Conclusions from Character Goal Tracking Exercise

To recap, we've been talking about techniques in serialized narrative that depict the process of gradual change over time. Characters in classical Hollywood storytelling are goal-oriented -- their goals set the action of the narrative in motion; their goals are well-defined; and changes in goal are generally strongly motivated. From this, I advanced the theory that serialized narrative requires a mixture of strongly motivated short-term goals and less strongly-motivated long-term goals. This mixture provides episodic closure, while creating psychological cliffhangers that carry across multiple episodes, seasons, and the entire series. To examine this theory in more detail, I defined three categories of character goals (beat, episode, and long-term) and reverse engineered a beat sheet for a climatic Mad Men episode to track goal shifts.

As expected, although Don achieves his overall episode goal (to hire Duck Phillips, block Pete, and avoid the exposure of his true identity) the manner in the story is told raises additional questions and further complicates the ongoing question of the series -- who is this guy, and as Rachel Menken says directly in the episode, what kind of man is he (is he now / has he been / can he become)?

Additionally, we see varying degree of goal shift among the central characters of this episode. With the exception of Pete, the other characters Don comes up against in this episode are consistent in their own well-defined goals. Peggy's episode and long-term goals are in alignment and her expression of those goals prompts Don's action in beat 25. Pete shifts his beat goal by deciding to confront Don with the contents of the box, but his episode goal remains the same (his beat goal shift is more of a change in tactic.) Rachel Menken and Bert Cooper articulate their responses to Don in clear terms. Don's goals change and his central conflict is deepened against the backdrop of characters who retain well-defined goals (whether they achieve those goals or not). I suspect that for an episode to work, we need to have some central characters hold on to their well-defined goals, while another character (or perhaps 2) are shifting. (I'll have to test this over additional episodes.)

So this seems like a fruitful exercise for examining character change over time. This particular set of movements for Don is not that closely related to our larger questions of social change in the early '60s, but if I can use this kind of technique to examine the changes over the series, it should yield something interesting related to our larger questions.

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Edit April 26, 2011

Clarification on the Idea of Character's Having Long-Term Goals

Following a conversation with Mike Newman and some additional reading, I want to add a clarification to the idea of characters in serialized narrative and Mad Men in particular having long-term goals. I believe my earlier term was too loosely defined, but I don't have a good substitute phrase yet.

Mike has written about characters in indie cinema being portrayed as without clearly defined goals. In his new book Indie, has has this passage, which discusses the movie Lost in Translation:

As spectators we formulate questions about the characters, and this motivates our continued interest. We wonder if each character will stay with his or her spouse. We wonder if they will really fall in love with each other, as seems possible (and desirable to us). But there is no scene in which these outcomes are posed as questions with absolute answers or deadlines by which time decisions must be arrived at.

What Mike calls questions in the passage above, and contrasts in his book with the clearly-defined goals of traditional Hollywood film protagonists (the hero must stop the bad guy, get the girl, win the trial, stop the alien invasion, etc.)

These questions (psychological, philosophical, existential questions) are formulated by the spectator but attach somehow to the character in the narrative, whether or not the character actually expresses them as questions or expresses a goal of answering the question. The questions have no absolute answers (because of the nature of the questions) and no deadline.

The way that the storytelling attaches questions to a particular character is what made me think of them as being long-term goals for the character -- in the sense that the protagonist has to deal with the  "who am I, why am I here, what am I doing with my life" question to some provisional extent to bring an end to whatever slice of life story the narrative is trying to tell.

It seems to me that serialized narrative, if and when it takes up these kinds of questions, as Mad Men does (Don raises existential questions with Rachel Menken in the pilot), draws out the features Mike identifies in these kinds of indie films to a much larger degree. If an episode has a resolution that seems to come down on the side of an absolute answer (Don tries to be happy with what he has), that answer may be revised or reversed in a later episode (Don has another affair). And the sense of life going on and on without deadline is certainly much stronger in serialized narrative.

Perhaps the clarification is not that the protagonist "has" the long-term goal, in the same way that they have episode or beat goals, but that the narrative raises a meaning-of-life level question in relation to a character and his or her choices in life and then the audiences assumes a "goal" of having the character answer that question to some extent through the meaning that attaches to the big life choices they make in the narrative.