Character Change in Mainstream Movies: Structures of Moral Development

Abstract

Character change is an essential component of Hollywood storytelling, yet little has been written about how it is typically structured. This paper addresses that deficit. Through close formal analysis of a small but narratively diverse group of films—Casablanca (1942), The Apartment (1960), About a Boy (2002) and Wild (2014)—evidence is presented for the existence of a common schema, one that is used to organize the ethical development of morally-flawed protagonists. While this represents only one type of character change, specifying its structural dynamics productively extends our knowledge of commercial cinema's narrative norms as they have persisted in history. It also provides a basis for challenging the view, most fully developed by Carroll (1984), Smith (1995) and Plantinga (2018), that sympathy with or allegiance to characters is a matter of general moral assessment. I argue that because the schema requires a protagonist to repeatedly fall short of an ideal morality, one that is always clearly delineated in the narrative, then allegiance to them cannot be the result of moral approval or their ethical development would be meaningless. My solution is to propose a pluralist account of allegiance, one which emphasizes the role of viewer concern for flawed protagonists who, in all of my examples, suffer sustained emotional and psychological distress.