How to Create Believable Change in a Character
By: Gilbert Bassey
Tags: Creative Writing, Writing, Writing Tips, Storytelling, Screenwriting

Elements of true character that help create change — 5 lessons from Joker

The 5 elements of true character work together to create a multi-dimensional character. As such, none is more important than others.

1. Give the character a goal

No interesting story can be told without a character who has a goal. If you think this isn’t 100% true, then go ahead and try. If you’re able to come up with something, please send it to me at gilbert.storycraft@gmail.com, I’ll love to take a look at it. Perhaps I can learn a thing or two. Moving on.

making the world a better place — Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

When we meet Arthur at the beginning of Joker, the down and out clown has one primary goal — to make the world smile. Arthur deeply desires this because the world around him is terrible. This goal leads Arthur for most of the film, taking him from one scene to the next, on and on until the story’s climax.

2. Put the character in conflict against the forces of antagonism

If a character has a goal, and upon going in search of that goal, gets it without overcoming any obstacles, the story will be as flat as a whiteboard. Rarely do people ever get what they want without having to fight. If they do so in life, then certainly not in story. Conflict is the lifeblood of story, and the only way to create it is through antagonism. The stronger the antagonism, the stronger the story. The forces of antagonism are of two kinds — internal and external.

2019’s Joker proved that having internal and external antagonism gives you far greater room to create believable change. This is in stark contrast to having just external forces, which is what some stories do. Of the two forces, internal forces are more responsible for creating believable change. One such force is a character’s flaw.

A man with a lot to deal with — Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

In the case of Joker, Arthur had to fight obstacles from without and within. From without, he had to contend with the world around him — the decadent Gotham City. As he tried to make people smile, he kept getting into conflict with people who wouldn’t let him be. For example, the bullies at his workplace.

From within, Arthur’s flaw was that he couldn’t relate to people in a normal sense. Nowhere was this flaw more telling than when he couldn’t control himself from laughing at people’s misfortunes. For much of the story, he refers to this as “a condition”, but by the end of the film, he has a different opinion on the matter.

3. Give the character a need that contradicts this goal

Where the goal is the conscious desire of a character, his need is his unconscious desire. As in, most characters are totally unaware of their need when the story begins. In the case of Arthur, at first, his need is somewhat difficult to identify for the average viewer. But by the end, his need becomes crystal clear — to be one with his inner nature. Arthur’s conscious mind wanted to make the world smile, thereby reducing suffering. Unfortunately, his unconscious mind found people’s misfortune to be amusing. Such a deep disconnect can only be resolved by one side overcoming the other, or by finding a new level of balance.

4. Let conflict lead to loss and pain for the character

Conflict without consequences is useless. It’s like a war without casualties. Can we really call it a war? In Joker, Arthur losses a great deal. But it’s not just that he lost some things, it was the nature in which he lost them. In a 10–15 minutes sequence close to the third act, poor Arthur loses 3 key things. In fact, it is these losses that lead us into the third act proper.

First, he loses his hope of meeting his real father. This happens when he goes to confront Thomas Wayne about the affair the latter supposedly had with his mother. To his dismay, it turns out that the story is more than what his mother told him. This loss leads him directly to the next one, the truth about his mother.

Arthur serving mum — Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

She lied to him about almost everything. In fact, she was the reason why he was ‘broken’. This is because she was a terrible mother right from when he was conceived. She dropped him on his head quite a few times, as well as some other bad habits that messed up young Arthur’s brain development.

On its own, these are pretty solid losses for a character, but then Todd takes it one step further. It becomes clear to the audience and Arthur that his girlfriend is imaginary. Quite harsh if you ask me. Thus, he lost his father, mother, and girlfriend on the same day, only minutes apart. Given the size of the losses, is it any wonder that he also loses himself? This leads us to the last lesson.

5. Let pain and loss lead to change

No one changes unless the pressure to change is so high that it overcomes all our regular defenses. In a story sense, if the pressure to change is only applied from external forces of antagonism, the change will be weak. But when the pressure is both external and internal, their combined power creates honest change.

Todd Phillips changed Arthur to the Joker and you believed it because the change was as a result of great pain and loss. Recall that Arthur wanted to make the world a better place by making people smile more. But this desire was in contradiction to a nihilistic view of life which saw him laughing at people’s misfortune. Thus, there was pressure from within for Arthur to change. Then came the losses.

With three losses delivered back to back, the overwhelming pain Arthur felt shattered the person he was trying to be, creating a new one in its place. From a clown who wanted to make the world smile to a clown who was happy to watch it all burn.

By accepting his evil side (true nature — based on what the film presented), he changed. It was both positive change and negative change. It’s this duality that made the ending so resonant. On the one hand, it was a negative change because Arthur had given up on being a good person. On the other, it was also positive because, by accepting his evil side, he made himself whole.

In the end, the film’s main point is that the Joker was created by his society as much as himself.