Character Development in Contemporary Cinema

Emphasizes the importance of character development in films as a modern concept.
Associated closely with Hollywood-produced dramas.
Explains the commonly used three-phase structure: setup, confrontation, and resolution.
During the setup, the audience is introduced to the scene, characters, and particularly the protagonist.

And so it's very important when we think about the idea of character development to acknowledge that it's a relatively recent phenomenon. Every Hollywood film that we are likely to see, particularly drama, typically has the same three phase structure. There's a setup where we're introduced to the scene, to the different characters, and typically to the main character, the hero.

The Path of Hero’s Journey towards Maturation

The hero’s path involves progressing through confrontation and problematizing the situation to learn and grow.
The journey often imparts realization and recognition to the hero.
Experience of pain and suffering is an inevitable and necessary step towards maturity.
The process culminates in a moment of recognition, which signals the conclusion of their journey, symbolizing development and maturation.

And from there, we progress to some kind of confrontation, some kind of problematization of the situation that the main character of the hero has to learn through, has to experience. In order to arrive at some realizational recognition, and of course, along the way, they may experience pain and suffering. But that pain and suffering is a necessary step towards the denouement, the conclusion of the drama, which is that moment of recognition, and development, maturation.

Hero’s Journey and its Dramatic Unfoldment

The hero begins as a likable but naive character, often experiencing hardship due to this naivety.
The difficulties faced by the hero are reflective of their inexperience and innocence.
These trials serve as critical turning points in the storyline, teaching the hero—and indirectly the audience—crucial life lessons.
The drama that ensues helps the hero, and the audience alike, understand the bitter realities and necessities of life.

So typically, that hero starts off as likable but naive, goes through some pains, difficulty, often that reflects their naivety. It's a product of their naiving. And both the hero and by ext extension, we're the audience come to realize the necessary bitter lesson as of the drama of what is unfolding.

Now, that structure, that three phase structure goes so well, we can think of as kind of timeless, classical. But actually, if we look through the sort of one of the key foundations of modern-day drama that is the same say, the ancient Greek tragedy, we actually don’t see that particular structure be around very often. For Aristotle, the purpose of tragedy is not to show show a necessarily a a kind of happy ending, but rather to show that the recognitionition realization happens, it can also befall the hero in the context of tragedy of typically the hero’s death.

So this has idea of a kind of happy ever after story of transformation that comes about through the protagonists’s immersion in a world that produces hurdles, that they have to overcome, is at the same time, it’s both classical, but also has some modern characteristics, and in fact, we could date those modern characteristics to roughly speaking, the rise of capitalism and the sort of contemporemporaneous artistic development of the novel. Why that’s relevant is that there is a particular particular term that’s used to describe the novel with that particular kind of novel that shows character development, which is a German term, building is Roman.

The `Roman’ stands for novel. The bildung means has a variety of meanings, but has something like the idea of character development, something like culture, the culturation of the individual who is the hero of the text. Why that’s relevant is because the text that we are looking at in the context of human machine learning here, phenomenology of mind is a phenomenology of spirit, is both a very famous text of Western philosophy, but it’s also sometimes compared to a building’s remand, that is a particular kind of philosophical argument that almost has this idea of a hero undergoing a series of trials and tribulations in order to arrive at a particular realisization. In fact, the ultimate realization, the realization of absolute knowledge that comes into the conclusional text.

So this is important because in some sense, the idea of philosophy, not as a series of principles or maxims or theorems or, takeaway messages that we might like to think, well, that’s what we sometimes think about. You know, my philosophy is, you know, I believe this, these are my principles.. This is not actually the way Hegel proceeds in terms of the philosophical argument.

It proceeds precisely in that sort of dramatic form, through the idea of a particular character, which we might call them the mind or spirit, a very abstract character, to be sure, who undergoes a series of transformations. And hence we have the classic sort of formula that’s often ascribed to Hegel lovey himself and never says it, of thesis antithesis synthesis, by which we mean something like we start at a particular place, we go through a process of negation of that place or position, the antithesis, and then, in order to move forward, the thesis and antithesis sort of come together in this process of synthesis. That is a kind of reductive description, however, of Hegel, and we won’t be using it further.

It’s just a sort of that’s often if you like the sort of Wikipedia version or the kind of quick summary version of what Hegel is doing through and through in the phenomenology of spirit. But we’ll be looking at some examples in closer effect, where that particular process becomes more complicated