Your timing is impeccable. Thanks for the reminders!

I’ll take your premise one step further. What makes the Protagonist metamorphosis arc so powerful in film is the exact reason all of those infomercials do well.

While we all want change, and believe we can change, we don’t want to put in the effort. The infomercials all temp us with short cuts.

What’s the next best thing to a short cut? Watching someone else go through the change you would like to make as your proxy – especially if it’s a really difficult change.

Using your three examples:

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s change took place after being swept up in a tornado and being deposited in a strange land with what appears to be no way to leave. We can take the journey with her, but walk out of the theater unscathed. A shortcut to “no place like home.”

In Citizen Kane, Kane is miserable as an adult despite his power and fortune. We leave the theater with the thought that even though we don’t have all that money, we don’t have his problems. A short cut to contentment.

In Tootsie, every man in the theater got a quick lesson in how to efficiently capture the attention of the women in their lives. The women got a quick lesson in how an “ideal” man should act. Quick lessons are short cuts. And the guys didn’t even have to put on a skirt.

So, the harder your protag works to effect his change, especially after he realizes he must change, the more absorbing his story.

In the cases where the protag doesn’t change, it’s only because everyone around him travels the arc of change. A societal short cut.

Yeesh Jeff, you kind of lost your credibility of this post citing Obama and Pirates of The Caribbean.

The most appealing thing about this paradigm to me is the idea that this isn't just any old change - say, a stingy person suddenly going through some hell and realizing they'd be happier if they were more generous. Instead, it's about getting in touch with an original, more authentic self and freeing it.

There's a cost to living in society - especially our ultra-modern, over-communicated, over-committed societies - and that cost is a disconnection from our selves as we jump through hoops trying to live up to the expectations and demands put on us, either by ourselves at some earlier point or by others. This is one of the reasons I like the Will Turner example. Sure, he'd make a decent blacksmith, but he'd make an incredible pirate - only he's convinced himself that there is some uber value to living the more respectable, buttoned-down life of a smith. So he's sacrificed his real self early on, but this change reverses that sacrifice.

Thank you, Scott!

Interesting post, but your concept of charcter change seems to presuppose a change in a positive direction(?), as a more well-integrated, more authentic individual. What about films like The Godfather and Raging Bull (and several others), where the protagonist's change has a negative effect on himself and others, and where he ands up farther away from his psychological/moral need?

@Ero: Yes, there are all sorts of metamorphosis arcs including negative (if you note in the movies I included in the OP, "Citizen Kane" is an example).

"What about films ... where the protagonist's change has a negative effect on himself and others, and where he ends up farther away from his psychological/moral need?"

That's a fairly concise definition of tragedy. Even so, it still conforms IMO to Disunity > Deconstruction > Reconstruction > Unity.

Look at Michael Corleone, for example. At the end, he is "unified" with his role as patriarch of a crime family, correcting the "outsider" status he felt at the beginning. But at grave moral, emotional and spiritual cost.

What Michael experienced as Disunity probably would have saved his soul had he stayed the outsider. But he was moved by stronger, more primal forces.

@daveed: Michael Corleone is an excellent example and in a way similar to the dynamic - believe it or not - to Pirates of the Caribbean in that Michael has Mafia blood running through his veins (like Will has pirate blood). Michael's Unity state, as you articulated, is to 'claim' as his own his familial lineage / bloodline.