Passive Protagonists

via GIPHY


I'm writing a feature right now. Here's the Buffy-esque, spoiler free logline:

After discovering his/her birthright power as [awesome, superpowered person of dark prophecy], a young innocent must use his/her new powers to thwart the prophecy that foretells his/her part in [terrible calamity].

[Hey, do yourself a favor and read my post about loglines!]

This is a perfectly good example of a logline objective with stakes for failure that will likely have people rooting for my protagonist to succeed, because he/she turns from passive to active at the midpoint. 

Why do so many writers miss this? They keep their protagonists passive and put their antagonists behind the wheel for the whole movie. 

Do you have one of these passive protagonists? Look at your logline to find out. If your protagonist "struggles to", or their life becomes a "rollercoaster", or they're "put through the ultimate test", then my gut immediately tells me your protagonist is going to dodge boulders for the whole movie, and then they're gonna luck onto a deus ex machina. They'll never have a plan with consequences for failure. I'll never root for them.

You have to figure out what your protagonist is going to do, or else you don't have a movie.

Hey, let's make a weekly feature of looking at a passive protagonist logline from over on Scriptshadow, and see if we can riff an objective for the protagonist that will better tell us where the idea wants to go! Last week's first Amateur logline was:

"A perfect couple’s relationship becomes a rollercoaster when she wants a baby and he flat-out refuses to start a family."

What a perfectly solid idea for a movie, lacking any and all objectives for what is presented as dual-protagonists. I can just imagine the whatever's in the fridge crock pot stew this movie could be. He buys her a dog. She pokes holes in the condoms. He finds the holes and withholds sex. She tries to seduce him with a threesome. He sleeps in the spare bedroom with the door locked at night to protect his masturbation sperm. She goes to a clinic and buys sperm. He defrosts and spoils it before she can use it. And then at the end of the movie, on the verge of breakup, he gets cancer and changes his mind because mortality.

Does that sound like a movie to you? It's not. It's a montage stretched out to 100 pages with a deus ex machina ending. It's unlikely to sustain, because neither protagonist has a movie-sized objective with stakes for failure. Sure, you could say the stakes for failure are a break-up, but think about it: that's the opposite of failure, as each protagonist is getting what they want! She gets married to a guy who wants kids. He stays childless. 

So how does this fun idea find its movieness? Well, for starters, I think we have to be strategic, and lean toward making the husband the protagonist, and the wife the antagonist. His goal is to change her mind. His failure is parenthood. Sure, she's also trying to change his mind, but that doesn't have stakes for failure unless the movie goes on for 20 years and she hits menopause.

What next? Well, what else is missing from the logline? An inciting incident! What if her desire for a child is incited? That would give him something to work with, wouldn't it? 

So let's say the wife was a powerful executive who got fired, and that's what triggered her need for a child. So she stops taking her birth control. Now the husband can have a goal of getting her back on birth control by getting her job back before she starts ovulating. 

Or maybe the inciting incident is that the new neighbors have four kids, making the wife see kid joy up close, 24-7. So she stops taking her birth control. Now the husband conspires with the kids to be monsters whenever they're around his wife, hoping it will inspire her to go back on birth control before she starts ovulating.

In both of these versions, you can still have all those mini-objectives I riffed above, but now they fit into a complete narrative with a movie-sized objective with clear stakes for failure. And then just before the turn to act three, his plans to change her mind wind up changing his mind, just as she discovers his web of lies and leaves him. He must get her to take him back by getting her pregnant. It's a movie!

I imagine the writer of this script might object to my taking his/her perhaps semi-autographical logline and "commercializing" it. And maybe his/her script is brilliant and rule-breaking. Doesn't change the fact that making a protagonist active by finding their logline objective with stakes for failure will eventually save every writer some painful rewriting.


via GIPHY