Can ‘Stupid’ Characters Make Plot Narratives Memorable?

Question

Characters in movies ‘28 Days Later’, ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ made terrible impulsive choices that cost other characters their lives, but if it weren’t for any of those choices made in the films, they wouldn’t have had any significant drama

• Ignoring an expert about releasing an infectious chimpanzee causing widespread infection in the UK
• Releasing some random dinosaurs causing nearly all of the workers to get caught and eaten
• Giving up and leading other humans out in the Artic cold with a low-risk chance of surviving - causing a sad scene upon finding their bodies later on

NOTE: Mistakes are natural and are what make us human, but logically some of the events could’ve been avoided, that’s why the consequences are annoying.

Am I right?

Answer 1

Terror, Cowardice, Selfishness and Greed.

"Stupid" mistakes need to be understandable or the story is not satisfying.

They can BE understandable if the stupidity is part of human nature: Somebody is overworked to exhaustion and makes the mistake. Somebody is engaging in a criminal exercise, and does something extremely short-sighted in order to save themselves from being captured. Somebody is a coward and in their panic to save themselves at any cost, does something stupid for the rest of humanity.

In Stephen King's The Stand, a virus escapes and kills 99% of humanity because one person, out of cowardice, violated every rule of containment to run away when the virus escaped in the lab; believing against all logic that perhaps he had NOT been infected. But he was. We can understand that as human nature, no matter how highly trained they are nobody wants to die, and faced with certain death if he obeys the rules and a microscopic chance of living if he breaks them, he chooses to break them, to save his own skin, and it truly is human nature (psychology) that a brain flooded with existential terror is NOT thinking rationally or with any empathy for strangers.

Mistakes can be made, stupid (short-sighted) errors can be made, but you need to ground them in the dark sides of human nature: Terror, cowardice, selfishness and greed.

Answer 2

I would say there always is a way to make your plot slightly more logical than stretching the limits of human behaviour. Forcing your characters to make very obvious and foreseeable mistakes without being under pressure makes your story somewhat forced an unnatural, which isn't exactly a bad thing depending on what you are going for (for example, a highly symbolic story could benefit from exploiting its somewhat surrealistic nature with unnatural behaviour), but for most stories, it will just look dumb. The rest of the story resulting from that scene may be fascinating, but that doesn't make the scene less bad, and I think you should look for alternative excuses for your story if you want it to be perfect.

People do crumble under stress. We have seen it happen many times. Sometimes security protocols are badly designed, and we have seen it happen many times. Hell, sometimes people are simply careless and make mistakes like the ones you have mentioned, out of lazyness or even arrogance. The main difference here is nobody wants to hear about the dumbass who didn't put on the hazmat suit because he though he was too hard for that puny giant supermurderretrovirus that should have never been engineered in the first place (which again, we did in real life, with insufficient security measures, because we humans are idiots); these people are real, but frustrating, and more often than not, people don't really like being frustrated in fiction by the same kind of idiots who frustrate them on a daily basis.

Curiously, we often say these stupid characters are cheap plot devices to further the story, and that they have been put there by the author as an unrealistic excuse to drive the story forward, but truth is some of the most dramatic arcs in human story have been exactly that, as if we held fictional characters to higher standards of realism than real people! Ironic, isn't it?

Answer 3

Remember that all stories are moral. They deal with moral conflict, both within the individual and between individuals. Questions of what it is most effective to do to address a given problem as the matter of essays, not fiction. If fiction deals with them at all, it is to address the related moral issues.

There have always been moral questions surrounding man's conquest of nature. At what point is one presuming to play God is a common question. And if you are presuming to play God, how do you know what God wants?

Moral questions also have to do with value and with advantage. Supposing that one accepts global warming alarmism at its worst, and suppose you accept that the most radical decarbonization proposals are the only efficacious response, there are still a host of value questions to deal with, such as:

• Why should I in the middle of the continent give up my car and my fresh veggies so that you who chose to build your house on the sand don't have to move?

• It is wise to wreck our economy today to reduce carbon emissions radically when the resulting impoverishment of our economy could shut down the research that could lead to alternative sources of power or efficient means of climate control?

