On Characters

Let’s talk about character development. Let’s do it by talking about Superman.

Superman is a divisive character. It seems like people either love him or hate him.

With the latest high profile incarnations of Superman in Superman Returns and more recently Man of Steel and Batman v Superman, I feel like the hate crowd is tipping the scale. I can’t say that I blame them.

The problem as I see it is that no one in charge of making those films really fully understands the character. And if they don’t understand who Superman is, how is the audience supposed to?

One thing any writer must do is KNOW the characters they are writing about. It’s vital to know what makes them tick, what makes them do what they do. This understanding helps to make the characters seem vivid and real. It helps to foster the illusion that these are living entities who have had full lives.

But it also keeps the characters consistent.

An audience might not really connect with an underdeveloped, flimsy character. They will actively revolt against a character that fundamentally shifts away from the very characteristics that they were built upon.

The classic example of this is the third act reveal of villainy from a character we had, until that moment, thought was good. We’re willing to accept it, even embrace it, if the writer was clever enough to sprinkle clues about the characters real motivations. Maybe even congratulate ourselves if we were able to figure it out before the story revealed it. But many of us have seen stories where the shift simply comes out of left field. It’s jarring and makes no sense. Worse, it takes us out of the story.

It’s a desperate play by an author with no better ideas.

And it trades character for shock value.

So back to Superman. More specifically, why the latest movies fail to understand the character.

Superman is nearly all powerful, nearly indestructible, and incredibly intelligent. It can be difficult to create conflict around such a character.

The easy “out” is to either make a villain physically stronger, or create something that makes Superman physically weaker. Both have been tried. And all they wind up doing is just creating mayhem without any real meaning.

In Superman Returns, Superman’s main challenge was an entire continent made of Kryptonite, the only substance that can kill him. However, since the film essentially reduced Superman to fighting a literal rock, there wasn’t any opportunity for character development. How did Superman win? He just soaked up some sunlight and picked the entire continent up anyway, despite the fact that moments earlier it had completely stripped his power.

Sure, the scene looked pretty cool. But there was virtually no meaningful dialog leading up to it, none during Superman’s actual act of heroics, and Superman didn’t have to do anything other than just…try harder.

Man of Steel tried to use both something that weakened him, and someone stronger. The “World Engine” was trying to turn Earth into Krypton, and so we are told that Superman will be weaker near it. As with Superman Returns, there’s no satisfying explanation for how Superman manages to just will himself to be stronger than this object. He just does, because the script required him to win.

But then he has to fight Zod, who is also from Krypton, but who we are told was bred to be a warrior. Finally, we get an opportunity for some character interaction. Instead, Zod is reduced to essentially as much a machine as the World Engine. He makes some statement about not knowing how to do anything else and the he and Superman spend the rest of the film knocking down buildings.

A lot of people were upset by the resolution to this conflict when (spoiler alert) Superman kills Zod by breaking his neck.

That’s not Superman, they said. Superman doesn’t kill, they said.

And therein lies the fundamental misunderstanding of the character. That’s because his physical strength and intelligence isn’t what makes him an interesting character.

What makes Superman interesting is his absolute and unwavering optimism. It’s his certainty that there is good in everything. His morality equals his physical strength.

And this is also his greatest, yet least exploited, weakness.

Superman: The Movie, despite some flaws (time travel?!?) has a great moment in it. Lex Luthor’s plans are altered slightly when Otis accidentally inputs the wrong coordinates into one of the two nuclear missiles Luthor intends to fire at California. The second missile is now headed toward New Jersey.

At first, Luthor is upset. Presumably he was hatching this plan before he knew of Superman’s existence. But he soon realizes that he can actually use this against Superman. Luthor obtains a chunk of Kryptonite to attempt to kill the Man of Steel, but if that fails, Luthor uses the best weapon against him: morality.

Luthor reasons that even if the Kryptonite somehow fails, there’s no way Superman can be in two places at once. One way or another, he’ll have to make a choice about who dies. Then moments later, Luthor’s girlfriend, Eve Tessmacher, ALSO realizes she can use Superman’s morality against him. She confesses that her mother lives in New Jersey and offers to save him from the Kryptonite ONLY if he promises to stop that missile first.

So as I said, not only is morality Superman’s greatest strength, it’s also his greatest weakness. Greater than Kryptonite. Greater than any kind of super being.

Superman Returns hit many of the right notes with the character. How could it not, with how slavishly director Bryan Singer attempted to mimic Richard Donner’s take in Superman: The Movie? We do believe this is essentially the same moral character Christopher Reeve so masterfully portrayed.

But by having him battle a giant rock, there’s no moral conflict. All Superman has to do is just try really hard to lift something really heavy. And by this time the film conveniently mostly ignores that this Really Heavy Thing is also made of Kryptonite because the script has backed itself into a corner. This rock is the only thing left for Superman to fight, and how can he not win?

Man of Steel went the opposite direction with the morality of the character. That is, almost nothing in the film gave us any real reason to believe in Superman’s unwavering morality. We see him steal clothing. We see him destroy a truck out of revenge. Pa Kent tells him that maybe it’s ok to let people die as long as it’s for self preservation.

Why WOULDN’T this version of the character kill? Which is the biggest mistake the film makes. As an audience, we’re supposed to care that Superman makes the choice to kill Zod. But we don’t. The film has spent the last two hours SHOWING us that Superman has little regard for human life, is selfish, and has been taught to protect himself at all costs. Superman killing was zod was supposed to be a moment of shock for the audience, but instead was just the final rung on the ladder of an escalating departure from the character.

No wonder people were so outraged.

The thing is, it’s not even that Superman killed Zod. In fact, the opportunity was there to make exactly THAT the impossible moral choice that Superman is forced to make, like Christopher Reeve’s Superman having to choose between letting people in California or New Jersey die. But you don’t get to do that if you’ve spent the entire rest of the film tearing away the essential character traits that make Superman moral in the first place.

This is why it’s essential, as a writer, to understand your character. Understand your character’s motivations, weaknesses, and strengths.

All stories require conflict to propel them. And the best conflict is emotional fueled by solid characters, not physical fueled by flying punches.

Start by putting solid thought into your characters. But persist by staying true to those characters, because you can test them and empower your story by how you force your characters to overcome challenges to who they are.

 

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