Characters in movies without backstories

Cafe Society
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**Warning: Spoilers

**
I was watching Fargo for the millionth time last night and I was struck by the realization that Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) is really the most dynamic and interesting character in the whole movie, and yet has no back story.

It’s never explained how he got involved in the kidnapping scheme. He’s a complete outsider to the Minnesota culture, clearly from out-of-state. His accent is whiny and nasal and suggests some part of New York. And unlike his partner Gaer Grimsrud, the Scandinavian ex-convict, who is silent and dull-witted, Carl even appears to be somewhat cultured. He takes a hooker to a Jose Feliciano concert at an upscale banquet-hall, and he makes a Clockwork Orange reference during his conversation with her (“a bit of the old in and out,” which is clearly lost on his “date”) indicating at least some appreciation for the musical and cinematic arts. He’s also pretty well-dressed, and he comes across more as some kind of extremely mean-spirited hipster than as a cold-blooded criminal.

And is he a murderer from the get-go, or is he gradually pushed towards the edge due to the mounting frustration of the failed kidnapping scheme? Towards the beginning, when Gaer shoots that cop in the head after Carl tries to bribe him, he appears utterly stunned by the killing - yet later on in the movie he shoots Wade Gustafson when he refuses to drop the briefcase, and then kills the parking lot attendant (maybe to ensure that there were no witnesses?) It seems like his character actually changes over the course of the movie, starting as simply a small-time con man accompanying the more dangerous and criminal Grimsrud, and then after the cop’s death, as the stakes get higher, becoming a totally cold-blooded psychopath.

There are quite a number of people on the Fargo message board at IMDB who actually seem to be rooting for Carl Showalter and viewing him as a sympathetic character. While I think that’s taking it a bit too far (the guy is a murderous weasel!) it is obviously a testament to how well-written and well-acted a character he is. People truly seem to sympathize with his desperation throughout the course of the movie.

This is just one example of a really interesting character who has absolutely no backstory. What are some others?

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I had thought that it would be fascinating to have a backstory for Willy Wonka, but when Tim Burton did this, I didn’t like it at all. I guess maybe I still want a backstory, just not the one Tim Burton provided.

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I think it’s usually better NOT to have a backstory, for the record, especially if the character seems like he or she needs one.

Some things are better left a mystery!

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I’m with you, Argent Towers, I would love to see a prequel to Fargo. Every time I watch this movie, usually a couple times a year, I wonder why the William H Macy character, Jerry Lundegaard, needed the money so badly. Specifically, the money for the parking lot. Was he going to rip off his FIL after he got the money? Did he need it to pay for the cars he had stolen? Why did he need it so badly?

SSG Schwartz

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Another extremely interesting question.

Two things were going on. One: Jerry was running some sort of scam with the GMAC (the General Motors financial division) where he was sending them financing documents with fake serial numbers over the fax machine and collecting money for it somehow. I don’t know the details but that’s what can be gleaned from the phone conversation he has with “Reily Diefenbach” in his office. The latter, who he speaks with, has clearly discovered that Jerry is trying to rip them off, so Jerry’s plan is foiled.

Two: He has this plan to develop 40 acres in some place called Wieseta and build a giant parking lot. (Jesus, that would be one huge lot!) He’s trying to get a loan from his crotchety, gruff father-in-law Wade, (played by Harve Presnell in a wonderfully exaggerated and yet still-believable role) but through some miscommunication, Wade and his accountant Stan Grossman (I guess even in WASP-land Minnesota the accountants are still Jewish :p) think that he’s not asking them for a loan but for a finder’s fee so they could build the lot themselves. So his plan here fails also.

