Writing Morally Gray Characters, Part 2

This article is a continuation of Writing Morally Gray Characters, Part 1. 

Politics Is A Dirty Gray

“Politics is a dirty business, but if you do not do politics, politics will be done to you.” So states novelist Will Shetterly.

Many movies and TV series about politics shows the absolute compromising nature of politics. Gray characters abound as they try to get their agendas passed or do damage control in a situation.

Borgen is a TV show from Denmark about the first female prime minister. She learns just how much she’s willing to bend the rules to get her agenda done, and to prevent her government from collapsing. As the series progresses and the pressures of governing increase, she situationally makes compromises that are borderline legal.

In The Mayor of Kingston the unofficial (“fixer”) mayor of a town (Jeremy Renner) populated by prisons says to his mother (Diane Wiest) the philosophy of what their family does, and she gives it right back to him not allowing his morally gray pronouncements:

MIKE
We don’t break the law, Ma. You know
that. We bend it, to keep the
peace. For everybody.

MARIAM
Oh, I’m very familiar with the
process — your father invented it.
And don’t delude yourself into
thinking any of this is for the
common good. You two have worked
extremely hard at accomplishing
absolutely nothing. You prolong the
inevitable. You’re couriers. Fix it
men. Part time gangsters, but
because you don’t make much money
you think it’s noble?

It has been decades since his mother spoke this much to him,
and the words hit him like a mallet.

MIKE
I want to (change)… I just don’t know how.

The characters in this show are all gray characters. Even mom who knows what her sons do and her husband did and chooses to look the other way pretending she has no culpability in the situation.

Choosing a high stakes profession for your characters offers plenty of opportunity to present situational ethics when the alternative to not acting badly is worse than staying in the lines.

Miss Sloane shows the slimy world of lobbying as the main character uses whatever manipulative techniques she feels are necessary to win a high stakes vote in Congress.

Wag the Dog is a tongue-in-cheek look at what people will do to bolster ratings. It’s a masterwork of gray characters who lie, cheat, and rationalize what it takes to win an election.

The original House of Cards and the American version detail what an ambitious politician will do to stay in power. The tensions are amazing because the main character is unpredictable and is likely to do anything at any given time. But he’s also charismatic and not all that bad – until he kills a journalist in the American version (Kate Mara) that is. But until that moment in Season 2, he’s mostly gray and we can somewhat comfortably follow him. Yeah, he’s icky but not a true villain. Yet.

Situational Ethics

Some characters cross the line from the beginning of a story and some are born from circumstances.

Death Wish has a first act where the character is shown to be driven to become a vigilante. Paul Kersey was an architect living a normal life. Murder is always wrong (self-defense aside) but we can certainly understand why he crosses the line and takes to the streets to prey on criminals after his wife and daughter are brutalized and murdered by thugs. We can accept Kersey’s plan for revenge because he’s not evil or arbitrarily murderous. He presents himself as a target, giving thugs a chance to not commit a crime, then shoots to kill when the criminals do come after him. He’s not putting guns to heads (initially) but rather has a razer-thin justification for what he does. The very essence of a gray character.

We root for him subconsciously. We wonder ourselves what we’d do under the same circumstances if someone hurt our family. It makes us uncomfortable to watch but somewhere there’s a rationalization that justice is being served and we side with this gray character. The situation of  Death Wish makes it plausible that we’d give a surreptitious nod of approval to street justice being dispensed in this manner.

But, and this is important, your job as a writer is to establish the gray character’s normal world so you can show the reasons they act in the way they do. Setup is key. Who are they, why did they change? Or were they always this way because of…? It’s up to you to convince us or we won’t follow the character.

Rationalizing Moral Ambiguity

One of the ways to make these gray characters work best is to present them with an untenable situation. Walter White’s impending death, Paul Kersey’s justifiable rage, Tony Soprano’s ultra-violent world and occupation. They excuse their behavior with one word: because.

Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) of The Boys has a vendetta going against all superpowered men and women (“supes”) because of his backstory regarding his wife. He justifies bringing them down because of it.

Perhaps the grayest characters I’ve ever seen are in The Americans. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys play husband and wife Russian spies. It’s agonizing watching the dance they do trying to be ‘normal’ American suburbanites who are also attempting to destroy an American way of life. The internal conflicts they have to deal with are superb. They are loyal to two masters and need to somehow serve both at the same time.

