Who is it all for?
“What’s the most important relationship for your protagonist?” is a key question we ask in script development. Who do they need most in their corner? Whose love / pride / respect is the true prize that drives everything that they do? Who do they want at their side when it’s all over?
These core relationships are where the heart of your story really lies. The truest, most relatable reflection of the human experience. And the most enduring takeaway we have from watching a film, long after we’ve forgotten the details of the plot.
It’s not uncommon that the answer a writer gives to the question is that the protagonist’s relationship with a deceased parent is the one that matters most. Although, more accurately, this means their relationship with the MEMORY of a mother or father who is no longer alive.
Of course it makes emotional sense. Those first relationships are primal, essential to our survival and key to explaining who we are. Our parents shaped us, gifted us values and inflicted wounds upon us. It’s a universal human experience that on some level we all want to live up to - or escape from - who our parents raised us to be.
Unfinished business with a no-longer-here parent can certainly be a powerful stake to motivate a character. And a character’s secret fear that they’ve let down or disappointed a lost parent is often used as an added layer of internal need to reinforce why it matters so much to the protagonist that they take down the corrupt bosses, win the championship or form the community choir. (This, of course, is distinct to films that are specifically fore-fronting that grief, for example Aftersun or Wild.)
But, despite universal empathy for the loss of a parent, in very practical terms the emotional resonance of such a relationship won’t necessarily be shared by an audience in the way it’s intended to. For two key reasons:
The audience will not get to experience their own relationship with the character. If the parent character is not on-screen in the present of the film, we are denied the opportunity to know them. When you’re writing a screenplay and imagining all the characters then of course those mourned-for parents have as much presence in your head as anyone in the story world. Their influence is significant and therefore they FEEL as real. It’s quite easy to forget that the audience won’t actually get to meet them (unless they are featured in flashbacks or re-appear as a ghost.) If, once the film is made, they exist only as an idea of a person who is referred to in dialogue, they will be relegated in importance by the vivid reality of every other character fleshed out on screen by actors. It’s a huge ask for the audience to invest in a relationship they don’t actually get to watch in action.
The deceased character has no agency of their own. A common character arc I read is that the protagonist strives to make peace with the memory of their beloved mother or difficult father. But the dynamic is a one way street. What’s really happening is that the character is changing what they themselves choose to believe about their parent’s feelings towards them. An internal mind-shift that can’t be either denied or confirmed. The ‘resolved’ relationship therefore lacks catharsis. And doesn’t deliver the satisfactory resolution the writer intends.
Whatever the character achieves in the story won’t physically bring the parent back. So the original question remains: at the end of the film, who now needs to be at the character’s side? How has that parental legacy been honoured in a relationship that the protagonist has fought for in the present of the film?
What relationship makes it all worth it? Not just for the character, but one the audience can share in too.
