Character Vs. Plot

I’ve been taught a lot in writing classes. Writing brief “like Hemingway.” Start late and end early. Fill every scene with tension… Character is king. No, wait. Plot is king. The characters come from the story, right? So the plot will inspire them. No, but a good story/plot can only happen through the actions of an interesting character.

So what is it? Character or Plot? (Yes, I know there’s a difference between story and plot, but for this post only the terms will be roughly interchangeable…. or rather will encompass both story – the actual narrative being told – and plot – the way it’s being told)

While I decide whether to start with a character or story idea, I’ve been looking at some films that seem to approach it from opposite directions with extremely good results. First, we have Memento which, while it does have a compelling lead character, depends almost entirely on its intriguing story and uniue plot structure to reveal things about that character in ways that make him far more interesting than he would be in a normal, chronological plotline. On the other end of the spectrum is a film like Superbad (go ahead, throw tomatoes), which gives a fairly straightforward and almost too-familiar story of young men trying to have their last flings before college, yet delivers the old story with amazing freshness as the cast portrays excruciatingly awkward characters with complex inner lives.

In Memento, we never see the social vulnerabilities of the characters but only the literal ones he faces because of his memory lost. In Superbad we aren’t challenged to look at a story in a new way but instead are given a simple plot so that more time can be spent trying to understand why the characters do the crazy things they do. At the end, both scripts turn into fantastic movies, so how do we make a judgment call between character and plot?

A TA in a Lit. class I took my sophomore year once said “Criticism all boils down to Critic A saying one thing is right, Critic B saying another thing is right, and Critic C saying that both A and B are right if we synthesize their theories.” That brings us to the third kind of filim, the one in which plot and character seem to perfectly complement each other.

Now both Memento and Superbad do this to some degree. After all, they are both decently-writting films and cannot help but have plot and character affect each other. However, there are scripts that seem to have plots that can only exist with the very specific characters within them. Citizen Kane, I believe, is an enduring classic for that reason: Charles Kane is a man who needs to be loved, and it’s only fitting that his story be told by those who came the closest to loving him.