Beyond Characters?

This chapter addresses a number of ways that traditional public characters have evolved to correspond with the way that moderns picture blame and causality. It looks at the decline of heroes and villains in this supposed post-heroic era. It turns to the ways that the essentialism of character work is challenged, through various attitudes that range from medicalization and skepticism through cynicism and irony. It discusses the ridicule of flat characters, the dispersal of blame in a risk society, and the invention of new terms for circumstantial victims like trauma, patients, and abnormal. It argues that these new characterizations do not escape the essential triad of villain, victim, and hero. Public characters may have changed in some ways, but they are not obsolete. And, despite modern skepticism about the traditional language of characters, heroes thrive in today’s new nationalism with leaders like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and Donald Trump.

From Victims to Heroes

This chapter looks at an important transformation, when victims manage to become heroes, addressing several ways that groups can jump the boundary from victim to hero. It discusses the intentional suffering of martyrs and saints. They are heroes by example, as their pointed sacrifice becomes a form of power for those who have no other. The chapter also looks at heroes of endurance and resistance. Their resistance, by surviving rather than dying, counters the traditional expectations of passivity and weakness from sufferers. It discusses the gendered dimensions of this heroism. In the transformation from victims to heroes, oppressed and injured groups face an essential dilemma: They need the sympathy that victimhood brings but also the strength to fight back. The chapter draws on a range of examples of attempts to solve this tension: including the Palestinian concept of sumud, guerrilla warfare, and survivors of child sexual abuse.

We Fear Villains

This chapter presents villains as part of a typology of primary characters including heroes, villains, victims, and minions. Within this framework, villains are bad and powerful. They can be cruel, arrogant, greedy, hypocritical, sacrilegious. They are also secretive. This heightens people’s sense of urgency in stopping them, generates collective identities forged against the evil outsiders, and places god-fearing citizens in the role of protective heroes prepared for sacrifice. People construct villains for the powerful emotions they inspire in audiences who fear and hate them. They focus blame, transforming anxiety and frustration into indignation and purpose. Demonizing opponents is one of the oldest political strategies, and still plays a role in politics today. Character workers exaggerate their opponents’ strength, malevolence, and activity levels. They may be either superhuman or subhuman, but urgent action is required to thwart them. They are always busy, looking for weaknesses.

Arenas of Character Work

This chapter examines how institutional environments elicit and shape character work. Their reputed characters help or hinder players in a range of strategic arenas. This chapter explores the founding of nations, mobilization for war, corporate public relations, protest movements, elections, and legal proceedings for the nuances of character work in each of them. The media and politics often intersect, especially to stoke outrage through the identification of villains. Rumors, scandals, and gossip affect characters in subtle and sometimes sudden ways. The character work in these public arenas shows how much is at stake in the politics of reputation and blame.

We Admire Heroes

Opening with a discussion of eulogies for John McCain, this chapter presents heroes as part of a typology of primary characters including heroes, villains, victims, and minions. Strong, good, and active, heroes are the players who must set things right and protect others. Heroes struggle, which is why they are admirable—and also why they need others’ cooperation, votes, or financial support. The combination of good and strong leads to bravery, actions that run the risk or reality of self-sacrifice. Hero portraits can remind people of the hero’s past victories, but also of the powerful forces arrayed against her. Strong enough to protect herself, the hero’s goodness requires that she act on behalf of others as well. This is the difference between heroism and success: an individual’s accomplishments, such as earning a fortune, may not help anyone else. Because strong figures can be threatening, character work on a hero highlights her goodness and willingness to sacrifice herself for others.

Ridicule and Contempt for Minions

This chapter presents minions as part of a typology of primary characters including heroes, villains, victims, and minions. Character work tends to portray the weakness of victims—paradigmatically women and children—as the lack of physical power, whereas the weakness of minions lies more in their ineptitude and in an overexcitability that undermines effective action. Inept characters cannot be too threatening and thus need not be punished or repressed too thoroughly. They will go away, self-destruct, or see the error of their ways with little outside intervention. It is hard to blame them. Villains are the real threat. Portraying one’s opponents as ineffectual is a way to discourage their potential backers and to undermine their own confidence, but it also may relax and demobilize one’s own team.

The Art of the Word

Words are the main tool with which we construct characters, especially in literary narratives. Opening with Shakespeare’s King John, this chapter looks at narrative theory, epidictic rhetoric, public relations, and theater to show how characters are constructed in literary and other genres. Traditional characters are often considered “flat,” but even those stereotyped portrayals have many uses. They have faded somewhat in literature but are still crucial to political reputations. They embody what we fear and hate, admire and love, respect or pity.

Introduction

Public characters, especially the main versions of heroes, villains, victims, and minions, represent central building blocks in the reputations of groups and individuals. Character work is devoted to crafting familiar images, especially of strategic players and even more especially of political players, that influence audiences primarily by suggesting the emotions they are supposed to feel about the characters. The characters are defined along two dimensions: as weak or strong and as moral or immoral. Public characters are often found in stories, but they are also created through visual images. In an era of corporate public relations, carefully orchestrated electoral campaigns, and social media, character work has never been more influential—or more ignored.

Conclusion

The conclusion looks at how public characters offer lesson to understand culture more generally. It includes a critique from Robert Zussman and a response to that critique. Zussman challenges the claim that social and political life inevitably involves character work. And when it does, he strongly doubts it is a good thing. The simplifications of characters do not contribute to rich and reasoned political debates, they short-circuit them. He finds the tone of Public Characters too positive about the role characters can play in public life. The conclusion responds by defending the claim of inevitability. It is hard to imagine political arguments without characters. Characters streamline meaning, but they are not always so simple after all. They evoke emotions that can inspire action and draw new voices into public debate. Like all tools, characters can be used to harm others, but understanding how characterization works can only help everyone.

We Pity Victims

This chapter presents victims as part of a typology of primary characters including heroes, villains, victims and minions. The same attributes that make heroes appear strong also make victims—who lack them—appear weak: a soft or feeble physique, small size, a lack of experience, intelligence, wisdom, wealth, offices, or special skills. Victims cannot protect themselves or maneuver in the political realm or other strategic arenas. They must be good, and are therefore also innocent. Victims can arouse pity, horror, and indignation in audiences. But those very emotions can make them seem something less than human. Victimhood creates a gap between viewer and viewed, objectifying the victim and freezing her outside the possibility of will or reasoned action. They lack agency. Victimhood is thus a risky self-presentation, as with victims of rape or abuse who are sometimes criticized for not having done enough to save themselves.