In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. dreamt that his four young children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” King was appealing to people’s understanding of character as both virtuous and “built” by hard work, discipline, and commitment to the greater good. King’s contemporaries knew that definition of character as well as they did the other definition: representations of people in fiction and on stage and screen.
The two meanings of character have coexisted for a long time. But in an increasingly performative world, the noble task of building character feels shunted aside by the relentless pressure to raise one’s profile within the dramatis personae on social platforms. I’ve been thinking for a while about two widely used expressions that underscore this shift.
Having or not having “main character energy” should appear odd to any fiction writer. It implies that some people lack the motivation or talent to be the main character in their own life. Worse, it implies that these low-energy types don’t even warrant their own narrative, that they are “seen” only as wallpaper in someone else’s narrative. Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield longed to be the hero of his own life, but even the poorest in Dickens’s time would expect to be the main character in their own life story, however paltry its range.
Perhaps the main character energy pursued by people on Instagram is just another way of wanting to be a star. But then is the desire to be a star or the star? Being the star is bound to a particular narrative. The clearest manifestation of the-star-ism I can think of is Gilda Radner decked out in a Brownie uniform playing the elementary school lead in “The Judy Miller Show”—a one-girl bedroom cyclone about what Judy Miller is doing RIGHT NOW . . . main character energy for the ages. Performances like this made Radner a star, despite her predominant energy veering toward the self-effacing.
Or perhaps the character issue with the Instagram set is related to having or not having agency. I thought about this when Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey opened at the same time that the Nathan-Lane-led production of Death of a Salesman closed on Broadway. The main characters in both tales certainly have the energy to move the plot forward. But however strong Odysseus remains throughout the epic, he is acted on by the gods, whereas in Arthur Miller’s godless midcentury America, the tragic hero Willy Loman has lived by his own choices. I suppose you could say he is seduced and victimized by the Sirens of capitalism, but he at least had the power to walk away from a system that promised to wring him out, kick him aside, and leave him for dead.
The narrator in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick—the only human to survive the shipwreck—is nearly subsumed by the raw energy of multiple characters who are nevertheless lowly within a galaxy where Ahab and the whale duke it out for star billing. The novel baffled its first readers because the narration starts with Ishamel telling you that he’s telling you a story and later veers into an omniscience that the real-time boy would not have access to. I suppose you could say that Ishmael has so little main character energy that he loses his narrator badge, but then if he’s fighting with anyone it’s Melville himself—the idea that main character energy ultimately belongs to the author.
The novel that seems to troll the equation of main character energy with stardom is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which ends with a Harlem riot during which the narrator runs from the police and falls into an open manhole. The police drop the iron cover back over the hole to trap him underground: “I’m an invisible man and it placed me in a hole—or showed me the hole I was in, if you will—and I reluctantly accepted the fact.” Despite his subprime status, we are in the hole with him at the end, not up there with the police.
The main character in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is undoubtedly the schoolmistress Miss Jean Brodie and her relentless energy. And yet her acolyte Sandy Stranger uses her youth and sexuality to usurp Miss Brodie in her “prime”—but only to immediately retire the love cup association of main character with sexual dominance by becoming a nun.
Ralph Waldo Emerson in the essay “Character” oddly foresaw what was coming, but not in the way he thought: “We shall one day see that the most private is the most public energy, that quality atones for quantity, and grandeur of character acts in the dark, and succors them who never saw it.” Today, this “grandeur of character” is not the King kind cultivated in the dark but the Taylor/Beyoncé kind pollinated by pyrotechnics.
The companion to main character energy is the gaming term “non-player character,” or NPC. The fact that one term emerged from the domain of women and the other from that of men (or boys) is telling. Of the two options, being an NPC seems more of a downer than lacking charismatic energy. In the 2021 movie Free Guy, Ryan Reynolds plays a bank teller who learns that he’s actually an NPC in a video game and is about to be eliminated in the next version of the game. His non-player character expends a lot of energy on behalf of NPCs to ensure that the game continues. But he’s not human. What is it like for human analogues of NPCs?
