Let Us Talk Technique: Two Dimensional Characters Who Are Not
Spoiler warning, in this post I am going to talk about Orphan Black, not in any great details, but there are some reveals from both seasons that are going to be given away. You are warned.
In Orphan Black the main character Sarah Manning is one of a number of clones. Which has led to the greatest marketing campaign ever, “She has been duped”, I giggle every time I see it.
In the show, of the five or so clones that are recurring characters there is one who started out as what I thought was going to be pure comic relief the uptight, suburban house mom Alison Hendrix.
Where main clone Sarah is a gutter-punk who adjusts to finding out she is a clone by stealing one of her clones identities and lashing out at everyone involved in the unfolding conspiracy around how the clones came to exist. Clone number two, Cosima, is a scientist and actually seems excited by the whole turn of events. Clones three and four, Helena and Rachel, are both sociopaths with Rachel appearing to be higher functioning of the two.
Alison the most normal of the clones, appearing to be a stereotypical type-A, overachieving, professional mother. Not as in she works, but someone who should work and instead has turned one-upping Martha Stewart into a way of life. She seemed like a two-dimensional foil so the others could bounce jokes off of. But, over the course of the first season as the conspiracy is revealed and her perfect little world starts to collapse. We come to understand that same tendencies the others have that lead to violence and worse are there in Alison, too. She constructed a perfect little world to hide it away. The same demons of self-doubt and neurosis that Sarah or the two psycho-clones wear on their sleeves are hiding just under the perfect little homemaker facade.
Confronted with the idea that someone in her life is a monitor for the company that did the cloning, that someone has been watching her for her entire life and helping perform illicit medical experiments on her in the middle of the night, Alison cracks up. Alison thinks her friend is the monitor and kills her because of it. Well, technically Alison lets her die in a horrible garbage disposal accident. Though, it really is murder as Alison has more than enough time to stop, and consciously does not.
This leads Alison down a path that leads to a horrible community play, booze, pills, and finally, rehab. All of which is played a bit for laughs, mostly in the community play, but Alison is the only one of the clones who really is in danger of losing something. This gives her a grounding and a motivation that the other clones don’t have. Sarah is worried about losing her child, but she was not really a mother previously and becoming a mother is as much her story as it is keeping her daughter safe.
Alison’s husband, who was her monitor, has just been given the same sort of treatment. He has gone from being a henpecked, chubby, beta-male dad to a shadowy pawn and finally to be revealed to be what might be the only honestly good character in the whole show. And then, he accidentally shoots someone’s head off. Again mixing the pathos with the comedy, it is the best accidental shooting in a car since Pulp Fiction.
In the end, the technique I am impressed with is this idea of showing how these characters are not the two-dimensional characters that they are introduced as and how it can add such depth to a story. In showing that these one-note, foils are fully fledged characters with motivations and showing them change over the course of the story, a.k.a. giving them arcs, it can both surprise and strengthen the story being told, by adding depth in places where it might not have otherwise had it.
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