STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 5

First off, I'm currently not grabbed by my current term "narrative emphasis" as it applies to sorting out which character(s) in a narrative incarnate the centric will. For that matter, the earlier term "centricity" isn't all that illustrative, either. So I'm introducing yet another new term-- the first of three, in this essay alone!-- namely "charisma," which, as it happens, is sometimes defined as the means by which leaders are designated, and sometimes in terms of a mysterious attractive charm. Merriam Webster provides two definitions:

: a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure (such as a political leader)

: a special magnetic charm or appeal

It's easy enough to sort out charisma when a narrative, be it a stand-alone type (Philip Wylie's GLADIATOR) or a serial type (the Siegel-Shuster SUPERMAN), is indubitably focused on one character.

But as I began discussing in SUBS AND COES PT. 1, the fact that a serial narrative bears one name in the title, as with BATMAN, that doesn't mean that Batman has all the centric charisma in that narrative. Sometimes Robin is in there with him, sometimes he's not; the situation can vary from story to story or from long arc to long arc.

The term "stature" doesn't really speak to the process by which the author decides, consciously or subconsciously, what focal presences he will emphasize. Rather, the term applies best to the finished work, to deciding what characters have acquired greater stature as the result of their functions in the story. Further, charisma applies exclusively to the focal presence alone. Within a given narrative, other characters may have different levels of stature according to the narrative's needs. In one story, such as THE KILLING JOKE, the Joker has almost as much stature as Batman, while in another, such as the BATMAN TV-episode "Joker's Favor," an everyman like Charlie Collins may acquire more stature than Joker-- though without Collins exceeding Batman.

At the same time, there are, as I discussed more fully in STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 2,  there are a lot of "hero's sidekicks" out there who may perform many if not all of the same narrative functions as Robin-- Junior Tracy, Doctor Watson, et al-- and none of them come close to sharing centric charisma. In PART 3 I provided my analysis as to how the teleseries ANGEL started off as a "one-centric-character" narrative like that of its source-series BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, but, perhaps for exigent reasons, it morphed into a narrative with an extended ensemble.

Now that I've put forth "charisma" as a term that better approximates the creator's organization of narrative elements, my other two terms apply to the process of whether the charisma is bestowed upon just one focal presence, or is distributed to more than one. The first would be "non-distributive," given that the charisma is not divided up, as with the Superman mythos, while the second, as seen in the Batman mythos, must be judged as "distributive" on the whole, since the Bat-mythos has a history of allotting narrative charisma to more than one presence in a sustained manner.

[After I formulated these two terms, I duly looked them up on the 'Net, and found that the pairing had been used for the (mostly unrelated) disciplines of algebra and the stock market. I think it unlikely that I'd ever heard of these usages, though.]

"Charisma" in many cases would apply more to "leadership" than to "charm." I've noted here that in many narratives, the focal presence may not be the most interesting presence in the room:

...I reject Springer's thesis that a work's "real hero" must be its most dramatically interesting person. A given author may merely wish to use the "centric will" of a given protagonist as an organizing factor, and nothing more, and there have certainly been other good stories that starred protagonists even duller than either Ivanhoe or the Spirit. 

I'll possibly discuss this dynamic further in a forthcoming follow-up to my earlier INVESTMENT VS FASCINATION essay.  However, in conclusion I should mention one situation in which a narrative can "star" more than one character and still not be distributive. Some narratives star what I call a "swarm" of interrelated characters who are not distinguishable in any important way. Each film in the ALIENS franchise concerns a different alien, or group of aliens, but despite superficial differences, they all share the same basic identity, and so each of them has but one focal presence. Occasionally this "swarm type" of focal presence includes entities with different appearances, as one can see in the Cartagrans of WAXWORK II. However, they all share the same identity, and so WAXWORK II is also a non-distributive type.