You're Lying to Yourself

or, here's a decent starting point for writing a dynamic lead character

Rick Blaine in CASABLANCA.

Morris Buttermaker in THE BAD NEWS BEARS.

Two amazing characters in two perfect movies, performed by two immortal if somewhat unlikely movie stars.

Also: two variants of what I call the "lying to himself" protagonist.

It's pretty typical to expect a lead character to change over the course of a story. For this change to feel earned and necessary, there also needs to be a good reason for a change to occur.

As far as I can tell, one of the best reasons is that your lead character is living some easy, comfortable lie.

They need to evolve to live a new truth, but it'll take some jostling for them to do it.

Both Rick and Buttermaker fit the prototype. These are men well into middle-age who are stuck in a rut, unsure how to face the second half of their lives.

At the start of their stories, they are drinking heavily and quietly wallowing in unspoken self-pity. Their romantic heyday is behind them and they are single. They don't have children of their own.

To a traditionalist mindset, they might even be cautionary tales. Rejecting the trappings of marriage and family, as younger men they put all their chips on adventure and ambition. But now they are middle-aged, mere shells of their once great promise. It seems that they have outlived their usefulness. They appear to be living lives without purpose or meaning.

But both CASABLANCA and THE BAD NEWS BEARS suggest: both of these men are in fact living comfortable lies.

They've refused to adapt to a changing world and are clinging to a past version of themselves that no longer fits their current circumstances (just like no one’s static self would be able to do). They numb themselves with booze and nostalgia, unwilling to adjust, let alone evolve.

They lie to themselves that they are no longer of use because that’s actually easier than admitting the truth: it’d be too hard for them to change. It's easier to stay the same and drink and tell themselves self-pitying lies.

In order to find a new purpose, they'll need to find a new community. And more or less against their will, both Rick and Buttermaker will do so, via younger characters.

For Rick Blaine, it's the resistance movement growing around him in Casablanca. It's Ilsa’s return and Lazslo's idealism and the young Bulgarian refugee couple, all of whom activate Rick's buried political and romantic idealism.

Importantly, though, in this more mature version of Rick that will emerge from these circumstances, his energies will no longer be directed at his own well-being, but rather to the well-being of the community at large.

For Buttermaker, it's the misfit band of the Bears baseball team, and especially especially Amanda, his ex-girlfriend's child and a surrogate daughter he's largely neglected. Buttermaker’s uncomfortable encounters will activate his buried love of the game and competitive pride and (eventually, finally) his paternal instincts.

And just as importantly, in this more mature version of Buttermaker, he will learn to transcend his personal competitive pride for the sake of all of the kids on his team, regardless of their skill level. Likewise, he will finally embrace his relationship with Amanda, even when it's inconvenient to his comfort.

As far as I can, there's a deep shared storytelling architecture between these two stories.

The protagonist is living a comfortable lie.

Then he encounters a younger community that is living an uncomfortable truth.

In order to help this new community, he himself has to change to embrace a buried element of his own being in order to become a new, truer version of himself.

This new version of himself will lead him out of his rut, help his new community, and carry him into a meaningful second chance at life.

I love this "lying to himself" storytelling architecture. And there are a bunch of examples of it, especially in its white middle-aged alcoholic variant: Rick Dalton in ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD. Mac Sledge in TENDER MERCIES. Ernst Toller in FIRST REFORMED. Also much older, as in Mike Milo in Eastwood's CRY MACHO.

For Rick Dalton the alcoholic seemingly washed up actor, the uncomfortable truth he has to evolve to meet is found in young actress Trudi Fraser and eventually Sharon Tate and her friends.

For Mac Sledge the alcoholic seemingly washed up country singer, it's the young widow Rosa Lee and her son and the young upstart band that befriends him.

For Toller the alcoholic seemingly washed up man of God, it's a troubled married couple and a radical environmentalist community.

For Milo, the formerly alcoholic seemingly washed up rodeo star, it's a 13 year old boy in Mexico and his modest rural community.

This middle-aged or older white dude variant isn't the only version of this self-lying protagonist, of course. It's just the one I see the most, partially because of my own viewing habits, partially because of Hollywood's storytelling blinders. I'm sure there are plenty of "lying to herself" variants that I'm overlooking.

But just because this architecture has been tailored to one type of lead character, it doesn’t have to be.

I think Max Durocher from COLLATERAL — my favorite performance by the great Jamie Foxx — is maybe the most dynamic version of this "lying to himself" protagonist.

Max is a nice guy. And like most Michael Mann protagonists, he's competent and fastidious. He takes good care of his cab. He knows the best routes to cover LA. He also has a dream of starting his own limo business.

But Max is also something of a pushover, and he's been stuck in the same taxi job for years. The lie that Max tells himself is that he's on his way to making his American dream come true. Max literally tells that lie to his mother as well, leading her to believe that he's already started the limo business.

In truth, Max is likely stuck in this cabbie job, unwilling or unable to take the bold steps necessary to break free. He doesn’t numb himself with booze or nostalgia. He numbs himself with stories about a daydream that he’s never going to actually follow through on.

It's only after encountering Tom Cruise's Vincent — a ruthless, calculating hitman — that Max is forced to confront this lie he's been telling himself.

As the night devolves into murder and mayhem, Max must confront the fact that in being this passive, easily-pushed-around mere dreamer, he's not being his authentic, whole self.

It's only when he's forced to actually pretend to be Vincent in order to not get killed by a cartel kingpin type dude that Max is able to tap into an uncomfortable truth: he in fact is fully capable of standing up for himself. He just hasn’t been willing to do so up to now.

Even better: Max will now have to do exactly that in order to survive the night and protect those he cares for.

In the prior examples I’ve given, the self-lying protagonist's uncomfortable truth has been positively embodied by a younger community, who he then protects and defends (to varying levels of success).

In COLLATERAL, the self-lying protagonist's uncomfortable truth is malignantly embodied by a shadow version of himself, who he then must destroy.

Architecturally-speaking, I think either is a perfect construction.

I’m not offering a formula here. As always, I’m focusing on malleable, adjustable, customizable storytelling principles.

There are countless ways of exploring and manipulating these principles so they can be used to tell stories with a whole array of identities at the center.

If you have a specific protagonist in mind but you’re unsure how or why to make them change, it might be as simple as starting them off living a very specific, rather comfortable lie, then forcing them to encounter some new individual or community who embodies a very specific, uncomfortable truth.

Whether or not they are able to rebirth a new version of themselves to live in this new, uncomfortable truth is up to you, of course — and it’s also up to them.