What did you go and do that for?
You need a really good reason to write characters whose decisions show them to be as dumb as a box of rocks....
For this entry in Breadcrumbs, I want to reflect on the question of how intelligent – or otherwise – characters in fiction should be. By intelligent, I’m not referring to pure cognitive ability. Characters don’t all need to be intellectual giants, the scientific equals of Newton or Einstein, nor the strategic inheritors of Napoleon. What interests me here are characters acting wisely or stupidly, that is, characters acting knowingly in or against their own best interests.
Some characters can get away with acting stupidly, if their foolishness is bedded into their character in a realistic manner. Addiction would be a good example. Addicts are aware of how damaging their actions are and many addiction stories focus on characters battling against themselves and their addiction. All well and good, or dark and grim.
There are other situations, too. Double-crosses are great way to make a smart character do a seemingly stupid thing, and work best when the double-cross is completely plausible, fully concealed and the actual best possible choice in hindsight.
Stupid characters – characters who know better but still do the wrong thing – are one of my pet peeves in stories, and especially cinema. I don’t think I’ve read many novels where the protagonist always chooses the wrong thing without good reason. Fiction gives the writer more space to get into a character’s head and show the reader why smart people do dumb things. Cinema doesn’t always have that luxury. Stupid characters making bone-headed decisions which they know are bone-headed spoil stories for me. Like in Uncut Gems.
The big issue for me with the protagonist in Uncut Gems, Howard, is not his addiction. Let him be a gambling addict. Gambling might be one reason why Howard has problems, but it’s not the driver of the story. The thing which causes Howard to have all of his problems is not his borrowing $100k to buy a black opal. It’s not him having a mistress. The decision which gives Howard all of his problems is one the story never tries to justify.
Howard knows he has to get the opal valued by the auction house. He believes it’s worth a million dollars and knows the valuer has to examine the opal before an estimate can be placed in the auctioneer’s brochure. He knows when the deadline is. But for some reason, Howard decides to let well-known basketball loudmouth Kevin Garnett borrow the opal. Howard doesn’t know KG and has never met him before, but lets him waltz out of his office with a million-dollar gem.
The gem doesn’t get to the valuer in time, because KG, and goes on sale for less than Howard needs. The loan sharks don’t get their money. Bad things happen. Howard deliberately, knowingly, acted against his own interests and made an unjustifiably stupid choice. But, hey, no stupid choice, no movie, am I right? And while Uncut Gems is a very well-made, well-acted movie, everything hinges on that one stupid choice. The thing driving the entire plot makes no sense and this spoiled the story for me. All the other stupid choices Howard makes are justifiable in his mission to get everything under control. But the trigger decision? Moronic. But that’s just my opinion.
Other flavours of stupidity show up in stories all the time. Take Harry Potter, for example. Yes, I know it’s not fair to pick on books for kids, and there are many, many things wrong with the Harry Potter series which I don’t have time to explore, the only one I want to talk about is reflected here by one of Harry’s traits. He’s written as a relatively clever, inventive and courageous boy. Thing is, he is utterly, bewilderingly incurious about the world of magic he’s transported into. It doesn’t make sense – a clever boy, freed from the torments of his mother’s family, in a world where almost anything is possible? Yeah, he doesn’t seem to be interested. Oh, he thinks, Wizard Hitler tried to kill me but he died and I didn’t? Huh, how ‘bout that? His lack of interest in his setting and heritage and history is just plain weird.
I think I can explain why Harry is like this, and it’s not a character flaw. Harry doesn’t care about the setting because J K Rowling didn’t bother – in HP1 – to build a world large enough to explore. Hogwarts has a history, because Rowling wanted to write a school story for kids, not an epic fantasy for adults. The result is a setting which is so thin it disappears when it turns side-on to the viewer. Rowling bulks it out later on, to her credit.
I’d like to offer a counter-example. There is a movie where all of the characters make smart decisions, all of the time. Everyone understands the stakes. Everyone knows what happens if things go wrong. Good guys and bad guys, although there aren’t any heroes in The Way of The Gun.
It’s the film Christopher McQuarrie wrote and directed after The Usual Suspects, another film populated by smart characters. It’s an unpleasant crime thriller about a pair of criminals who kidnap and ransom a surrogate mother, who is carrying the child of a gangster. It’s criminals against criminals and it’s smart, violent action. McQuarrie wanted to make a film without traditional heroes and he succeeded. There are no appealing characters in this story. The protagonists are greedy and brutal. The surrogate mother is a liar and a cheat. The gangsters who want her back are just as bad as the protagonists.
What makes it work is that everyone in the story knows how the game is played. They all know what the other side is capable of and plan accordingly. They all know which scenarios are traps and try not to run blindly into them. They all know that things are going to go badly. Everyone has their eyes open at all times. Everyone is playing every side against the other. Risks are mitigated when unavoidable, just like you would expect smart – not intelligent, rather streetwise - people to do. It’s a film about deception and greed and while it hasn’t aged particularly well, it’s still interesting and there’s never any hint – in my opinion – of smart characters making stupid decisions.
The breadcrumb I’ve taken from these stories, and many others, is that characters cannot be allowed by the writers to make stupid decisions which they know to be against their own best interests without an incredibly good reason. It doesn’t matter how intelligent the characters are, rather how well they understand their situation. Dumb choices undermine smart stories, and stupidity is just as bad a motivator of story as coincidence.
