Our women...

I've been thinking over something that I mentioned earlier about the shortsighted nature of religious filmmaking or storytelling. I mentioned that too often things were inevitably reduced down to the same basic question: What is or isn't true? There seems to be a need out there by these filmmakers to prove their faith through their art. The thing is, these films don't all start out with bad ideas... In fact, most of the initial premises are interesting enough. But then it's like these films can't help themselves from slipping into fast and testimony mode.

I'm not going to tell you that I don't sometimes share that impulse, but I will tell you that I've fought hard to beat it down because I really believe that it leads to bland characters and bad story. And below, I've gone into why I think that happens.

Over the past week or two, I've been having a discussion with my wife about how LDS film has treated women in general. Initially, this might come out wrong, so please bear with me while I try to write around this first statement... But I can't remember a single female character in any of the LDS films I've seen that's really stood out as interesting, worse I can't think of any instance where a female character was nearly as interesting as the male characters.

If I say 'character arc', do we all understand what I'm talking about? Essentially, as a writer, when I create a character I try to picture who this person is at the beginning, and I try to picture them down the road how I want them to end up. The arc of the character is the path through all of the obstacles and decision making that takes the character from A to B. Along that path, I try to design the reality of the story so that my characters will learn the lessons they need to learn, have the opportunity to choose right from wrong, etc. so that they can arrive at the end of the story. There are infinite branching paths for these characters, infinite choices, infinite desires.

And yet, all of these women seem to be reduced down to: If she's single, she wants a husband; if she's married, she wants children. That seems to be it. I have spent my life surrounded by interesting women, married the most interesting of the group. They have always been able to outwit both me and my guy friends. And they're always incredibly complex. While marriage and children are priorities (especially for the LDS ones) that is not the sum of who they are as people. So why should that be the end-all sum of any female character?

The initial premise of our story revolves around a young man being called to serve as the bishop of his ward. We knew that he'd have to be married, have a kid or two. And before we really sat down to lay out what our young bishop was like, we had a long discussion about who exactly his wife was and how we wanted the calling to affect her desires, goals and aspirations.

In fact, each of our core couples was created wife first, and then matching her with a complimentary spouse after we'd worked out her character. Because simply, I'm tired of being disappointed by women characters who always seem to be afterthought additions to stories that only need women as background players. Is this a shared concern? Comment below.