I’ve been watching a lot of “Hey, Arnold!” lately. I would love to blame that on the fact that I have two children, but let’s be honest. That’s totally on me.
It was a great cartoon when it came out. It’s still a great cartoon. Arnold is a cool character who does the right thing, he is wise while having room to learn, he is kind without being a pushover, but he is still a cool guy. And a cool cartoon character.
But I noticed something very interesting in my recent rewatches of “Hey, Arnold!” Who would you say the show is about?
It’s about Arnold, right? After all, his name is in the title.
But who is actually saying the title?
Don’t worry, I’m not about to channel my inner Abed and ponder “Who’s the boss?” I’ve noticed that there are really two main characters of “Hey, Arnold!” The first one is, obviously, Arnold. So you’re correct to say that the show is about Arnold, but it isn’t just about Arnold. The show is really about Arnold and Helga.
It would make sense to assume that the most important two characters in the show are Arnold and Gerald, or maybe Arnold and one of his grandparents, but the relationship between Arnold and Helga is the one that gets the most fleshed out. Perhaps most importantly, Helga is the only character outside of Arnold who really gets the first-person perspective treatment.
Obviously most episodes are told from Arnold’s perspective. He’s the character we see the most of. He’s the character we get the most empathy for. He’s the character who’s emotions we are supposed to latch onto and understand. There are several episodes, however, that also shift perspective and focus on Helga’s emotions and her inner-dialogue.
I realize that there are plenty of episodes where we see other characters developed, and we see their emotions and motivations play out, but those characters are usually featured through Arnold’s perspective. They did start giving more characters the first-person treatment in Season 2, but I don’t think those episodes are as strong. That’s right. I’m a “Hey, Arnold!” Connossieur.
I’m not really here just to talk about “Hey, Arnold!,” even though it is an amazing show. I don’t think most people realize how important the perspective of a narrative really is. In any work of fiction, whether it’s a movie or a TV show or a book or whatever, there is almost always a character who is supposed to provide the crux of the perspective for the audience. They are the window for the audience into the narrative.
That’s who we call the protagonist, generally. The main character. The “good guy,” even though a protagonist by no means has to be a good person. Or a person, at all.
Yes, most people realize that a protagonist is an important character. Most people realize that the main character matters. But what we don’t think about is how the main character shapes our perspective of the work we’re immersed in.
To go back to my example using Arnold and Helga, we would feel very differently about Helga if we only ever saw her actions through Arnold’s perspective. True, she is a bully in the highest degree. She’s mean and she’s surly. She makes fun of other kids relentlessly. She even pushes Harold around, and Harold is a big dude.
But then you get an episode where you see how neglected she feels around her parents. Or you get an episode that shows how she just doesn’t fit in with the other girls at school because she isn’t girly enough. Or you get an episode that flips perspective back and forth and you get to see how she feels during a spelling bee when her dad is pushing her so hard to win because it’s how he feels merit, while we also see how Arnold’s family gives him loving support and encouragement even though they don’t expect him to win.
Because of this change in perspective, we are forced to change how we feel as an audience. Helga isn’t just the mean little girl who pesters Arnold all the time. She’s also a neglected outcast who is trying to grapple with feelings and emotions that she isn’t quite capable of dealing with.
For goodness’ sake, Helga is the most developed character on the show!
“In 30 years of teaching, your failure to grasp the thematic significance of T.J. Eckleburg’s glasses is my greatest professional disappointment.” - Your English Teacher…probably. (Photo by BBH Singapore on Unsplash)
Perspective can be particularly interesting when it isn’t coming from the main character, but it instead focuses on the main character. Have you read The Great Gatsby? Of course you have. Or…at least you were supposed to have read it. Who knows if you actually did?
Your English teacher. She graded your paper. She knows.
But The Great Gatsby is definitely all about Jay Gatsby, right? His name is in the title. His relationships are the ones we care about. His motives are the ones we follow.
The story is not told from his perspective, though. Not for the most part. Throughout most of the book, we are actually following the perspective of Nick Carraway as he follows on Gatsby’s heels like a little lapdog who likes free booze and fancy parties. Neither of those things are actually good for dogs, by the way.
The same thing happens in other high school literature staples like All the King’s Men and A Separate Peace. We aren’t all that interested in the character who narrates, but we are very interested in their opinion of the main character who they just so happen to befriend and follow around.
Even when they aren’t with that main character, how Jack Burden spends half the voluminous novel All the King’s Men chasing down stories or dirty laundry his boss, Willie Stark, can use to further his political career, most of their decisions and actions revolve around that character. And as an audience, that’s what we want. We don’t care about the milquetoast narrator. We care about the eccentric, idealistic, fantastic figurehead that they care about. Even if that figure turns out to hate themself, or if they turn out to be the worst person who ever lived. We care about that character because our narrator cares about them.
The perspective that we are forced to see them through changes everything.
I know I’ve largely mentioned just books so far, but movies do the same thing. Or at least they try to.
I remember watching the deleted scenes – because I’m a nerd – on the Stephen King adaptation Secret Window. And I was listening to the director’s commentary on those deleted scenes – because I’m a nerd – when they talked about a deleted scene that featured the villain torching our protagonist’s house.
Deleted scenes (with commentary) from Secret Window | The clip I’m referencing is the very first one, as luck would have it.
Now if you don’t mind a spoiler for a 16-year old movie, let me explain to you why that scene is a problem. The supposed “villain” of Secret Window, a really strangely Southern John Turturro, complete with hick hat and campy accent, is entirely a figment of Johnny Depp’s imagination. Well…Depp’s character’s imagination, I should say. I’m not privy to Depp’s personal hallucinations, and that’s probably for the best.
