Film Courage: What's the purpose of a character's death in a story?
Christopher Vogler, Author: Good question what is the character's death? What does that do for the
story? What is the purpose of that? well death magnifies death elevates a story and I would say
in your cast of characters death should be one of the characters who comes around who threatens
or who actually steps on stage and deals out death to someone like the figure of
death with the scythe and the hood that we see in cartoons all the time
yeah that is an important and I think even mandatory element to have in a story and I don't
mean that literally necessarily although it's great if it's there as a threat or an actuality
but the possibility of death or failure is the metaphorical way to look at it
that it's the death of the possible death of your hopes the possible death of your dreams
that's I think operative in that Cary Grant's notorious example that he's hoping for his belief
in love to be restored but he's really dubious about it because death got in the way in the past
and death is threatening now so there's a tension between those forces but the death of a character
maybe the thing that makes it into a worthy story that the hero either dies or experiences
death quite nearby someone near and dear to them dies or they are forced to deal death to
someone else that's a traumatic thing that sometimes can be quite a powerful movement
in a story and maybe they feel responsible or they uh blame themselves but the death helps to
elevate the story and and is almost a necessity in order to really shake the audience and and
communicate with them that this is quite a serious it is a matter of life and death
should death serve the plot or the themes or both well yes death should serve
both the plot and the themes it kind of works almost in a mechanical way within the plot
but we haven't talked about themes much but the theme I think there should be one overriding theme
in most stories there can be multiple ideas but one basic human quality that you're exploring and
death should definitely lean over that and cast a shadow on whatever that human quality is if you're
talking about Brotherhood or loyalty or friendship or trusts that should be threatened and that would
be your theme is I'm going to talk today about ambition well what if your ambition is thwarted
by death or failure that would add gravity to the story and maybe shine some light on on the theme
by testing it severely to the point of death so those things can all work together to make it a
nice design what impact does the death of the hero have on other characters in the story oh that's a
great thing when the hero dies or appears to die there is an impact on everybody else in
the story the great example that brought this to my attention as a young film student when I was
looking for the hidden rules and had just found them in the work of Joseph Campbell so there's the
whole pattern then I went to see the first Star Wars movie which came out within a few days after
reading Campbell for the first time and by golly there everything was but in the critical scene
in the middle of that movie that corresponds from me to the ordeal stage eight in my frame
is that they're in this giant trash Masher thing at the bottom of the Death Star and Luke Skywalker
our hero is pulled under by something with tentacles and appears to have died not for long
but for just a few frames you see bubbles come up and then no bubbles the water goes flat and then
the attention turns away from him to all the other characters who are watching and they are freaking
out because they think the evidence is telling them Master Luke is dead he's been pulled to his
death and so they're all thinking how am I going to go on and who's going to be the hero now and I
sitting in the audience am one with them wondering if I'm not Luke Skywalker anymore who am I in this
movie I identified with him I'm going through the story wanting what he wants and now if he's dead
who am I so there was this sense of unease and a sense that something's been pulled out of the
design and it creates a vacuum and I think that's embedded in a lot of ancient rituals that go back
to the Stone Age times when to escape from the ice sheets from the glaciers we had to go into caves
in Europe they acted out these kind of scenes where the shaman or the leader of the ceremony
would take on the robes of a buffalo or something and would dance around and then would seem to die
it's like baked into ritual performances that you will enact the life of the characters of of these
Supernatural forces like the Buffalo Spirit or something like that but also their death
and the audience is programmed or trained to react by crying by holding themselves tight and worrying
oh what's going to happen to us now that we don't have a hero to protect us they gather around the
sort of pit where the hero has fallen in and are deeply affected by it and depressed and this is
part of the magic of the hero's journey is that then that figure the robed Shaman who's playing
the role of the Buffalo or Luke Skywalker comes back to life sort of defying our expectations
and our understanding of death is permanent so if someone appears to die they're dead and then they
come back again wow we get a supernatural boost from that it gives us a lift and this is sort of
the inner mechanism of all stories I think and all religious rituals and all kind of performances of
of any kind is to take you to that edge let you experience that for a few moments and then bring