The question is, what does he really plan to do with the money? There are two possible scenarios, as I see it. One, he could sincerely want to build the lot, and his extortion of the money from the GMAC was a very inept and stupid way of trying to raise capital for it in addition to a possible loan from Wade. The other scenario is that he never intended to build a lot in the first place, that he had been ripping off the GMAC with the fake serial numbers simply to enrich himself, that he was also planning to just rip Wade off if he had gotten the loan for the parking lot, and then just flee the country with all the money. This might seem outlandish but Lundegaard seems like a genuine sociopath. He does not seem to display much true affection for his son, and he certainly doesn’t seem to care about his wife (I think we can assume that he married her because of her family’s money.) I think it’s entirely possible that Jerry was planning to extort a shitload of money from both GM and from Wade, and then just hightail it to Mexico and leave his family behind.

(side note - man, financial misdeeds might seem on the boring end of the plot spectrum, but they can make damn interesting plots. I recently read A Man In Full and it’s amazing how Tom Wolfe can turn the boring, dry world of corporate banking and real estate into an epic battle between desperate, bloodthirsty jackals.)

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William Goldman does a very good job of explaining how he screwed up The Ghost and The Darkness partially by giving one character a back story.

I haven’t seen Unforgiven in years, but I remember it being used by a few lecturers as how an casting the right actor (In this case Eastwood) can add back story to a character without spelling it out in dialogue.

Before those gorram prequels screwed everything up, you could argue that Bobba Fett was a perfect example of people latching onto a character who was for the most part a blank slate.

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Nurse Rachet in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

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I would have loved to find out more about Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel) in Pulp Fiction, even if just to see why he was at a formal-dress party in a tuxedo during normal breakfast hours.

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I thought he was another of those pathetic losers who’s always looking for the next big score that will bring him untold riches but constantly gets scammed. He tells himself he’s not a bad guy but if he can just borrow this money from his FIL, he’ll hit it big and pay everyone back. That was the genius of the movie, I didn’t feel like you needed backstory 'cause I know guys just like that.

Same for Steve Buscemi’s character. He’s a small time hustler that gets sucked into something far shadier than he ever intended. He’s absolute crap at reading other people which is why he keeps dropping references to things he hinks make him look “smart” when they’re really just pretentious.

Both characters are flip sides of the same coin, believing if they can just do this next thing, they can make everything “all right” but not realizing how deluded they really are.

There are others movies where’d I’d like to see backstory (although, of course, I can’t think of one right this moment) but I thought Fargo really sketched out its characters so well, you already know it.

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Nitpick: Wayzata. It’s a suburb of Minneapolis. I have no idea why a parking lot there would be profitable, unless I’ve forgotten an explanation from the movie.

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Backstories help you understand a character, and hence develop simpathy for him/her. You’re not supposed to give a rats ass about Nurse Rachet or Carl Showalter’s problems.

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Han Solo.

Other than the fact that he’s in hot water with Jabba, we never learn anything about his past.

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Kuwabatake Sanjuro in Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo.” Even his name has no backstory. He apparently makes it up on the spot.

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I took Winston Wolf to be an old-guard gangster, maybe one of the old-school Jewish mobsters from way back in the day, who Marcellus maintained ties with because he knew how to “get things done.” He’s sort of a remnant of a bygone era, I guess, who is still playing the game because he’s good at it.

I think the formal party he was at was a poker game. Poker games, of course, frequently last well into the wee hours and can carry over into the next day, especially if the stakes are high. If it wasn’t poker, it was probably some other type of game.

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Backstories are okay when they’re necessary in service of the plot, but having a backstory just for the sake of completing the character (from the viewer’s point of view) often takes away more than it offers.

For instance, in Casablanca, Rick’s backstory is implied (“I’ve often speculated on why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with the senator’s wife? I’d like to think that you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.”) but never filled out, even to the other characters (“We have a complete dossier on you: Richard Blaine, American, age 37. Cannot return to his country. The reason is a little vague.”) The only character who really “knows” Rick is Ilsa, who of course has him twisted around her finger like a discarded paperclip. Despite the manifest flaws in that movie, keeping his backstory a mystery allows Rick to come across as the only real character in the film.

