Writing Morally Gray Characters, Part 1

When you speak of gray in life, you’re normally talking about a mainly colorless tapestry. But morally gray characters, those considered not good nor bad, neither heroes not villains, are some of the more complex characters you can write. Even more interesting, is a psychological phenomenon that allows our audiences to embrace and even love these characters.

Allowing Bad Behavior For The Sake Of The Story

There’s interesting psychology in play with challenging characters. It’s something as writers to which we should all pay attention because it helps us in defining these challenging characters properly.

From an article in the Brown Daily Harold by Christina Peng:

“According to Boston University researcher Mina Tsay-Vogel, the act of empathizing with complex characters is part of a condition called moral disengagement — when we ignore our moral standards and excuse a character’s negative actions so we can enjoy the narrative. But we all morally disengage to different extents — and some of us don’t at all.” 

For years I wondered how I could support a character like Tony Soprano who was a psychopathic bully. It’s to David Chase’s unending credit that he was able to take such a character and allow us all to suspend our judgments and follow Tony and his not-so-merry gang of thugs.

Of course, history is filled with gangster archetypes both in literature and film. These characters drew us in and we embraced them cognizant that we’d never want these people over for dinner.

Another Theory

I’ve asked student classes for the last twenty-plus years if they thought life was fair. It was a lead-in to a lecture about existentialism in film. Not one in all that time ever answered in the affirmative. We know life isn’t fair. We know it can be arbitrary, vicious, though sometimes good, of course.

I think it’s this recognition of the unfairness that goes to the core of allowing gray characters to become our favorites – or at least acceptable. We know from our experiences that sometimes good people do bad things and bad people do good things. Neither good nor bad is the way I’d assume most of us define ourselves and others in our lives. We relate to the sometimes situational ethics  exhibited by characters like Jackie Peyton’s Nurse Jackie (Edie Falco) or Ray Donovan (Liev Schreiber). We know Donovan loves his family and would avoid hurting them at all costs. While we may not agree with the methods, we don’t necessarily condemn him given the situations.

Their World

One of the keys to making these characters excusable is establishing their world properly in context. Typically, Tony Soprano’s world was difficult and violent. This didn’t excuse his behavior, but it mitigated it. Same with White Heat, a 1949 legendary gangster film starring James Cagney. Although diagnosed with “homicidal psychosis” Cagney’s Cody Jarrett mostly visited this crazy on people trying to hurt him. We can’t excuse his murderous sprees but given who he is and the world he’s in he’s mitigable in context. 

No one expects anyone in the Sons of Anarchy motorcycle gang (SAMCRO) to uphold society’s values. Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam) is shown killing people, but it’s mostly justifiable in context to this uber-violent world. Jax is truly a gray character, a not-all-bad, not-all-good person as opposed to his uncle, the Ron Perlman character, who is irremediable.

Slow Burns

The duo of Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) started their life of crime from very different places. Walter was a high school science teacher diagnosed with a deadly disease who was initially trying to get enough money to take care of his family before he died. He teamed up with a reluctant low-rent thug (Jessie) and they became a major force in the meth drug trade.

Walter was not all good and Jesse was not all bad. For eight seasons we watched them go deeper and deeper into a dark place because of the genius of series creator Vince Gilligan. Gilligan knew that we’d watch until we were so hooked we couldn’t look away, sorta like the old frog-in-the-increasing-hot-pan of water.

In movies, in Act II and III what would have been unthinkable to the character becomes justified and/or normalized behavior.

Hitman (Netflix) does this with Gary Johnson, the Glen Powell character. In the opening acts he’s a professor who then goes undercover for the police to bust people trying to hire a hitman. He becomes smitten by Madison Figueroa Masters (Adria Arjona) who wants to have her husband killed. He surreptitiously warns her off so she won’t get arrested and that begins his path of corruption until he ultimately does what he pretends to be. The entire movie is basically a setup for the Glen Powell character’s bad actions in the end.

The Godfather is perhaps the most stunning example of this. When the movie opens, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is a WWII hero on the straight and narrow. He has no aspirations to join the family business like his brother Sonny (James Caan), but when Sonny is murdered and Michael’s father Don Vito (Marlon Brando) is shot, Michael finds himself increasingly becoming a part of the gangster life until he ends up as The Godfather. This after he cold-bloodedly assassinates another gangster in a restaurant, something he would have never considered in the first part of the film. His progression is justified and understood, if not approved, by us because we can see how and why it happened out of necessity.

