Script: Shopgirl-ing for an Arc

WARNING: this is a new film, if you haven’t seen it, this may contain spoilers…

Shopgirl does some interesting things with character arcs, especially when it comes to Jeremy, a secondary character who is absent for most of the film. When we meet him, Jeremy is a weirdo slacker with no social skills. His treatment of Mirabelle, while so appalling it’s funny, is not malicious; he’s just totally clueless and self-centred. He really does like Mirabelle, he simply hasn’t got a clue what to do with her.

By the end of the film, Jeremy must be a sensitive, completely realized person who is capable of giving the lonely Mirabelle the human contact and love she so desperately needs. This is the biggest arc any character in the film goes through. But we don’t have time to spend watching him evolve slowly because we’re busy with Mirabelle’s affair with the charismatic Ray Porter. So how to pull this off?

The solution is to create a ridiculously obvious device that has ‘insert character arc here’ stamped all over it in such big letters that, well… we buy it. It’s so machinated it works.

Jeremy goes on tour with a band for what he thinks will be rock and parties. But the lead singer has a habit of listening to self help tapes on the tour bus sound system, which Jeremy, a good impressionable toadie, is completely plugged in to. They start with yoga tapes in LA, and by the time they hit Nebraska, it’s relationship tapes for hopeless guys like Jeremy.

And guess what? It works. When Jeremy comes back, he is a sensitive guy, who really, honestly wants to treat Mirabelle how she deserves to be treated. Jeremy is such a hollow guy to begin with that we believe an utterly hollow solution could make him someone, er, solid. Of course, key to pulling this off is the fact that, despite Jeremy’s flaws, we also believe he loves Mirabelle. When she asks him at the end what made him change, he says “you did. You said, ‘just do it.’ So I did it.”

And maybe that’s a lesson for screenwriters, too. Maybe we don’t need to spend sleepless nights wrestling with dramatizing the minutiae of a character’s arc. Maybe we need to just throw characters into a situation that implies growth, and leave it at that.