Photo by Simeon Muller on Unsplash
Last week I wrote a piece on killing fictional characters, specifically talking about how too many writers seem to enjoy killing characters just for the fun of it without any consideration for plot or significance.
I suppose I should mention that not every death has to matter. Not every death has to be dripping with symbolism and reverence as I might have made it sound last week, but I do believe that writers are getting a little too cavalier with their grim reaper aspirations.
This week, I want to take this angle of character deaths and approach it from another direction. This week we're going to look at how exactly you make a character's death matter.
Every Friday for the last several months, I've put up a movie question on Facebook for people to answer. I enjoy starting a discussion and getting people's opinions on pop culture and story, and this has been a great forum for that purpose.
This past week's question was "What was one character death in TV and movies that made you feel absolutely nothing?" What is a death that just did not move you at all.
I have to admit, I agreed with quite a few of the suggestions people put out there. Some people gave answers like Padme from the Star Wars prequels. Someone said Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Then someone suggested the new droid in Solo: A Star Wars Story, which you could tell they wanted to be so meaningful, but it just wasn't.
Some people came across pretty cold-hearted, though, like the folks who said that Dobby's death in Harry Potter meant nothing to them, or the person who had the gall to say that Old Yeller's death didn't move them, but experts say that we'll cross paths with seven serial killers in our lifetime. Perhaps all seven of mine were in the Facebook comments last week.
At least they outed themselves with their unfeeling nature.
But with all of the names people mentioned and the ideas people put out there, I felt like I could see some trends in why certain deaths just didn't matter.
One of the answers that initially surprised me was Jack in Titanic. How can a sane person watch that movie and not feel for poor Jack, giving up his life so that ungrateful wench Rose can live?
Seriously. She's just the worst.
(Photo is the property of Paramount Pictures.)
But then I remembered when James Cameron visited the set of Mythbusters and talked about the ending to Titanic. The Mythbusters tested whether or not both of them could have survived on the door using it as a raft, and it was indeed possible, but Cameron said matter-of-factly that, "You're missing the point. Jack has to die."
At the time, that statement mean nothing to me. Looking back, though, that says a lot. Jack's death was forced. It wasn't "organic."
I try not to get too metaphysical with my writing, but I know some people who will try to "talk with" their characters and "let the characters breathe." They want the story to be real, right? I don't hear voices when I write, but you have to be careful with contrivances and pointing the plot too far no matter how the story evolves on its own.
With Jack's death being proscribed from the dawn of time, Cameron wrote himself into a corner. He knew what had to happen, and he just forced it to happen. He didn't find a better way to do it. Sure, Jack still had to die, but the method which he chose to give us the ending he knew he wanted just didn't work.
In Cameron's defense, most writers are afraid to kill off a key character like that, and so they'll write in a Deus Ex Machina just to save the character that everything in the story demands should die.
So, with all that in mind, I can see how Jack's death didn't matter.
Compare that death to a character like Hamlet (and almost everyone on stage at the end of Hamlet, and a couple notable absentees). Yes, the whole story was leading up to Hamlet's death. It was inevitable. But the great tragedy wasn't just in his death, it was also in the events surrounding his death.
"I knew him, Horatio. And, boy, was his family screwed up."
(Photo by Mathew MacQuarrie on Unsplash
Hamlet's plan kills his mother instead of his uncle. His uncle has plans of his own to kill Hamlet. The web of deception that created the circumstances demanding Hamlet's death turned out the true tragedy, not just the death by itself.
That's one of the first ways to make fictional death matter. The circumstances surrounding their death need to bolster the death. Irony is one of the best ways to do this. If a character dies through some action or inaction of their own where the audience saw it coming, that can make things unique. Or if the character's own plans backfire horribly and bring about their own demise, that can do it.
You can also look at Dobby's death as a great example of how to make a character's death matter. If they die sacrificially, then their death is likely to elicit more emotion.
Of course, Dobby's death also highlights the best way to make a character death matter: Make the character lovable or hatable.
If someone is ambivalent about a character, then that character's death will most likely be meaningless. Think about the red shirts on Star Trek. They were throwaway characters who nobody knew or cared about, so audiences were ambivalent towards their deaths.
One of the most popular answers to my poll last week was the blonde bore Shannon from Lost. People really just did not care about her death at all. When someone mentioned her, I had to admit that I didn't even remember her death. Or anything about her.
Shannon was a long-running character on a very popular show full of great characters, but she just slipped into the background. Even when they tried to make her more interesting by giving her a love story with fan-favorite Sayid, she was just kinda blah.
The writers tried to make her death matter a little bit more by making us feel empathy for Sayid when he lost the woman he loved, but there is a problem with that. If the audience never really bought into the relationship, then the audience didn't care when it ended. No matter how much people liked Sayid, they didn't feel that bad for him because they never really believed the love was there.
It was nothing like when Hurley lost the love of his life. That one messed me up pretty good.
