Dear Creative LazyWeb-sters:

[mlerules]

A friend is currently mulling over an idea for a film with a completely off-stage main villain. This is what he says and I'm spreading the question further w/this post:

I can think of a couple of examples of this that, in my opinion, don't work well (Blair Witch Project springs to mind, as does one horrific Enterprise episode), but I'm at a loss for examples of people who've done it well. As a general rule, if the audience doesn't ultimately confront the villain (vicariously through the main characters, of course) they're left feeling unsatisfied with the narrative. But for every rule there's an exception, so I'm sure they must be out there.

So, can anyone out there come up with an example (preferably on screen, but also in prose, and preferably in science fiction, comedy, or drama and not horror) where the non-appearance of the antagonist is either not a hinderance or actually an enhancement to the storytelling?

Comments

[jimkeller.livejournal.com]

See, I fall into the latter category, but perhaps that's just because I feel so strongly that we must confront the villain somehow for the story to wrap up...

[argentla.livejournal.com]

Well, it's necessary to confront the forces of opposition, which may or may not be the villain, depending on the nature of the central conflict.

For example, I recently watched the late-seventies British espionage drama The Sandbaggers, which is a Cold War procedural about a beleaguered special operations director of the British SIS. The nominal villains of most episodes are the Russians or their satellite states, but in a dramatic sense, the forces of antagonism are Burnside's own superiors and colleagues, against whom he schemes to get things done and who sometimes scheme against him. The villains of any given storyline may not appear at all, and the action plot is often resolved off screen (in part because the show's total budget is about what the average American production spent on catering). The central dramatic impetus of the episode, however, is "Will Burnside unravel the complex scheme?" or "Will Burnside and his men realize they've been set up as patsies?" The force of the dramatic conflict is not in the action plot, so we often don't need to see the KGB officers or the Bulgarian policemen or what have you.

By the same token, in a romance or romantic comedy, the force of opposition is the love interest, not the bad guy. This played out in over-the-top fashion in Moonlighting, where the villain would often stumble in out of exasperation that no one was chasing him, or the mystery would go unresolved -- the central conflict was the will-they-or-won't-they tension between David and Maddie Hayes.

[jimkeller.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I'm going to have to see if I can track down The Sandbaggers. What others do to creatively work around budget constrictions is always enlightening.

[argentla.livejournal.com]

It's all on DVD from Netflix; I just finished it.

The interesting thing is that they do some location scenes, although most of the action takes place in the permanent sets of the SIS offices. Their biggest economy measure, so far as I could see, was to be quite ruthless about the number of characters, especially in the first series. They had seven or eight regular, recurring characters, and a very, very small number of guest stars per episode. (In the second episode, for instance, the plot concerns the rescue of a group of Norwegian technicians whose plane has crashed in Soviet territory; we actually see the technicians, but they have no dialogue, so they're represented by extras.) There a number of times when it's quite surprising. For example, Neil Burnside, the main character, was previously married, and his wife divorced him for being an insufferable workaholic (and generally insufferable). His ex-father-in-law, who's the Home Office permanent undersecretary, is a recurring character, and his ex-mother-in-law appears two or three times, but his ex-wife never appears in any form.

In a way, it adds to the realism of the atmosphere, because you get a clear sense of the way these life-or-death decisions are often made by a few people in great isolation, where they don't necessarily know what's happening on the ground. (The creator was an ex-SIS officer, and the reason the show ended in 1980 was that he mysteriously disappeared.)