In my capacity as a sessional screenwriting lecturer, I often read student screenplays that feature an inactive protagonist, who moves through the story passively observing the more interesting, fraught travails of the other characters.
I believe what is happening here is that the writer has inadvertently ‘written the audience’ (or themselves) into the story – they are forgetting to clear a space for the audience to enter into the midst of the drama.
Reading a screenplay where this has occurred is akin to settling down in a cinema to watch a movie, only to have someone very tall sit in the seat directly in front of you, thus obscuring your view of the screen – you have to look around them, your frustration mounting, to see what’s going on.
This tendency, when writing a cinematic story, is just one of many ways in which screenwriters can fail to consider the audience, or even to display contempt for the audience. Another example is the tendency to overload a story with exposition – to spell out every detail, rather than leaving gaps over which the audience must make an imaginative leap.
