Cabbages

In Robert Altman’s perfect film, The Long Goodbye, there’s a security guard who does impressions. When the lead characters drive in and out of the gated community he works at, he stops them for a moment to ask if they want to see his new impression.

He’s not a huge presence in the film, he appears in maybe three or four brief scenes, but he does a lot of heavy lifting for the world building of the film.

Part of this is what he tells the audience about other people. In seeing how they respond to them, we learn a bit about who they are, both in a practical and internalised sense. This person lives here and is friendly with the staff. This person visits a lot and has the patience and time to indulge other’s foibles even while he’s in the middle of trying to solve a murder case. This person is a stranger and is mean.

All of this is valuable for clarifying the central conflicts of the story, but to me there is something more important in what is happening with this small, supporting character. The moment you first see him, when he approaches a guy’s car and says hey, I’ve been working on a new impression, we get a picture of what his life is like.

We picture long days spent alone in his little guard’s hut with nothing to amuse him but himself. We picture him picking a new celebrity to mimic, thinking about what makes them distinctive. Rolling words around in his mouth to find the shape of them. Maybe he has a little tape recorder so he can play his attempts back to himself, trying to decide if this impression is ready to be shown to other people.

This tiny detail makes him feel like a person. Like a fully realised human being who has things going on that aren’t related to the main events of the film. And his feeling like a full person with his own life, makes the film feel peopled. It makes the story feel like it’s taking place in a wider context – in a world, not in a vacuum.

Often when something just isn’t hitting for me it’s because this kind of thing is missing. Because every single character is only there to talk about things that relate directly to the plot. That there aren’t any people around who aren’t concered in some way with the main events of the film. It makes things feel inert and unmoored.

In my house we call this cabbages.

This is a bit of an if you know you know (and also, welcome nerds) reference, but in essentials it really just means that any character who appears, no matter how tangetially, should have something they love. Something that matters to them, something that drives them, something that is completely unrelated to anything else going on.

It doesn’t have to be anything massive, we’re not looking for fully fleshed out. Just something small, as long as it feels real. A tiny aside that gives you a glimpse into what that unimportant person’s life is like. A comment that makes you feel that they have a life.

All characters, no matter how small, need their cabbages.