HOW CHARACTER CHANGE
CHANGES THE WORLD
This last week, Pureflix premiered it’s pro-life offering, Unplanned,which has the tagline “What she saw changed everything.” The story follows the transformation of Abby Johnson (played by Ashley Bratcher), a former Planned Parenthood employee who became an outspoken voice on the pro-life side of the debate after witnessing an ultrasound of an abortion procedure.
Ironically, I couldn’t have planned a better film to wrap up this month’s theme of character change in stories. See, in holding both of her perspectives on the abortion debate, Abby was driven by a need to change her world for the better.
In a sense, this is what every artist who tells stories also tries to do. They tell stories to change the world for the better—even if they are unaware of it.
Let’s illustrate this point by comparing storytelling to cooking: A chef does not need to intentionally calculate calories and nutrients to prepare a dish. Those things are just there whether or not the chef adds them. If they are not there, then what the chef prepared is not food, and anyone who tries to subsist on it will starve to death. Stories are just like that—except that people consume them for meaning, values, ideas, emotional contexts and solutions to the big and little questions of life.
But aren’t stories just entertainment? Yes, only in as much as taste is the only reason for eating. On one side you have food items that most people consume primarily for taste—mmm, donuts—yet they still provide ample calories despite the hopes of dreams of every dieter. And on the other side you have food items like the much-aligned broccoli—despite it being “good for you,” there’s that element of taste that drives certain people to avoid it all costs.
So like a good chef, presentation may be the most important thing to make their offerings attractive and engaging to the senses. However, a great chef also knows how to satisfy the appetite and the body’s need for sustenance.
Character Change is a Call to Action
This month we’ve been looking at characters and how they change, along with some different movies that highlighted various aspects of the subject: My Fair Lady demonstrated the idea that a character’s change is hand-in-glove with the story’s premise; Tootsie showed how characters take risks not knowing how it will change things, including their own beliefs; and Gone with the Wind highlighted how character change happens within a larger context of the world they live in.