Eviler Than Thou

Pure evil like that of the villain (Kilgrave) in the series Jessica Jones cannot be rationalized. Or can he? Turns out he has a backstory that goes a long way to mitigating what made him so evil. But does it allow us to get close to him? No. Because he forced Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) to murder someone and then took advantage of her in every way conceivable.

While Jessica herself falls nicely into that gray area of not-all-good and not-all-bad, Kilgrave, even with backstory, continues to act out his evil and carry it to extremes. By comparison, Jessica is easy to digest – we may cringe occasionally at her behavior but put her up against the evilest villain I’ve ever seen and she is not even close. To fight the sort of evil that Kilgrave represents (he’s called The Purple Man in the comic book) she must necessarily break the rules and use situational morality at times. This is one of the tentpoles of the gray character.

In fact, most of the time what separates a true villain from a gray character is the extreme a villain will go to. Kilgrave forces people (through his mental powers) to do horrible things just because it pleases him. Jessica may bend the law but she’s attempting to maintain some standards. In comparison to Kilgrave, she’s only bad-ish. We can follow and support her because of that stark comparison.

Redemption

The narrative mechanism for most films is redemption. We all like to believe that there’s second chances out there. The so-called ‘happy ending’ isn’t a fluke in our entertainment world; it’s de rigueur.

If a character has been shaped by external forces to become who they are, and that who-they-are then is flawed, it requires a lot of the work as writers to change them to satisfy the audience’s desire to see things work out.

But to be redeemed, they have to be flawed initially.

In The Tourist the Jamie Dornan character is struggling to find out who he is after an accident that has caused amnesia. The so-called accident was actually someone trying to kill him in the outback of Australia. He’s got a secret (that I won’t reveal) but you get the sense in the early going that he is not a really nice guy. Still, we like him because he’s so vulnerable when we meet him, and whatever comes we’ll follow him hoping for the best.

Jax Teller was initially a gray character even though he rode with a motorcycle gang that was as bad as it gets. He was born into it but never fully crossed the line until season eight. The writers rightly understood that he could no longer be redeemed and punched his Harley into an oncoming semi; but until that time, he might have been able to live forever in that gray place or find some sort of redemption.

The Families That Gray Together

The Sopranos, the Lannisters from Game of Thrones, the Gallaghers of Shameless all show the influences of families on the characters.

Jason Bateman stars in two family dramedies with gray characters: Arrested Development and Ozark. He always manages to elicit sympathy because he’s trapped into his situations and the people around him are all corrupt so he has to be. In Ozark it’s not so much family as extended family because his ex-partner was stealing from a drug lord. He’s given no choice.

Theo James stars in The Gentleman trying to cut ties with drug dealers that his father and brother (and tacitly his mother) went into business with. Every time he thinks he’s cleared the family estate, something else jumps up at him pushing him back in the gray world he’s been forced to inhabit.

Extralegal Legal Eagles

Some occupations just call for gray characters. Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) of Suits,  Rake’s Cleaver Greene (Richard Roxburgh), Boston Legal, LA Law are prime examples of what types of characters make hit shows. Older shows like Perry Mason, The Defenders, etc., had upstanding righteous barristers. These days we like our legal pie served with a slice of corruption.

Private Dicks

Private investigators are some of the finest gray characters we have. Rockford (James Garner), “Marlow”, “Sam Spade”, the Kalinda Sharma character (Archie Panjabi) in The Good Wife, Psych, Burn Notice, etc. all exhibit that shifting line of morality used to solve crimes.

They lie, cheat, cross boundaries – do whatever they need to to satisfy their clients and we gleefully follow them wherever they lead. Even old Sherlock Holmes isn’t above bending whatever rules he needs to. Holmes was a substance abuser both in the original Arthur Conan Doyle tales and the most recent iterations (Sherlock, Elementary).

In Conclusion

Gray characters emphasize the concept of shaded morality and bad faith. We are familiar with this through our own experiences where we rationalize and excuse certain behaviors. No moral code is black and white; there’s always exceptions and those exceptions form strong gray characters if done right.

More and more today we see these types of characters reflected in the movies and especially TV where the floodgates have opened for anything-goes drama. Homeland, Mr. Robot, The Wire, Madmen, Umbrella Academy, Better Call Saul etc., all demonstrate this superbly.

These are potentially the most interesting characters we can create. Neither all-good and not all-bad. A never-ending shifting landscape of situational morality and life in a society with changing values.