There is a major difference between an unlikable character and a hatable character, though. Shannon was just a little unlikable. Benjamin Linus, however, was hatable. Had we seen his death, it would have likely been quite meaningful just because of how much we wanted him to die (or didn't want him to die since he was a really fun character to hate for a while there).
These are the villains. The really, really bad dudes who you just can't wait to bite it. One of the most enduring images in Hollywood history is that of Hans Gruber losing his grip on the side of the Nakatomi Tower at the end of Die Hard. Part of that has to do with how it was filmed, with the crew telling Alan Rickman that they would drop him on the count of three and then actually doing it early to get a real look of surprise. So his face is genuinely shocked when he falls.
A large part of it also has to do with the fact that we hated this guy. He was such a deliciously awful villain that watching him die was satisfying. Watching the hero get the better of him in that moment was the perfect finale (if you ignore the raging Swede-monster who shows up in the final seconds only to be shot dead by Carl Winslow) to one of the best action movies ever made.
Two great villains, both alike in dignity...but one fell into a giant pit like an idiot.
But compare Gruber to Fett. Boba Fett. The Fett was a great villain. Even if he was an underling of sorts, his costume and his demeanor all made him to be one of the coolest customers in the Star Wars universe. It made sense, too, because he was after Han Solo.
The dichotomy of Fett and Solo was pretty great. Fett was Solo's foil in so many ways, almost as if a couple little things in Solo's life had gone differently, he could have turned out more like Fett and less like himself. Maybe.
And then Boba Fett goes down like a chump with a lucky accident.
I have to admit that I don't mind Boba Fett's "death" in that moment, but I know most fans hate it. Instead of getting a satisfying defeat where Solo bests Boba Fett in one-on-one combat, fans get to see the stupid jetpack launch him into the Sarlacc pit.
It's like the "No capes!" moment of Star Wars.
There is another way to make a character's death meaningful, and that's pure and simple gore. The spectacle of the death can redeem a lot of sins. It's also a shortcut and should only be applied sparingly unless you're writing a horror or slasher. Most everyone has their favorite horror movie death, right? I can guarantee you that it had almost nothing to do with the story or the irony of the character's fate and everything to do with the overall quality of the gore or the spectacle of how that person died.
But think about the narrative value of a horror movie. Most horror movies only exist to prop up a character that audiences want to watch kill people. So those deaths have "narrative meaning" in that they give the real main character something to do.
Honestly, "Michael Myers romantic comedy" is probably a bad idea no matter how you mean it.
Would anyone want to watch a movie of Jason Voorhees lost in the wilderness trying to survive a frigid Maine winter? Not really. What about Saving Private Ryan except Tom Hanks has been replaced by Freddy Krueger? That could be funny, but the humor would only last so long. Maybe a romantic comedy with Michael Myers?
I think that's the main question. How do we give a character's death narrative value? That's much broader than just saying it needs to "mean something," and it allows for deaths that aren't symbolically important.
Not everyone who dies is Jesus. My favorite high school English teacher once told a story of a student who stood up during an author's visit and said how much she loved the symbolism of a certain character's death and how the character portrayed a worthy "Christ figure." The author replied, "Honestly? I just wanted to kill him."
For a death to have narrative value, it just needs to do something. It can make the audience feel some strong emotion, it can further the story, it can change the course of the plot. It just needs to do something other than happen.
Personally, I think any character death needs to make the audience at least feel something, even if that emotion is more for the characters who are left. In A Sheriff's Duty, one of my main character deaths is written in such a way that you want this character to die because he's a bad dude, but his death spells out certain doom for the protagonist.
Even though the audience wants to see that character bite it, they don't want it to happen right then. At least in my mind that's how it works. Who knows? Maybe the audience doesn't actually care.
This is also what happened with most of the deaths in Avengers: Infinity War. When the snap happens at the end, most of us realized that these characters would be back. Half of them already have sequels announced. So what value do these deaths have? What could they possibly mean?
Their value came in watching the other characters react to them. When Rocket saw Groot fade away, it was heart-wrenching. And this is a character we've already seen have some kind of resurrection. When Spider-Man dissolved in Iron Man's arms, it was genuinely hard to watch because you could understand how they both felt in that moment.
Spider-Man will be back. So will Groot and so will Black Panther. But seeing other characters react to their deaths made that scene work. It gave these ultimately reversable deaths meaning. It gave them enhanced narrative value, on top of making us as an audience ask the question, "How will they fix this?"
So if you're a writer looking to kill off some characters, make sure that those deaths have at least some kind of substantial narrative value. I know that the "red shirts" had narrative value in that they proved how serious the situation was and that "anyone could die at any moment," but not really. There was no substantial narrative value.
If you're a reader who wonders why you just can't bring yourself to care about a certain death in fiction, look for the narrative value of that death. It's possible that the writer just messed up and that there isn't any narrative value to this character's death.
Or you could only come across six serial killers in your lifetime because the seventh is staring you in the face every morning when you look in the mirror. Because...because it's you. Not because there's a serial killer staring out at you from behind a mirror in your house.
But now you've got that image in your head, too, so have fun shaving!