Sometimes you may have a story that starts with one person as the protagonists and you will want to hand off the baton and make another character the lead for the rest of the story. This is a tricky maneuver and I want to examine two films, one that pulled it off to great success, Psycho (1960), and the other failed at this Godzilla (2014.) Naturally spoilers for both movies follow in this posting.
The critical element in this hand-off is the motivation of the succeeding protagonist. Their motivation and the their ultimate goal must be derived from and dependent upon the actions of the establishing protagonist.
Psycho introduced Marion Crane as our protagonist. The film begins like a noir, with a character of questionable morals sliding into a life of crime that spins out of control when Marion steals a large sum of money from employer and heads out on the lamb. When she meets Norman Bates and ends up murdered in her motel room the genre shifts under our feet and we find ourselves in a horror film. The main character baton is passed to Marion’s sister Lila as she tried to discover what happened to her sister, eventually drawing her to the motel and its deadly mystery. Without Marion’s impulsive theft and flight leading to her murder Lila has no motivation that can drive a plot. With the audience aware of what happened to Marion, but not why or by who, there remains in addition to great danger, cryptic puzzles for Lila to overcome in her quest to understand her sister fate.
Godzilla (2014) introduces Joe Brody as the protagonist. An engineer at a Japanese nuclear power plant, Joe’s wife is killed by a mysterious forces that destroys the facility and leaves Joe with guilt over his responsibility for his wife’s demise. Fifteen years later Joe’s son Ford comes to get his father out of jail for trespassing into the quarantined power plant. Joe and Ford are therefore present when the Kaiju mature and escape. Joe is killed in the disaster and Ford spends the rest of the film trying to get home to his own family while repeatedly crossing paths with the massive monsters. Ford’s motivation, get home, has nothing to do with Joe’s actions or his own deep troubles. If Ford had been in japan on any assignment his motivation to get back to his wife and son would remain unchanged. The hand off from Joe to Ford fails and as such the film lack an emotional through line that it should have possessed. This could have been fixed in the writing processed. If Ford had felt guilty about never believing his father’s theories before his death and became obsessed with taking vengeance on the monsters, violating orders, ignoring his responsibilities to his own wife and child in order to chase the Kaiju across the pacific then the story would have had more weight and emotional impact.
To me it is clear that you can do this sort of hand off but the authors and creators must think hard about the motivations that drive both protagonists and fusing them so that one cannot exist without the other.
