Character vs Plot (or Let Your Characters Breathe)

In the 2016 crime-western Hell or High Water, there is one left-field scene where, in a rare break from the film’s usual tension, Jeff Bridges is quizzed by the waitress of a café while taking his order, asking in a very unusual manner which out of green beans or corn on the cob he doesn’t want with his meal. Five years on from the first and only time I’ve seen the movie and the many details of the intricate heist-thriller plot that saw the film earn best picture and best screenplay Academy Award nominations have all but left my memory. What I do remember of Hell or High Water is this scene with the waitress, vividly enough that it is the first scene that comes to my mind whenever I am reminded of the film.

This, I don’t see as a bad thing. While the waitress steals the show in this scene (props to Margaret Bowman), we learn a lot about Jeff Bridges’ character too. A character in the midst of investigating a chain of violent bank robberies might have every reason to snap back at a waitress being unusually cut-throat with him for not knowing the café’s exact menu off by heart on his first visit, but he doesn’t. He recognises the waitress as so set in her and the restaurant’s ways that she still berates one asshole from New York who tried to order trout back in 1987, and chooses not to make her job any more difficult or cause unneeded conflict, at the risk (albeit a low one) of not getting the meal he wanted. It’s simple, but we see Bridges’ characters merits on a person-to-person level, and these tell us he’s a person worth rooting for, in the most subtle of ways.

It’s rather the case for a lot of the time, that when we look back over films we’ve seen, our memories are of the characters and their environments, rather than the events that take place. Much like when we look back on an encounter with anyone in our past, we’re more likely to remember where we were, how they looked, how they spoke, and most importantly, the feeling of being with them, as opposed to anything that was actually said during this encounter. While we may forget the plot of a film, the 2nd act turning point, how character X knew character Y was gonna be at the courthouse, we’ll find it much harder to forget the characters themselves and how they made us feel. Feeling endearment or curiosity towards a character or set of characters is a key way to ensure our perceptions looking back on a film will be favourable, and as the example from Hell or High Water shows, achieving this can be a simpler task than you might think.

Scenes like that with the waitress are the types of scenes that tend to transcend their film’s storylines, and often the scenes most likely to embed themselves in popular culture. Think the Royale with Cheese discussion in Pulp Fiction, the tipping the waitresses debate in Reservoir Dogs, or seeing Jesus bowl a strike in The Big Lebowski. It’s important to note that these aren’t throwaway scenes. Whether the film’s intent is to endear us to their main characters or the opposite, these scenes contribute to that goal by showing us what a day spent with this character would look like.

The medium of film has a special purpose. It lets us explore situations and worlds so extraordinary that we would never encounter in our day-to-day lives. This brings with it however the problem that in most cases we will be unable to empathise with these characters, as we don’t know whether we would act differently to these characters, due to the deliberate foreignness of these situations they find themselves in. It is with these small scenes that we are really able to start imagining ourselves in the world of the film. Most of us will have a random McDonald’s menu fact we like to throw around, have found ourselves in debate about the right amount to tip at a restaurant, or felt a bit weird upon seeing someone get a bit too in the zone at a bowling alley.

Much of the time we don’t get this intimacy with our protagonists. We are told to root for them purely for the fact that they’re the main character. A lot of the time, particularly in your mid 2000’s comedies or thrillers, all we’ll get is the protagonist in private giving a speech to one of their allies, right before the big showdown scene, explaining why X and Y during their childhood has led to them wanting this goal so bad. You probably have a scene in mind that fits this brief exactly, and though their ally is usually convinced, this is rarely a strong pitch to the film’s audience. Why? Not only because we haven’t lived their childhood with them, but also we’re inquisitively aware we’re being pitched to, that the film is breaking the fourth wall to plead its characters case to us.

So what’s a better way to get an audience to invest in characters without telling them to? Show us the mundane - but different. Show them tying their shoelaces in a weird way. Some of us may perk up and think “hey, that’s how I do it!” and some of us may think “that’s an odd way to do it, I wonder where they learned that?”. We may even wonder how they carry out other standard tasks. In any case, from something as simple as putting on shoes, we’re now asking questions about this character and beginning to invest in their backstory.

Or, put them face-to-face with a waitress. And while we may expect a goal-oriented Hollywood lead to stand their ground, we understand that in real life, we too would know better than to test an elderly waitress’ already wearing-thin patience by daring to ask for anything other than iced tea.