Look no further than the Republican Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson and posse at the platform, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and posse likewise—rationalizing complete surrender to an irrational stooge. The chronic fear and desperation on the faces of Steve Scalise, Tom Emmer, and Lisa McClain suggest secretions you could smell if you were in the same room. Scalise stares blankly like the meerkat from The Lion King. McClain’s frozen bug-eyes become more nonhuman as her bouffant hairline recedes. I always think of this generational void of character in the context of Thomas Massie, who ironically lost his congressional primary, meaning he is not a Republican candidate but is at least still a congressional player.
Elon Musk’s frequent disparagement of people as NPCs suggests the premium he places on being a player. In Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), a Hollywood studio executive gets away with murdering a screenwriter. The symbolism may seem heavy-handed at a distance of 34 years, but with raw creativity reduced to “content” that can now be produced by AI, the movie anticipated a purge of human writers so systemic that you don’t even have to kill them.
I find it strange how mega-narcissists like Musk see themselves as the top of a hierarchy of “players” and not as the auteur behind an entire system that dictates human behavior. Musk invested in people’s ideas and bought Twitter; he didn’t make anything de novo. However much damage the algorithm has inflicted on society, it is not the work of a single creator but a composite force of decades’ worth of incremental tweaks by unknown technologists (NPCs?) in a system greased by capitalism.
We watch individual Olympians do amazing things every four years but quickly forget them because the athletes who matter are the players connected to professional leagues and colleges and octogenarian coaches and betting markets. Everyone and everything that makes money is immediately replicated. There is a passive acceptance of—even surrender to—replication-as-content. In sports it’s the “draft picks” bought and assembled; in arts and entertainment it’s the algorithmic mix-and-matching of genres, eras, and racial and ethnic profiles.
In a world without auteurs, the ancient Greek movie I’d like to see would focus on Homer himself. Who was he to be able to put generations of disparate oral stories into a single narrative that his rendering made definitive? Who was he to speak for the gods? Was he a believer in myth or a savvy manipulator of the human need for spectacle? He begat not just a literary tradition but a godlike curatorship of existing oral “content.” Remember Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message. Same goes for Plato and Sophocles. I still don’t understand people who speak confidently about the moral character of Sophocles vs. Sophocles as a character penned (or papyrus-ed) by Plato.
One thing you can say about Donald Trump is that he always had the energy to want to be the main character. Before The Apprentice, he was never a main character in New York society: he was a boardwalk novelty, a tricked-out curiosity. He positioned himself as THE real estate “player” of the 1980s but then crashed and burned and became a figure of derisive fun for the gossip columns. Only when he played the main character in a reality show that concocted a fictional version of his life did he “command” anyone’s attention.
You could argue that Trump is an auteur in that he invented the character of “Trump.” He talks about himself in the third person and used to call the media under the phony name John Barron to keep himself in the news. But the character “Trump” doesn’t do or make anything; he has no ideas or policies. All he has is the leftover 1980s marketing hype that he cribbed from solvent real estate developers. A perfect parasite, the character “Trump” needs a host to steal from and/or debase. He undoes the work of others for the sole purpose of keeping himself in the headlines.
What would the America of 1963 make of a president completely without character who is nonetheless the main character in the tragedy of America’s demise? We’re so locked into fretting Trump’s disastrous wars and tariffs that the epic tragedies of unregulated AI and climate change barely make it onto the Sunday morning talk shows. As a malignant narcissist, Trump doesn’t care about the changing climate. The only change he cares about is renaming the process whereby large language models “scrape” human creativity to reassemble and feed back to us so that we’ll never again need to be creative. Ludwig Wittgenstein believed that reality is shaped by the words we use, and the words we have used for this dehumanizing theft are “artificial intelligence.” Trump believes that calling it “superintelligence” will make everything OK.
“All life is an experiment,” Emerson wrote in “Character.” “The more experiments you make the better.” In their pursuit of infinite wealth, America’s tech oligarchs are making the executive decision to turn that experimenting over to machines. As the oligarchs envision it, artificial general intelligence will be the only auteur, sorting societies into characters, players, and filthy rich overlords. How will AGI judge its own performance? I can’t even imagine, though it won’t be by the content of its character. §