life back into the picture and it transforms you it you don't come back to the same level
it's like if you took a basketball and pushed it down under the water it's resisting you it wants
to come back up to the surface and if you just suddenly let go of it it doesn't just Bob up to
the surface it actually flies up out of the water so the same thing is happening with human emotions
that when you depress them by apparently killing the hero by making me think the hero has died
the audience's emotions are temporarily depressed and they'll go along with it even though they
know I've seen the movie before and I know Luke Skywalker doesn't die here he's going to live but
just for that second part of you on this cave person level experiences it as if it were real
and feels all the things that you would feel if someone dear to you had died so then they're
brought back to life and there's this huge rush and there's a lift and this can be done a number
of times in the course of a story should be I think somewhere in the middle and then certainly
just before the end we replay this at stage eight and Stage 11 where the hero is resurrected and the
art of the Storyteller and the filmmaker is to make the death as convincing as possible or to
make the failure as convincing as possible and then turn it so that the hero wins and we get so
much more satisfaction out of that than we would if the hero just did the things in one if they did
the things and fell into a pit and almost died or seemed to die to all appearances they've died and
then they crawl out alive that's a tremendously more powerful experience than just doing some task
and succeeding so I I think the death serves to involve the audience because they're all
existentially concerned about their own death so anytime you show me one on on screen part of me is
studying that quite closely to see what's it going to be like for me and maybe there's hope that I
can live through it and live again is there such a thing as a hero's death or a villain's death
yeah there's there is uh room for the hero's death and for the villain's death in these designs this
is something you can trace this back all the way to the beginnings of Storytelling if you want to
go back in let's say Anglo-Saxon literature you can look at Beowulf Beowulf was this great warrior
hero who fought Monsters he fought one Monster battled with this thing tore its arm off and then
had to fight its mother who came to get revenge and then defeated that one and lived a long time
ruling over his people and having prosperity and good times but in the end had to face one more
Monster and there comes a dragon that is it's a terrific battle but in the end they both go down
in flames and so the hero dies in sacrifice and that's a common way for the death of a hero to
be experienced it can be experienced tragically there's certainly lots of room for that in many
many stories that end with the tragic death of the hero and maybe it's meaningless and that itself is
a sad thing that you died for nothing but there are other cases where the hero's sacrifice is
Meaningful and it was done to save others or to show some way that maybe I couldn't make it
but you can this is kind of the idea in the Bible where Moses gets to the edge of the promised land
and he's within sight of it but he's just too old and so he says you go on to the promised land and
I'm just gonna camp out here and watch you all go and I'll wave goodbye and we know he he dies
soon after so the hero sometimes is handing it off and leaving it for others to finish
and that's a noble death when the hero sacrifices something or gives it over to the Next Generation
as for the villains the villain's death is a different kind of satisfaction
there is a thing called Poetic Justice which means that whatever the hero or the villain
did they should be rewarded or punished in a way that matches poetically to what they did so if
the hero did something dangerous and wonderful to save the world they should be rewarded with love
with the crown with being King with some kind of prize some kind of Victory and if they have
failed if they have broken the rules of the gods or have let themselves down and let the others
down then it's a tragic kind of thing but for the villains there should be this poetic justice so
that whatever evil thing they did to the hero the same should be done to them a beautiful example
of this is in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy deals with this wicked witch who's already set
her straw man friend on fire and is threatening to kill her and her dog and everybody in the team
and Dorothy does an act of Mercy she takes a bucket of water and throws it on the wit on
on the Scarecrow and puts out that fire but some of the water goes on and splashes the Witch and
Dorothy doesn't know this but the witch is in the book she's it says she's made of sugar and that
she just dissolves and goes down into the floor crying out my wonderful wickedness is is over
and so the villain's death gives us a satisfaction that it sort of corrects
the imbalance the villain represents an imbalance in society and the hero is trying
to bring things back to a state of balance to a state of justice and so it might be
necessary to punish the villain in accordance with what they did it's very unsatisfying if
they get away with something and don't have to pay an appropriate price for what they
did audiences on some level just instinctively know that's not a happy or satisfying ending.