, had a lot of latitude in choosing how to tell the story. I was excited to see this film, even though I knew the main characters were going to get it in the end, because I hoped they would use every tool they had to overcome the awesome power of the sharks. Sharks may be larger than we are and they certainly have jaws full of razor sharp teeth, but in the words of Charles Morse, “We’re smarter than they are.” But the writer director didn’t explore any options in the possible sea battle between man, woman and shark, instead the couple argued and blamed each other then they got eaten. Open Water isn’t a movie about heroes fighting overwhelming obstacles, it’s about some big fish having dinner.
Heroes are not hapless victims of circumstance. They use whatever skills they have gained in life and apply them to the task at hand. The best heroes aren’t born brave or resourceful, they become brave when they are faced with an overwhelming obstacle. Paul Rusesabagina, the hero of Hotel Rwanda, is not a brave man. He wants to do his job well and support his family and he has no interest in choosing sides when society begins tearing apart in Rwanda. But when the genocide starts, and his countrymen ask him for shelter and sanctuary, he has to make a choice and his choice save the lives of over one thousand people who survived partly by drinking, cooking and washing with the water in the upscale hotel’s swimming pool. Paul also has to face off with the military and his employers, the Belgian company that owns the hotel.
A hero may not know what he or she is up against, but a true hero finds something inside them, something they may have learned in ordinary life to overcome adversity. In Armageddon, the hero, Harry S. Stamper, played by Bruce Willis, is an oil driller that has been launched into space to drill a hole in an asteroid that’s about to destroy planet Earth. He’s not a hero, he’s a just an oil man, but his very specific skill is going to enable him to save the planet and all of human civilization.
A Hero doesn’t give up. There is always a moment in the script when the hero wants to quit. This moment is called the midpoint crisis. The hero is usually alone and realizes that he cannot win against the overwhelming power of the antagonist, but then, at that precise moment, they also realize what they will do to fight the final battle even if it means death. In The Gauntlet, Ben Shockley, played by Clint Eastwood, is trying to extradite a witness. At the midpoint, he realizes the only reason he’s been sent on this mission is because he’s an alcoholic and no one wants this witness to make it back to Phoenix. He’s up against the entire police force, and to make matters worse he’s fallen in love with the witness. The odds are impossible and he can’t survive, so he hijacks a city bus, reinforces it with steel and rides into town through a gauntlet of sharpshooters, then pulls the bullet riddled bus right up onto the steps of city hall.
A movie is usually about the worst day in a character’s life. Being a hero isn’t easy or fun, too much is at stake. But it is through difficulty that we grow. This may be where David Drayton, was lacking. Before the storm that brings in the evil mist, David is at work as an illustrator. He’s painting a movie poster with a character who looks a lot like Clint Eastwood in Fistful of Dollars, in other words, a hero. David’s talent is painting or drawing, but there’s also an opportunity here for him to know something about movie heroes, even if he’s just studying the character that he’s painting. But this opening set-up is never really used in the story, and that’s where The Mist fails. There’s never a moment when David is anything more than a generic father character. He wants to save his son and his friends, but he never finds that special quality inside himself that enables him to succeed. And even though he survives, he doesn’t seem to learn or grow from this experience and for the viewer, it’s a deeply unsatisfying, if familiar, feeling.
Dana Dorrity is an assistant professor of Communications and Media Arts at Dutchess Community College. She has an MFA in screenwriting from the American Film Institute and teaches media writing, screenwriting and video production classes.
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