Due to the recent passing of Charles Grodin, I re-visited his performance in the classic buddy movie/comedy Midnight Run (1988). Grodin’s droll, passive-aggressive resistance to his captivity is brilliant and Robert DeNiro plays one of the all-time great straight men. It was a joy to watch again.
In the movie, DeNiro plays ex-cop Jack Walsh making a living as a bounty hunter. He loses his job in Chicago when he refuses to go on the take, losing his wife, daughter, and career when he flees town to escape the gangster who was framing him.
Despite unhappiness with his life in exile, he still maintains a code of honor, carried over from his days as an honest cop. He is hired by a bail bondsman to bring a mob accountant back to LA; he is promised $100,000 if he can deliver the accountant, who escaped police custody, in five days. Throughout the movie, Walsh is dogged and determined to meet his deadline, even when he begins to develop a grudging friendship with his prisoner. He knows that Grodin’s character will be killed soon after delivering him to the authorities, yet he does not waver from his goal.
This is the first version of The Tough Guy Code: Performance Integrity. The protagonist remains focused on the path that they chose or was assigned to them, no matter the obstacles in their way and with disregard for the personal cost to themselves. This characteristic is essential to every James Bond film, all of which follow a similar plotline: 007 gets on the scent of a villainous plot and pursues the clues ruthlessly until he has defeated his antagonist. Supporting characters, including a disturbing number of women, die along the way, but Bond is neither deterred nor bothered much by their loss. Collateral damage is often a characteristic of the fulfillment of a code.
Most personal codes are moral to one degree or another. In Midnight Run, Walsh is offered more money by the mob to turn over his captive, but he refuses. While he continuously expresses his primary motivation – he needs money to get out of the bounty hunter business and open a coffee shop – he is not willing to betray the contract he agreed to, even if it means more money and far less danger and risk. In doing so, he reveals that his stated motivation is not his true reason for proceeding as planned; loyalty to the bail bondsman who hired him – who will be financially ruined if the accountant escapes – weighs more than fulfillment of his personal needs.
Moral Integrity is the other version of The Code. Each code upholds a moral value. For 007, it is maintaining the British Empire. For John Wayne in The Searchers (1956) it is saving a blood relative. In Saving Private Ryan (1998), it is sparing a mother the loss of her last living son. These codes are often values imposed on a character from outside: religious beliefs, community mores, or military honor.
Character’s codes are useful narrative tools for the storyteller. As a limiting device, they provide an additional obstacle that a character may have to surmount. Either they struggle to conform to the code or the code conflicts with other needs and wants in their life. This provides additional levels of conflict, either internal and/or external.
Most codes have a downside. For 007, not everyone benefits from the presence of the Empire, especially residents of the countries subjugated by it. John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in The Searchers is driven, in part, by virulent racism. Saving Private Ryan poses the question: does it make sense to let other men die to save one mother more grief? Don’t those fallen men have mothers too? In a well-constructed story, the character with a code should struggle with questions like this. Even a flat character arc character like James Bond or Superman can benefit by injecting questions about their code into the story, the additional level of complication and tension generates useful conflict.
Doubts about conforming to a code are expressed through Performance Integrity; doubts about the validity of the code itself, are expressed through Moral Integrity. If affirmation of the code is the point of the story, then protagonist either achieves their goal or they validate the code by the result of their triumph. Failure may even validate the code. If deconstruction of the code is the end, then the protagonist either fails and the failure exposes the emptiness of the code or they wind up rejecting the code – as Walsh does at the end of Midnight Run – because they find another value, like friendship, that overrides the values of the code.
In Les Misérables, the policeman Javert ruthlessly pursues Jean Valjean until he reaches the point where he cannot reconcile his professional code with the realization that Valjean is a good man, thus he takes his own life. The character of Javert demonstrates that antagonists or supporting characters may also have codes. The source of conflict between the protagonist and antagonist may be adherence to different codes, as in Heat (1995). Perhaps the conflict may be between a character with a code and one without one. In Star Wars (1978) you have the classic dynamic of an idealistic youth and the mentor teaching him a code and the amoral rogue who only lives from day to day. Han taunts Luke, disparaging the existence of the force, but ultimately comes to appreciate values beyond his own selfish needs.
Codes can be affirmed in a story or deconstructed. Either model can serve the ends of telling a compelling story.