The Problem of (Fictional) Identity

Here’s the thing about me and characters from plays: I don’t care about them. Not really.

Now, I love plays, and believe me, when I watch one, if there’s a character who’s particularly cool or hateful or attractive, I’m certainly rooting for them or interested in them or hoping they’ll succeed/fail/die/live. But they don’t follow me home and talk to me once the final curtain drops. Why not? Because, for me, characters in plays exist less as persons than as potentials. They are words on a page that need an actor to breathe them to life, and because of the sort of medium theatre is, each reincarnation will be different. What stays the same across performances and productions isn’t the character: it’s the way that character fits into the plot.

Contrariwise, the reason I do fall in love with characters from books, TV, and movies is because they’re concrete. Play characters get “redo”s – they can change the story just by telling it again. Book, TV, and movie characters stay the same no matter how many times you reread the story or replay the film. I can imagine Sherlock Holmes “out there” somewhere, hunting down crooks with Dr. Watson. But Katurian K. Katurian is nowhere to be found in this perpetually constant fictional universe; Didi and Gogo don’t really exist.

In essence, what makes a character real to me is continuity of personality: David Duchovny’s Mulder is a consistent person. But Kenneth Branaugh’s Hamlet isn’t consistent with Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet, who isn’t consistent with Mel Gibson’s Hamlet. They don’t even live in the same universe.

Why am I thinking about this? Well, this Monday, I was looking forward to seeing two shows (one a movie, one a TV series) about characters who really spring off the screen for me. I saw both, and I enjoyed both, but I’m left with that uncomfortable feeling you get when a friend does something totally unexpected or you find out a startling and incongruent piece of a loved one’s past. Do I even know these people at all? Only, when it happens in fiction, the real question is: are these characters actual people whom I could know? Or are they just plot devices on a page that change depending on the needs of the artists?

See, both the movie and the TV show did something that redefined what was “real” in their fictional universes, and in doing so, both stories demanded that their audience re-evaluate the personalities of particular characters. Suddenly, things about those characters that had seemed to be written in stone were up in the air again.

You can probably guess which TV show I’m talking about, but since a) it’s still soon enough for spoilers, and b) the movie is a better example anyway, I’m going to stick with the latter. The movie was the new Star Trek feature, with Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto. Was it awesome? Yes, it was. Tons of blowing stuff up, dramatic emotions, and really pretty people. No, like really pretty people. Like, a heterosexual couple of main characters are kissing, and I’m not sure who has the most gorgeous eyelashes. If they turned this into a new Star Trek TV series, I’d totally be on board (ha ha).

Anyway.

Since this isn’t a review of Star Trek, I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say, the movie is an attempt to “reboot” the franchise, chronicling the early days of Kirk et al. in a vivid re-imagining of the circumstances of their meeting. As per usual in Star Trek, there are space-time shenanigans galore, including one rather big plot twist that ultimately results in the following scene (slightly paraphrased):

UHURA (pretty much turning directly to the camera and addressing the audience): The entire timeline is changed. The original story with Shatner and Nimoy and all those old people exists in an alternate reality. Whooooop! Red alert! NEW CANON! Whoooooooop! NEW CANON!

So what the movie is asking of its viewers is this: remember the Kirk who followed his dad into Starfleet? Remember Vulcans who didn’t speak with faint, villainous British accents? Remember the time Spock’s half-brother hijacked the ship and tried to kill God or the other time when the crew encountered a planet of Mafia gangsters or the other other time when Kirk and Picard hung out in the nexus? Put all that in a box. Tuck it away like a set of old action figures.

Because these young actors, this new movie, this alternate timeline – they’re your new toys. We know you’ll like them, because in all the important (we think) ways, they’re like your old ones. But in all the unimportant ways, they’re better. If you miss those old toys you put away, you can take them out and play with them whenever you want, but remember that we’re only going to make accessories and playsets for the new ones now.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the new toys. But I also can’t help but feel that the hours I invested in William Shatner’s Kirk, in Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, and DeForrest Kelley’s McCoy are gone. Because those “people” – those fictional characters I came to care about – don’t exist in a different way than Chris Pine’s Kirk, Zachary Quinto’s Spock, and Karl Urban’s McCoy don’t exist. Pine’s Kirk is now “real” in the fictional universe of the story. Shatner’s Kirk isn’t real there, and he isn’t real here. It’s like reading great fanfiction and then suddenly being told, “By the way, this replaces the original show/book/etc. now.”