Similarly, in the superior The Third Man, a lack of definition about Holly Martins makes his passion for trying to uncover the mystery behind Harry Lime’s death that much more curious. It’s clear that Lime considers Martins, along with his girlfriend Anna, partners of convenience in business and love, respectively, and yet Martins just won’t give up on digging to the bottom, even though he should know that the answer won’t rehabilitate the clearly villainous Lime’s reputation.

In Ronin, you’re only given enough fragments of “Sam”'s backstory (and that of the other team members) to know that they’re not what they seem. While a common complaint that the contents of the case are never revealed to the viewer (which is sort of a joke within a joke, a McGuffin’s McGuffin), the lack of backstory on both the team members and their objectives makes the film something of a puzzle. Ditto for other Mamet films (House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, Spartan); you learn about the backstory not by exposition but by piecing together what the characters say and what they appear to know.

However, in le Carré’s Karla Trilogy (the first and last of which, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People were made into excellent BBC miniseries) the slow uncovering of the backstory of the two rival spymasters, the Circus’ George Smiley and Moscow Centre’s “Karla”, is the plot of the story. Essentially all of the action, such as it is, is backstory, and the plot of the story exists as the puzzle of unraveling the clues. The middle book, The Honorable Schoolboy (never filmed, unfortunately, due to the cost of production in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia) has a lot more action, but primarily exists as a backstory to the fall of the old Circus.

On the other hand, Lucas’ Star Wars prequels are all backstory, and completely unnecessary fill-in-the-blanks full of unbelievable coincidences and unlikely events, compounded by an overly convoluted plot which added nothing useful to the mythos and made many formerly interesting and mystical things banal and prosaic. Sometimes is best just to leave well enough alone, George.

Stranger

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Well, we do know that he made the Kessel Run in under 12 Parsecs! :smiley:

Actually, in general, I like how the SW movies drop references to things we don’t ever see, such as Han Solo mentioning “that bounty hunter on Ord Mandrell” in ESB and Obi-Wan’s and Anakin’s debate over exactly how many times A has saved OB’s hide and whether one particular occasion counts or not.

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Several characters from Firefly are fun in that they don’t have backstories, but in different ways.

The Reverened Book’s lack of a backstory tends to emphasize the mystery of the guy. He obviously knows stuff that preachers wouldn’t be expected to be familiar with (Jayne in particular tends to notice this), and in one episode, we see that flashing his ID to Alliance authorities gets him priority medical care when before they were unwilling to give the Serenity crew the time of day.

Similarly, The Operative’s lack of a backstory in Serenity means we don’t know who he is, where he came from, or even who exactly he works for (presumably he wasn’t hired as an act of Parliament as a whole).

On the other hand, Jayne Cobb gets almost no backstory at all, save that he has turned on his partners in crime at least twice (once on Canton after robbing the mudder baron, and again later on when Mal hired him away from his previous boss during a standoff). The backstory we get for Jayne serves more to emphasize what we already know about him, that he’s an untrustworthy mercenary, and most of his actual characterization comes from stuff happening to him in the present.

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The The Day of the Jackal there is virtually no back story. Going off the book (which I just finished again—IIRC the movie is a faithful copy) the only things the reader is told are:
[ol]
[li]He was a hired killer[/li][li]His physical description[/li][li]He is English[/li][li]He killed a man in Egypt[/li][li]He had spent time working in an office[/li][li]He had some past dealings with a mercenary[/li][/ol] And that was it.

In the ending plot twist (a device which Forsyth has used to great effect) we learn that a man who’s flat the English police had been staking out was not the Jackal—leading to the quote at the end

Despite this distinct lack of back story you find yourself developing incredible sympathy for the title character (whoever he was). A masterful job of storytelling.

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Remember when the only thing we knew for sure about Vader was that someone had stopped him once before?

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We know his mother knits hats for him.

Stranger