Day 272: Implicit

Little thought I want to pursue here, about the role of character in film, which didn't fit into the review yesterday.

Context: I wrote a review of Kathryn Bigelow's film Detroit last night, and I found the film to be adroit in its crafting of event, but less so in its building and development of character.

This got me thinking about how character in film actually works. Unlike novels and longform television, where character reigns supreme, film is more concerned with plot and action. It is a large and bold form, and over the 90-minute runtime of a typical feature there isn't the opportunity to live with and get to know characters the way you can in a book or through a multi-season HBO television production (everyone say "The Wire" with me).

How the filmmaker thus writes and films their characters is more akin to how artists must draw their characters in animation. Think of a Disney or Studio Ghibli film. Think of Simba in the Lion King, or Chihiro in Spirited Away. These characters aren't detailed oil paintings. They're not intricate and exquisitely realised portrayals. They are sketched representations, simplified, with basic lines, shaded in a few colours, so that each cel can be redrawn with minor variations and placed over a static background, put together to give the appearance of depth and movement.

But what the artists choose to draw stands in for everything they do not. The explicit details are skillfully selected to point to an implicit world of richness beneath. The tufts on Simba's head that imply a whole luxurious coat of fur. The curved lines of Chihiro's knees that imply a whole knobbly, juvenile frame teetering on the cusp of adolescence.

Every exhaustive detail is not required, because the details presented are the telling ones - they point to much more than they actually state. And in some ways this approach can be more powerful than one offering a surfeit of detail, because if you get the telling details right then the audience fills in the blanks with their imagination, and engaging an audience's imagination means lighting up whole neural networks of association and memory - letting the brain's immeasurable complexity do the heavy lifting for you.

This is how filmmakers must sketch character in their productions. For their role is to draw not the physical shape of a character, but the emotional shape, and how that changes over time. Without the luxury of many chapters or television seasons to hone their work, they must be talented artists of the human soul - must offer snatches of dialogue, visualise the most vital moments, that get to the core of who their made-up characters are. They must show us the details that take us all the way in, underneath the skin, to the beating fictional heart we want to feel within.

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Music: 2025, by Squarehead.