The problem is that a fictional character isn’t actually a living, breathing human being with a core of given traits. With real people (most of us presume), a person’s actions are derived from or display their inner personality. But with fictional people, it’s just the opposite: a fictional character’s personality is inferred from his or her actions. Fictional characters live the ultimate existential lives: they really, really are only what they do and say (well, and in some stories, what they think). That’s all there is to them.

So when a TV show or movie or book changes the rules of reality in its universe, its audience has every right to feel disoriented: a McCoy who never said, “He’s worse than dead! His brain is gone!” is a different character from the McCoy who did. Suddenly, he’s like those theatrical characters who essentially exist in an ever-changing universe.

Every time you rewind and replay Data petting Spot or Scully shooting Mulder (remember that episode?) and every time you flip back and reread Edmund breaking the White Witch’s wand, you expect exactly the same things to happen. The characters perform exactly the same actions in exactly the same way. So their personalities stay the same.

(Interjection: performing the same actions in a different way isn’t actually performing the same actions, IMO. Just imagine the difference between saying, “I really like that tie” in a sincere way and “I really like that tie” in a sarcastic way. Roughly the same physical behaviour, very different meanings. And, I would argue (or at least I would if I didn’t think it would be incredibly boring and take up way too much space), it’s the meaning that constructs characters’ personalities.)

Contrariwise, what the newest Star Trek (and television-show-that-shall-remain-nameless) do – for different but equally intriguing and valid artistic reasons, but do nonetheless – is rewind and play back an entirely different scene. It’s like if you turned back to the beginning of Harry Potter and started re-reading from chapter one only to find Harry got Sorted into Slytherin and became friends with Malfoy*.

And, like that example, the crux of the uncomfortable feeling comes not from what actually happens but from our expectations of narrative. It’s not that I couldn’t accept the idea of Harry being a Slytherin; it’s that it already happens to be the case that he’s a Gryffindor. One of the strongest conventions of narrative (well, *I* think) is that the events described play out in time in the same order as the pages or frames or episodes that describe them go from start to finish.

Of course J. K. Rowling could go back and change whatever happens on the Hogwarts Express, in a way that a historian can’t go back and change what happens on the Titanic, because Harry Potter and his cronies are fictional. There are no unbreakable rules restricting what becomes of them except those that dictate what the human mind is capable of imagining. But when I start a typical story, I sign an imaginary contract with the author: I will imagine Harry as a real person with an individual character and the events described in the book as his actual life story as long as Rowling treats them in the same way. In a real person’s life story, there are no revisions, so I don’t expect there to be any at Hogwarts.

This is why, despite the amazingness of both the – oh, heck, you know it’s House – season finale and the new Star Trek movie, both stories left me with the feeling that a rug had just been pulled out from under my feet**. If Star Trek XI had been set between Undiscovered Country and Generations and featured a Kirk who loved ponies and cried all the time, I would have been upset. That’s not who Kirk is, and I would have blamed the writers for making him woefully out of character. But it wouldn’t have rocked me as much as this movie did, because ultimately, what the new Star Trek made me do is question the fundamental reality of these characters. It made me stop and ask, “Are these people?” And whether my answer was yes or no, that’s still a question that disrupts the entire story-telling process.

* Sidenote: as disorienting as this would be, wouldn’t it be awesome if there were books and movies that could do this? Yeah, it totally would. It would be like having infinity books in one. Only you’d have to make sure you finished reading them in one sitting. Otherwise every time you went back to re-read, you’d have to start the story all over again.

** Arguably, this was the intention of the House team. Actually, arguably enough that’s it’s almost not arguable that they didn’t.