Slow Burn Based On Situation

Andrew Scott is brilliant at playing Tom Ripley in the Netflix series Ripley. The delivery of nuance of character makes him impossible to ignore just like his quietly evil Moriarty character in Sherlock. 

But here we’re asked to understand and initially embrace this loser grifter who is scamming small amounts of money from medical practices. He’s so pathetic in his lifestyle, so desperate to live even a meager existence, we can’t help but feel sorry for him. He actually contacts his ‘marks’ using a payphone in the hallway of the flophouse in which he lives while people are slapping laundry dry, and having loud sex in the nearby rooms.

An unbelievable opportunity presents itself and he’s off to Europe with first class tickets and accommodations. While there, with money and status, he can’t help but be tempted by a lifestyle that contrasts wildly with the hardscrabble existence from which he came and to which he is supposed to return. That’s why writer Steven Zaillian spends a great deal of Episode One showing us Ripley’s life. We need to understand it to embrace some of what Ripley does. This creates an initially gray character, one we can and will follow; and when he goes really bad, which he will, we’re still imprinted somewhat with the Ripley we’ve been introduced to – the sad sack who lives a depressing and desperate life.

In American Rust we’re not given a lot of background information about a Sheriff played by Jeff Daniels, but he is already definitely gray when he hides a jacket implicating the son of a woman he loves in a murder. He seems so solid and reasonable we go along with this action even though it violates his law enforcement code.

Against Type Creates Grays

An interesting dynamic happens in The Avengers: Civil War when rule follower,  squeaky clean Captain America (Chris Evans) and rule-breaker Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) end up on opposite sides of a new law that would require the Avengers to stop being ‘vigilantes’ and check in with Congress before they did any crime-fighting.

Surprisingly, rule-follower Cap refuses and ends up with a team that also opposes the law against a group of Avengers led by Iron Man determined to enforce it.

Cap has always been the all-good face of the Avengers and although Iron Man is a superhero, he’s also always been a rebel refusing to give his supersuit technology to the U.S. when they demanded it.

Here’s the conversation after being told they had to abide by something called the Sokovia Accord agreed to by 117 nations.

Transcript by Fandom.Com

The Avengers are gathered.

VISION
I have an equation.

Sam Wilson
Oh, this will clear it up.

VISION
In the eight years since Mr. Stark announced himself as Iron Man,
the number of known enhanced persons has grown exponentially.
And during the same period, the number of potentially world-ending
events has risen at a commensurate rate.

STEVE ROGERS
Are you saying it’s our fault?

VISION
I’m saying there may be a causality. Our very strength invites challenge.
Challenge incites conflict. And conflict . . . breeds catastrophe.
Oversight  . . . oversight is not an idea that can be dismissed out of hand.

NATASHA ROMANOFF
Tony. You are being uncharacteristically non-hyper-verbal.

STEVE ROGERS
It’s because he’s already made up his mind.

Tony Stark puts his phone in a basket and taps it. The phone projects an image of a smiling young man. He looks down, then back up, and pretends to notice the picture for the first time.

TONY STARK
Oh, that’s Charles Spencer, by the way. He’s a great kid.
Computer engineering degree, 3.6 GPA. Had a floor level gig
at Intel planned for the fall. But first, he wanted to put a few
miles on his soul, before he parked it behind a desk. See the world.
Maybe be of service. Charlie didn’t want to go to Vegas or Fort Lauderdale,
which is what I would do. He didn’t go to Paris or Amsterdam, which sounds
fun. He decided to spend his summer building sustainable housing for the poor.
Guess where, Sokovia.

This has impact in the room.

TONY STARK
He wanted to make a difference, I suppose. I mean, we won’t know because
we dropped a building on him while we were kicking ass.  There’s no
decision-making process here. We need to be put in check! Whatever form that takes,
I’m game. If we can’t accept limitations, if we’re boundary-less, we’re no better than the bad guys.

STEVE ROGERS
Tony, someone dies on your watch, you don’t give up.

TONY STARK
Who said we’re giving up?

STEVE ROGERS
We are if we’re not taking responsibility for our actions.
This document just shifts the blame.

This is the crux of the civil war to come. Neither man is wrong, but neither is wholly right either. Gray characters indeed.