Let’s talk about weird MC characters.
Is anyone aware of a story with an MC handoff? I am not, and would be curious to see what it is like.
I’m going to propose East of Eden as a possibility because it takes place over multiple generations, but I have never read it, so I don’t actually have a clue.
What about stories with more than one character representing the MC?
I believe South Park: Bigger and Better fits the bill here. Anything else?
Although it’s definitely a broken story, there’s some MC switching in The Village between Lucius and Ivy.
EDIT: By switching, I mean that the director switched whose “eyes” we experience the events through, not that one of the characters shifted into the MC Throughline partway through. Are you interested more in examples of the former, or the latter (or both)?
I cannot contribute an example but can share an idea with multiple MCs I had in mind. The idea for this story is based on a real project which was featured in the press. A while ago I put the idea back in my drawer as I could not see how to make that happen.
Story - In order to boost profits the owner of a photo studio hires six world class highly respected photo-artists to make a “special” portrait of an employee of the studio. Before they start the session the owner tells each photographer a different story who the model is. “He is a an ex-alcoholic, an ex-drug, … “
I was trying different storyforms but could not really get it work. My starting point was:
Six Photographers as MC with Problem Perception
Employee as IC – has impact on their perceptions
Owner as OS
As I am writing this I can see an episodic short story kind of text where we follow each photographer to prepare for the session. The climax could be (as in the real project) the final presentation and revealing the truth about the model.
I just saw Gosford Park with the 92-year-old mother, who loved Downton Abbey. I wanted her to see what Julian Fellowes worked on before Abbey and what led to it.
Lo and behold, all of a sudden I was in MC universe…haha…or at least it seemed that way to me. It seemed every scene had the speaking person as the MC. Maybe, that’s what an objective/overall story does? I haven’t read the online analysis of the film, but I was just sharing my initial audience perception.
Also, before I mentioned Tarzan, when the Samuel Jackson character jumped into the jungle tree tops, following Tarzan and his friends. That scene had Jackson’s character as the MC, imho.
Maybe it’s time for a Gregory Maguire-esque rewrite of A Christmas Carol from the MC perspective of the ghosts.
I’m sure you already know about the multiple MCs in The Usual Suspects and The Princess Bride. But those both have an inner/outer story structure.
What about Hidden Figures? There seems to be handoffs between three MCs and their corresponding ICs. There are three “main” characters – Katherine, Dorothy, and Mary, each with their own IC (Paul, Vivian, and Levi, respectively) who each discourage the women not to fulfill their potential. All three MCs are Steadfast and all the ICs seem to change by the end:
Paul give Katherine a cup of coffee and agrees to letting her be a co-author of their report which was something he was against earlier. (Their was an RS of co-workers)
Vivian congratulates Dorothy on becoming a supervisor. (RS of boss/employee)
And Levi gives Mary a mechanical pencil as a show of support before she begins engineering class. (RS of husband/wife)
Katherine’s story is the story most focused on, but I think it’s because hers was the most directly tied into the OS of NASA trying to get a man into space.
I think the Goal for this story was Conceptualizing – everyone was working on a plan to try to get a man into space and back to earth safely.
I’m just curious about this because it seems so rare.
I should have clarified that I am not that interested in movies with multiple stories, hence multiple MCs. I’m curious about one MC but multiple characters playing that MC.
I think this would be interesting, but I bet in practice, this would end up as 6 tales told in parallel, unless you’re seeing something I’m not.
I had completely forgotten about this kind of multiple MC when I asked the question. Thanks!
Interesting thought. Though I certainly did not feel like they were the same character when I was watching the movie. I felt like it was Katherine’s story, and two parallel tales. (Though, I didn’t think about it very hard.)
I suspect that you are just seeing characters that you enjoy watching, not seeing MC handoffs.
Does anyone else have an instinct?
I’m sure it’s probably a broken or incomplete story, but Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl has always seemed like a movie that wasn’t sure who the main character was, structurally speaking. It’s been a while since i’ve seen it, but it feels like Elizabeth Swann is the “I” perspective when being proposed to by Norrington and being abducted by ghost pirates. But it feels like Will Turner is an “I” perspective when a pirate busts into our…sword smith shop or whatever, and we have a sword fight with him and a lot of the “you and I” stuff is between Jack and Will-although they could just be putting it between the wrong characters. Will’s “I” moments don’t tend to feel as strong as Elizabeth’s, though, at least not from what I’m remembering. Could it be possible there’s some MC handoffs there?
FWIW, broken stories are broken, and that makes them irrelevant here. (Though, not irrelevant in a larger scheme, just not when talking about structure.)
I don’t remember the movie all that well, but that is not what I see here. I’m building on this and:
Basically, I think people are mistaking well-drawn characters and exciting characters that get our adrenaline and interest up with Main Characters. (See Dead Poets Society for another example of this.) Main Characters have a unique perspective and get us emotionally involved with their journey. Well-drawn characters certainly get us involved, and we get them, but it’s different.
That’s not to say that authors can’t decide to let you in and treat a character like an MC for a moment. For instance, the IC in Frozen, seems to be saying “Hey, that paradigm you use where you really only understand the inner workings of the MC… Let It Go for this song.” Or, in maybe the 3rd or 4th episode of The Wire we get a very MC-like treatment of one of the policewomen – which bonds us to her, which the writers take advantage of a couple of episodes later. (Trying to avoid spoilers here.) But she’s not the MC writ large, just for a tale we never get more than a small taste of.
But I do think what they do in The Wire is different from what they do in _Pirates of the Caribbean.
My take has always been that we can have stories where we see scenes from the IC’s POV, but we have to feel alien to that perspective. During “Let It Go,” as wonderful as that song is, I don’t think we’re necessarily supposed to agree with it or think she’s justified. We’re supposed to be Ana, and Elsa’s escape into the mountains is yet another door closed between the two of us. Or in The Shawshank Redemption, we see lots of scenes of Andy Dufresne going around and acclimating to prison, but always as this strange, perfect other, the only innocent man in the prison. For all that time we spend watching him, we never get a sense of what it’s like to be a good man in a bad place–we are Red, the only man in prison to admit he’s guilty, and we watch Andy Dufresne and admire his confidence. So even in scenes where the IC takes center stage, there’s still a distance, a mental barrier that eludes us. It’s only when we make the final switchover that we begin to understand a fragment of what it’s like to be the IC.
Try telling that to a group of girls who suddenly feel empowered.
Sure, that’s probably how it’s supposed to be, but that isn’t always what authors decide to do.
360 is the best example.
What about
It’s been a while since I’ve seen either and have never read either of these, but would the Banks children from Mary Poppins or the Baudelaire.children from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events qualify as multiple characters acting as a single MC?