The Perfect Protagonist

A story needs a character who wants something badly enough to drive the whole machine, and the obsessive is that need taken to its absolute limit — a person who wants one thing so totally that everything else, including their own well-being, sanity, and life, is sacrificed to it. This makes the obsessive narratively irresistible: there is no wasted motion, no divided attention, no ordinary life to slow things down, just a single vector of desire burning toward its object. Hitchcock's Vertigo follows a man obsessed past sanity with remaking a woman; Scorsese's Taxi Driver rides Travis Bickle's fixation into violence; Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is a man consumed by oil and hatred, and Phantom Thread a man consumed by control. The obsessive supplies the relentless forward drive that the medium craves, the protagonist who cannot be distracted because there is nothing left of them but the wanting.

But notice which obsessions cinema returns to most, and a confession surfaces. So many of the great obsession films are about the obsession to create, to perfect, to make — the artist or maker destroyed by the pursuit of their work. Citizen Kane and his unfinished Xanadu in Citizen Kane; the ballerina dancing herself to death in The Red Shoes and again in Black Swan; the drummer bleeding for perfection in Whiplash; Herzog's conquistador and his impossible dream in Aguirre, the Wrath of God, made by a director equally famous for hauling a steamship over a mountain. These are not random subjects. The single-minded, self-destroying pursuit of an impossible perfection is also a fairly exact description of what it takes to make a great film — the years, the obsessive control, the willingness to sacrifice everything, including the people around you, to the work. When cinema films an obsessive maker, the camera is looking in a mirror.

This is what gives the obsession film its peculiar intensity and its moral ambivalence. The films cannot quite condemn the obsessive, because they are made by obsessives and addressed, often, to an audience that admires the trait — we are taught to call single-minded devotion to a craft "genius" and "dedication," right up until it tips into the madness these films depict, and the films know the line is thin or nonexistent. Whiplash refuses to tell you whether the monstrous teacher was right; There Will Be Blood gives its monster a kind of terrible grandeur; Aguirre is mad and magnificent at once. The obsession film admires what it fears and fears what it admires, because the obsession it is depicting is, at one remove, its own.

So the obsessive is the perfect protagonist not only because pure desire drives a perfect plot, but because the obsessive is cinema's self-portrait as surely as the double is. The medium is itself the product of obsessive vision — the director who will reshoot a scene fifty times, who will risk a fortune and a marriage and a life on getting one image right — and so the films about people consumed by a singular pursuit are the films in which cinema examines the engine of its own creation. We are drawn to the obsessive on screen because we are watching, in heightened and often tragic form, the very faculty that made the thing we are watching. The perfect protagonist is the artist's mirror, burning.

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The line: Citizen Kane → The Red Shoes → Vertigo → Aguirre, the Wrath of God → Taxi Driver → There Will Be Blood → Black Swan → Whiplash

This line crosses:

• The Camera That Loves the Sin — Taxi Driver is obsession filmed from the inside, Scorsese's kinetic camera riding Travis Bickle's fixation; the obsessive as the engine of the moral trap.
• The Children of the Rubble — Herzog's Aguirre is the obsessive maker filmed by an obsessive maker; the conquistador's impossible dream and the director's are the same madness.

Read through: writing on the artist-figure in cinema · the obsessive protagonist from Moby-Dick onward.

A note on the argument: the obsession film's recurring figures are documented record. The framing of the obsessive as cinema's self-portrait — the maker's own single-minded, self-destroying drive reflected on screen — is this essay's reading.