Assignment 1- Getting Into Character: Character Archetype

The character Tonya in the film I, Tonya (2017) is based on a real person, elite figure skater Tonya Harding who orchestrated an attack on a skating rival. The media created an unfavourable picture of Harding and in some ways constructed her as the antagonist (shadow) in the events that transpired. This makes her a complicated character to place into a single archetype. In some ways, the film recategorized Tonya into a multifaceted paradigm. The two archetypes that most explicitly serve to construct Tonya’s character in the film are the hero and shadow.

The hero as Christopher Vogler (2007) explains, functions as the audience’s access into the story. Tonya is clearly the audience’s pathway into the film. She also is the character who changes the most over the course of the film and ends up sacrificing her skating career. The themes of growth and sacrifice are dramatic functions that an audience will often attach to a hero (Vogler 2007). Another key indicator that Tonya is the hero is that she deals with death, both in the sense of losing her skating career and her fall from being an American sporting icon. A more intricate analysis of Tonya as the hero might classify her into the anti-hero archetype. She goes against the grain of society as Vogler (2007) claims “Tragic Heroes, central figures of a story who may not be likable or admirable, who’s actions we may even deplore.” Tonya has many flaws some which she never overcomes, these flaws in some ways allow the audience to connect with her on a human level by sympathising with her pitfalls.

Along Tonya’s hero’s journey there are other archetypal qualities that emerge. For example, deep trauma from her childhood such as her father stepping out on the family or her mother physically and emotionally abusing her, emerge in Tonya’s character in the form of the shadow archetype. The shadow becomes Tonya’s mask, a front which she shields her positive qualities behind. This protective layer is exposed to the audience in a moment of private vulnerability, seen in the famous mirror scene below, a moment which was never observed in the media’s construction of the real Harding. There is a shapeshifter dynamism that surrounds Tonya. She Frequently doubts and questions the people around her and this creates conflict in her character arc and on her hero’s journey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY2NLPKpK1Q

Vogler (2007) also proposes that film genres can have their own set of archetypes or re-occurring archetypes. Typically, biopics such as I, Tonya (2017), function to change an audience’s perception of an event or person and therefore their character’s archetype can evolve over the course of the film. We might come into the viewing of this film with a negative preconceived idea about Harding, stemming from intertextual influence. At the end of the film we identify with Tonya because she has been set up to psychologically function as someone on a quest for identity, which is what a hero is also designed to do (Vogler 2007). Therefore, it could be said that these types of films behave as threshold guardians, who test the hero and the audience so they’ll change in some way.

 


References:

I, Tonya 2017, DVD, 30WEST, New York, NY, USA, directed by Craig Gillespie.

Vogler, C 2007, The Writer’s Journey, Michael Wiese Productions, San Fracsico, USA.

 

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