On a message board, I saw a post mentioning that "Empire Magazine" had put together a list of the hundred greatest movie characters of all time. I scanned the list, and it was as laughable as one might expect- Indiana Jones at number one, Heath Ledger's Joker at two, Forrest Gump in the top ten while Travis Bickle languished at 27. Obviously, this is one of those deals that is too ridiculous to take seriously. But it got me to thinking about the metaphysics of such a list- how if you get to really thinking seriously about this inane endeavour, it might drive you crazy.
First of all, we have to throw out the central question- what does "greatest" even mean?- it's way too objective to approach here. It's some kind of a combination of most complex, most memorable, best written and best performed, but we'll leave it at that. No, instead we have to begin with the question of what is a film character. Sure, it seems self-evident. It's a character in a film. But what about characters who did not originate on the screen?
If you had a poll on the greatest fictional character of all time, from any medium, you'd likely find a consensus pointing to Hamlet. In fact, if you made a top ten list, it's likely that Shakespeare would take up a lot of that real estate. Sure, Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, Don Quixote and Captain Ahab all might sneak in, but you'd expect to see Lear and Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth and Rosalind and Falstaff and Iago monopolizing the list. So, wouldn't it follow that since all of these characters have been portrayed in films (although off the top of my head, I can't remember an As You Like It movie), that these same characters should dominate a similar list of film characters? I'd be surprised if they did, because no one thinks of them as film characters. So, does that mean that these lists have an unwritten rule about characters from plays and novels? No, because I'd be surprised if any list was missing James Bond or Don Corleone or Hannibal Lecter, all of whom were in novels before movies. So how does this bit of cognitive dissonance work? I suppose it comes down to how memorable the character was in the book versus the film- when you bring up James Bond, everyone thinks of Sean Connery, but if you mention Jay Gatsby, who thinks of Robert Redford? This is an imperfect answer, but it seems like the best that thirty minutes of distracted meditation can produce.
There's also the question of "real people". Nixon, for example, is an incredibly interesting person, and the Stone picture about him was pretty good. But I'd be surprised if he made such a list. But if, say, T.E. Lawrence or Jake LaMotta made the list, I wouldn't be surprised, and not just because those two examples I chose are among the most memorable performances in the history of the cinema. Again, I think it comes down to how people think about these people. If you mentiond Lawrence, I can imagine what Peter O'Toole looked like in the movie, but I probably couldn't pick the real Lawrence out of a lineup. So even though Muhammad Ali is arguably a greater "real" "character" than LaMotta, and Will Smith was pretty good in the movie, I believe people consider LaMotta to be a film character in a way that they can't with Ali, even if this is a slightly bullshit comparison because of just how goddamned great DeNiro is in Raging Bull. But I think you might see my point.
For the record, my top five list would probably include some combination of:
Charles Foster Kane (Citizen Kane)
Rick Blaine (Casablanca)
Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver)
Ethan Edwards (The Searchers)
and, I don't know, John Huston in Chinatown. I can't remember the name of his character.
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