The worst decade to be the main character in a movie, according to science
There are too many things to worry about in the real world to waste time worrying about fictional characters, but as a society, we sure seem to do a lot of it. In fact, it’s been preoccupying the human race from the beginning. These days, it’s perfectly reasonable to admit that, at the age of 12, you spent several weeks crying off and on about the fate of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Titanic. At least, I hope it’s perfectly reasonable to admit that, because I just did.
Most of us build very strong emotional attachments to figments of other people’s imaginations, which is why a certain storytelling pattern has evolved over the years. Hollywood has been one of the most stalwart perpetuators of this trend, at least early on. Although there are many tropes of the classical story arc, the cornerstone is this: the main character is still alive at the end.
They can nearly drown in a vat of maggot-infested human corpses (Dario Argento’s Phenomenon, in case you were wondering) or ruthlessly shove the man of their dreams off a very wide piece of floating wood that could definitely accommodate the two of them (Titanic again), but they will almost certainly come out of it relatively unscathed by the time the credits roll. This has been a pretty sacrosanct bit of cinematic storytelling for a while now, but there have been a few high-profile exceptions.
Before we continue, let me state the obvious: I am about to give away some major spoilers for several major motion pictures, and you may wish to avert your gaze. You have been warned. Psycho is, of course, the most famous of these exceptions. Not only did Hitchcock use all the narrative conventions to make you think that Janet Leigh’s character was the protagonist, but he gave her one of the most terrifying send-offs in cinema history. The most heartrending of all is the 1957 drama Old Yeller, in which a loyal family dog contracts rabies and is put down. It’s a sadistic bit of melodrama that no one who sees the movie can ever really recover from.
More recent movies like The Green Mile, Million Dollar Baby, and The Departed have all done their own variations on this plot twist. There are plenty of superhero movies that could be mentioned here as well, but in the world of seemingly infinite financial returns on such franchises, no character is ever truly dead until the audience stops showing up for the sequels.
Interestingly enough, there was a period in cinematic history where it was in vogue to kill off the protagonists. You might think that it would be the present. As filmmakers embrace postmodernism and throw out all the old rules, there is more scope than ever for them to pull the rug out from under their audiences, but according to one researcher, another decade trounces the current one.
Data journalist Daniel Parris crunched the numbers (by training a large language model to mine over 24,000 movie synopses on Wikipedia) to determine which period saw the most movie protagonists kick the bucket, and the results weren’t even close. In the 1970s, filmmakers were offing their main characters left and right. Bonnie and Clyde, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, All That Jazz, and Badlands all saw their protagonists dead by the end. No one was safe.
In retrospect, there isn’t much mystery as to why the ‘70s were such a brutal time for main characters. The ‘New Hollywood’ movement was throwing out all the conventional wisdom of ‘Old Hollywood’. The Vietnam War was pitting the young generation against the establishment. The Civil Rights movement was laying bare centuries of brutal, systematic racism. And political assassinations of key leaders were sending shockwaves around the world. Disillusionment, pessimism, and recklessness were everywhere, even in the movies.