• What is the desirable state anyway: Maintaining the natural environment as if man did not exist? Exploiting the natural environment to ensure prosperity for all. Every man for himself and devil take the hindmost? Wealth for those with the wit to get it; charity for the rest?

A lot of these films have a pretty clear moral thread running through them. Jurassic Park is a "should we play God?" movie. The basic rhetorical trick for arguing any moral position is to infantilize and demonize those with opposing positions. You don't have to win the argument rationally if you can rob the opposition of the moral authority to speak. (See the last US election campaign, on both sides.) Thus these movies have their buffoonish villain and their noble just hero. The attempt is to associate the morality of the argument with the morality of the man; to put my position into the mouths of saints, and the opposition's position into the mouths of buffoons and demons.

Answer 4

There's a truism, origin unknown, to the effect that "bad decisions make good stories." If everyone makes great choices all the time, it doesn't lead to much in the way of drama or suspense.

On the other hand, people want to be able to identify with your characters, and no one voluntarily identifies with egregious stupidity. Preferably, your reader would say "I know that's a terrible decision, but I could completely see myself doing the same thing in that situation." As @Amadeus pointed out, this typically involves establishing plausible, relateable motivations. You also want to ground those motivations in the character you've established. If a character typically makes bad decisions, one more isn't going to strain credibility, although it may well make the reader lose patience with the character for other reasons. Or, if this is the character's one and only bad decision, it should be rooted in an established character flaw, not forced on the character to advance the plot. Making a bad decision in honest pursuit of a noble aim is almost always plausible.

Finally, although it might not be the best possible writing choice, you can be a little more lazy with it if the bad decisions are being made by peripheral characters --thus making them part of the external conditions your main characters need to deal with. Dealing with other people's inexplicable stupidity is pretty relateable to most people.

Answer 5

It's not mandatory, but it is nice when the inciting incident echoes the overall theme of the story.

If ultimately the theme is greed leads to evil, then suggest the accident at the beginning of the story occurs because of some smaller version of that same kind evil, but petty and unrelated. If the theme is nature cannot be contained then the incident might involve a mundane version of trying to control nature, weeding a garden or dealing with insect pests.

If the plot is a Rube Goldberg of inter-related incidents one leading to another, the inciting moment can be a mini-example of things going progressively wrong causing the character to miss a bus.

Answer 6

Let's look closely at Jurassic Park.

The programmer (can't remember his name) was dissatisfied with what money he was getting. (In the movie, I don't believe there was an explanation, but in the book it was a case of changing requirements, which makes him more sympathetic.) He wanted to make more money, and came up with a plan to steal and sell dinosaur embryos. This plan involved disabling the power for a short time, but as a fierce storm came up in the agreed-on time, the programmer went off the road and got killed. The programmer is acting rationally for what he believes and wants.

So, we've got a conflict between two people, which is one of the things stories are about, and something horrible happens as a result of an accident during the conflict. This is good.

(The fact that the cages were unable to hold the carnivorous dinosaurs with the power off was a really bad choice that glossed over, and the use of an automated car system that used technology used indoors in factories was really questionable. The true idiot - as opposed to unfortunate antagonist - was the guy responsible for designing the park.)

Answer 7

I agree with you, in a very literal sense, in terms of the words 'memorable' and 'stupid'. I just watched the ending of a film called, 'Dinner for Schmucks', on television. It had resurfaced in my memory as being something I wanted to rewatch since I saw the title listed in the guide.

The premise of the film is a portrayal of a dinner party where a group of socially successful and intelligent people get together to mock their respective picks of 'most idiotic' guest. The winner is crowned as 'most interesting', which is code for the bullying, corporate-types, as 'biggest idiot'.

Now, this is, albeit, a clever device to showcase silly, humorous performances from the various guests, but my point is that while not an altogether profound film, the plotline was certainly memorable (as my memory was inundated with its unfolding simply by recalling the title).

A more profound example (and perhaps the most obvious in American literature) would be Lenny in 'Of Mice and Men'. Certainly memorable, mostly because of the actions of the mentally-challenged character. If it were not for one action in particular, which is the climax of the storyline, would anyone remember that tale?

I'll concede that the device could be used as a crutch, but that doesn't discount it's worth entirely. And perhaps that's not quite the variation of those words you were intending to address, but that's my two cents, fwiw.