🎬 #185 What Protagonists Can Teach Us.

Sorry about missing last week. To give you a bit of an insight, I wanted to try a new idea, not a change to the format of the newsletter that would be long term or anything but just a different style of post. I decided against it and then in the preparation to do it, I hadn’t figured out what else I could write, so I chickened out from going for it and didn’t post anything.

But I thought why not - so things are a bit different this week. It’s not really a recommendation but just something I thought about and thought you might feel the same / like to read about it too. This is an open recommendation, I suppose, to live as a protagonist. Which I guess could lead to the outcomes you want most, or if not, at least live more interestingly to you, on your own terms.

Love you,

Bry

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The best thing about watching a protagonist overcome obstacles and either achieve them or not, is that the obstacles are almost always clear. Even in the most idiosyncratic and personal story - the protagonist knows or eventually knows what they have to do, which demons they have to face. And then there’s the real world, where our own journeys are not as well scripted and planned. There are obstacles that, yes, we can grasp, that we need to overcome - but a lot of the time we’re adrift. We’re all in our own story and the things we must do or should do are more obtuse to us, like looking through a grey smoky film, hiding things that should be overcome on our own heroes’ journey. And as we get older maybe those things become even more obtuse. The path we were on as our own protagonist maybe isn’t as clearly mapped out as we once thought. As if a gravel path once clearly winding through dark woods had suddenly become scattered. Errant pebbles diffusing the clean curved lines we once saw guiding us safely into the unknown depths of the forests.

This is why to me film is so powerful. Each one can be viewed as a maquette of reality. As a glass domed terrarium is a to a rainforest - a protagonists’s journey is something graspable, just at the scale that we can handle which is why they’re such powerful teachers. Even in biopics, it’s still much more getable, knowable - it’s not the same as living thousands and thousands of hours as a real human in the real world and trying to make sense out of it as we go. In a film, we all feel that we can understand where they are and where they want to go and what they must do to get there. In the confusing reality of everyday life - where there are cloudy mishmashes of emotions, amongst the more clear sky moments - this is much more challenging and it’s ever-changing and we have to pay taxes and go to the toilet. Sometimes we’re just numbed out into inaction, because feeling safe is better than feeling something that we’d like to feel or achieve or become.

I think that’s why we’re drawn to protagonists - especially ones who [by the definition of what makes a good protagonist] have agency. They don’t sit back and let the world happen to them - they face up to it and take that step to take on the challenge that lays before them. It’s by their very nature that they don’t accept the conditions of their reality and so they break free from it. They happen to the world. They do, rather than think. And I think we are deep in the era of overthink. They have a clear image in their head, and if not, it becomes clearer by the doing, by the facing up to, not the shying away from where they are being called. One of the reasons we’re also drawn to people in the real world who have the facets of a protagonist and whose own way of living / life feels like something pulled off the silver screen.

They also transform. Great films have great characters that are usually different by the end, having gleaned some self knowledge or achieved the thing they needed rather than wanted. Transformation is maybe one of the most appealing things we can be shown in a film - because it tells us, we can change too. But change in reality is tough, it means leaving behind comfort sometimes, it means leaving behind the idea of who we are. It can mean failure. The mind and body crave homeostasis - its takes literal energy to force it out of its normal operating parameters.

There is also a blissful singularity to the goals of a protagonist. This is so appealing. There is usually one thing, one thing that lies between them and them being able to be made whole again, to return as a prodigal son or daughter to themselves. Again, reality is more complex, but we can take lessons from these ramblings I’ve typed here.

Be single-minded like a protagonist. Choose, out of all the things that you want, one thing to focus on for the next 2 months for example. Prioritise that, as if you heard the call and that is your goal at the end of your heroes’ journey. Other things are important but for the next two months that is the most important. Sometimes that can be a relief.

Transform like a protagonist. We can remember that transformation is possible, we can turn it all around. One small step at a time. Could just be about making one tiny choice differently, consistently. Doesn’t have to be big, all these choices compound into your heroes’ journey. And it’s never too late.

Do like a protagonist. Don’t worry that the challenges and obstacles and maybe even the path isn’t as clear anymore, it’s in the doing that things are revealed. The path is made before us. As the screenwriter, director, protagonist [i.e. you] get momentum and feel where this thing, this story we call life, that we’re in charge of, is going.

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