A Screenwriting Revolution!
"...who is the most complex character in the history of literature? Hamlet. And in McKee's Story, he praises the complexities of the prince (page 378): 'Hamlet isn't three-dimensional, but ten, twelve, virtually uncountably dimensional. He seems spiritual until he's blasphemous. To Ophelia he's first loving and tender, then callous, even sadistic. He's courageous, then cowardly. At times he's cool and cautious, then impulsive and rash, as he stabs someone hiding behind a curtain without knowing who's there. Hamlet is ruthless and compassionate, proud and self-satisfying, witty and sad, weary and dynamic, lucid and confused, sane and mad. His is an innocent worldliness, a worldly innocence, a living contradiction of almost any human qualities we could imagine.' Does that sound like a sympathetic protagonist to you? No. He is a character with depth, which is far more intriguing and valuable to the art of storytelling than flat sympathy. Hamlet was so brilliant that he is the only character in all of Shakespeare's canon who could have written his own play. But what was Hamlet's overriding quality? He was passive. He was caught inside a revenge story and yet because he was so brilliant, he was free from it. He could see all sides of everything and pontificated as much. He could exact revenge - or not. It didn't matter, because he saw everything. He was, as Harold Bloom wrote, 'a reflecting pool, a spacious mirror in which we needs must see ourselves.' It was through his passive nature that the genius of Shakespeare and his life-altering poetry shined through in ways never seen before.
"So what say you? Shall we dumb down the art of storytelling to simplistic formulas or shall we find inspiration in the greatest characters ever created and shoot for the moon?"
A new article by me found here.
[ Home ]
