By JDC Burnhil
What qualifies a protagonist as a protagonist?
The answer may vary depending upon whom we ask, and for what purpose. At one extreme, we find a very simple set of criteria, offered for functional purposes by author Robin D. Laws: “Any figure who the viewer wants to see succeed, both because they empathize with the character and because the character appears early on and in a large number of scenes, qualifies as the protagonist.” These characters “become the focus of our hopes and fears”, making the ups and downs of those characters’ fates impactful to the audience (Laws, ch. 1).
Yet Laws himself acknowledges that others have more rigorous demands for granting “protagonist” status, that “some [sources] argue … that the protagonist is the character responsible for the instigating action that sets the story in motion” (ch. 1) This is by no means the sole or most stringent set of criteria; to give an example from the other extreme, Michael Mackenzie explains why, in one of the two subtypes of giallo film he identifies, he deliberately chooses to not refer to the main characters as protagonists: “… the protagonist is considered to be the primary active force in any dramatic work, propelling the plot forward through their actions … the spectator typically shares the point of view of the protagonist … these conventions do not apply to the main … characters of the F-giallo …” (112-113). Others make the overlapping demand that a protagonist must have agency, and if this is not the case, “Your Story Is About the Wrong Character” (Ashkenazi).
Putting all these together leads to a puzzling picture: a corpus of works that conventional wisdom suggests are written in a “wrong” fashion, about the “wrong characters,” and yet they evoke substantial audience response. After all, it’s unlikely that Mackenzie would have had two dozen F-gialli to write about (228-232), if being centered around a non-“protagonist” had been a barrier to pleasing the audience; the environment from which the giallo emerged saw relentless copying of successes, not of failures.