But can you imagine?
The issue with this scene is that it pulls the audience away from the perspective that they’ve been following, to an extent. After all, the perspective we’ve been following is the person of Mort Rainey, the hapless fiction writer who is struggling through a disheveled existence. You could argue that this scene isn’t actually a change in perspective, but therein lies the problem. We aren’t supposed to know that yet. This scene, were it to stay in the movie, could spoil the surprise ending almost an hour early.
If you watched that clip, then you know that the director mentions how King didn’t have anything like this in his original short story. The director goes so far as to say that King knows better than to leave his protagonist’s perspective.
While most audiences probably don’t think about perspective, this is the kind of scene and the kind of movie that forces the issue. And that’s what makes it such a great example to follow. The audience’s perspective is vital to a story, and twisting that perspective between various individuals can be a benefit or a burden on the story.
Modern fiction tends to actually let authors play with perspective more than past eras of fiction. The Percy Jackson books are a great Young Adult example where the perspective character changed from chapter to chapter. One of the great benefits to this method of storytelling is that it allows you to skip the boring bits. If a character or group of characters is just going to be nonchalantly traveling for a few days, go focus on a character who is in some kind of peril. And in the hands of a skilled author, perspective-jumping can allow you to examine events from multiple points of view. You can give the audience a more complete picture and allow them to make up their own minds rather than forcing them to see things through one character’s eyes.
Changing perspectives can be great in mystery fiction, of course. In a mystery, the suspense all comes from who knows what, when they learn it, and who doesn’t know it yet. If you stick to just one perspective, that handcuffs the narrative a little bit. Everything is learned at one time and the suspense has to be manufactured differently. However, if the audience is allowed to see multiple perspectives, then they might know when a poisoned beverage is placed on the table or who sits on the chair strapped to the explosive before the “main” character learns this.
I’ll confess that the first book I wrote played with multiple perspectives in this regard. It was the tale of a single day and the murder that occurred on that day. Each chapter told the events of the day from a different character’s perspective, culminating in the title character (Will Baker) and the murder that occurred. There were interspersed chapters featuring the title character’s bride talking to police, identifying his body, and sorting out her affairs after the fact that still managed to shed new light on the story, but the main story took place over a single day and showed how each of the characters involved saw things play out.
Two things. First, the series is named after the second book in the series. I don’t know why, it’s kinda odd, but whatever. Second, if you like fantasy novels, I really encourage you to buy this book by clicking here or on the image of the cover above. It’s really good.
Of course, the character receiving the benefit of the perspective is the only one whose thought processes we get to follow. That means that we experience and judge all the other characters based on that limited field of view.
I’m in the middle of reading Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy right now – because I’m a nerd – and there’s a character we spend the entire first book presuming is something of a blithering idiot. Personally, I spent the whole first book picturing him as Jeff Goldblum based on his speech patterns, but that might just be me. In the Gormenghast trilogy, where the first book is actually titled Titus Groan and the second book is titled Gormenghast, character perspective shifts frequently. Even though it is a true third-person omniscient narrative, the “preferred perspective” follows one character at a time through most of the book.
The trick here occurs about halfway through Gormenghast when we get our first chance to experience Dr. Jeff Goldblum’s, I mean…Dr. Prunesquallor’s perspective. There are subtle hints in Titus Groan that Prunesquallor might not be so dumb, but they’re hard to believe when you see his behavior from the outside looking in. However, once you get inside his head, you realize that the man is a master manipulator. He plays his empty-headed sister like Pong. And he plays the other characters around him to push them towards his (admittedly well-intended) purposes.
If the book had stayed inside one single perspective, then this trick wouldn’t have worked. We might have seen Prunesquallor do something smart and think he wisened up a bit after a few years, but it wouldn’t have hit the same notes. Conversely, had his perspective been the preferred from the first page of Titus Groan, then I doubt his turn towards genius halfway through the trilogy would have worked. We would have known early on that he was an intelligent man who was skilled at manipulating people.
For me, I can tell you that the scene where you first hear Prunesquallor’s thoughts was the most stunning “twist” that didn’t occur at the end of a work that I’ve ever experienced. And it only worked because the author knew how to toy with perspective.
In the last 30 years or so, though, we’ve seen an entirely new phenomenon take over literature. Now we have people re-writing classic stories from a different character’s perspective. When I was a kid, we read the one about the big, bad wolf and how he was framed by the pigs. Then you have books like Wicked! or the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
It amazes me that, after 400 years, a play that has been performed as frequently and as diversely as Hamlet can still be turned on its head just by changing the perspective we see the action from. That, and Tom Stoppard adding a whole other side to the story, but you get my point. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, we follow Hamlet’s two buddies as they come to cheer him up. They talk about the meaning of life and the absurdity of fate. They ponder whether or not Hamlet’s really crazy and try to figure out exactly how hawks and handsaws go together.
“Hey. Whatcha doing with that handsaw over there, buddy?” (Photo by Diane Baker on Unsplash)
(Unless you really hate birds…they don’t.)
Perhapse you think I’m just beating a dead horse at this point, but it amazes me, personally, just how vital and relatively unnoticed perspective is when it comes to fiction. I’m not asking you to start imagining every story from another character’s perspective, although that can be a valuable and, for some authors, a lucrative experiment. I just want you to take notice of who’s perspective you’re being forced to experience the narrative through when you’re reading and I want you to understand exactly how the author is leading you when they switch things up and change perspective.
Even if you’re just watching a cartoon. Perspective is everything.
Or maybe this is just my way to “write-off” a business expense of all the time I’ve spent watching “Hey, Arnold!” lately.