Scenario and psychology

Screenwriting often relies on the psychological depth of characters to evoke emotion and foster audience identification. But what if this approach, while relevant, isn’t the only path? By exploring other perspectives, such as the psychology of the viewer or non-Western worldviews, we can enrich storytelling and reimagine cinema as a holistic experience, where the film becomes a full-fledged interlocutor. Discover why and how character psychology is just one tool among many to engage the audience.

An Overemphasis on Character Psychology

In screenwriting, a great deal of attention is paid to the narrative. Within this narrative, even greater emphasis is placed on the psychology of the characters to ensure coherence, identification, and emotional resonance with the audience. This is undoubtedly part of screenwriting: the psychology of characters, their development, their internal conflicts, as we often say.

However, the goal here is not to question the importance of this dimension in crafting an academic narrative, but rather to step back from what might be an overemphasis on psychological depth in screenwriting. In my opinion, this approach isn’t necessarily the richest path for inventing new forms of storytelling beyond psychological frameworks.

Psychology is a science that influences our representations of the world. To approach a screenplay primarily through the lens of character psychology is to view the world through a specific filter: that of 20^th-century psychological science. This filter is relevant, and I’m not questioning its value, but it’s just one way of seeing the world among many. Within the field of psychology itself, there are numerous schools of thought, debates, conflicts, and “factions,” as they say, offering different systems to explain human actions and emotions.

Thus, when we heavily psychologize screenwriting, we should perhaps start by identifying which psychological school we align with. We should educate ourselves about the context of our worldview. Character psychology is often perceived as something objective, when in fact it stems from a particular cultural perspective on actions and motivations. For example, psychoanalysis, which explains psychology through certain lenses, was a major innovation. It proposed a new way of understanding the world, notably by introducing the concept of the unconscious as the driver of human actions.

Before psychoanalysis, human behavior was explained through concepts like possession, demons, or other frameworks. Psychoanalysis changed that, and this worldview, which is also mine, isn’t wrong. It’s simply one perspective, that of a bourgeois Westerner. But there are many other ways to explain psychology, or even to move beyond psychological frameworks altogether and interpret the world differently.

In therapeutic practices, for instance, approaches like EMDR treat post-traumatic stress through eye movements, linking psychology to the body more directly without relying on psychoanalytic tools. For me, all of this is complementary. That’s why I don’t want to reject the psychologization of fictional film scripts, but simply point out that it’s not the only way to build character arcs—or, more importantly, the audience’s journey.

The Audience is the Main Character of the Film

“The audience is the main character of the film”: this idea, proposed by Alfred Hitchcock, is deeply rooted in psychoanalysis. But it opens up a different perspective compared to the psychology of the film’s characters. In Hitchcock’s view, the actors portraying the characters are merely vessels, projections of the audience’s own emotions. They are instruments among other elements of the film, enabling the audience to experience their own emotional journey.

If we consider characters not as beings to whom we must apply coherent psychological reasoning, but as instruments that evoke emotions in the audience, we stop psychologizing the characters and instead psychologize the audience itself. For example, the audience might encounter characters whose actions are incoherent, defying any explicable psychological structure, yet still evoke strong emotions.

Hitchcock’s classic example of suspense illustrates this well: the audience knows there’s a bomb in the room, while the characters do not. Whatever emotions the characters feel, they won’t align with what the audience experiences. Take a love story between two characters, meticulously constructed psychologically. If a bomb is about to explode, the audience won’t identify with their romance but with the idea that they’re about to die, rendering their love story futile and less important than the life-threatening danger they’re unaware of.

Similarly, an audience can experience strong emotions without any human characters. For instance, in a film showing Earth from space, with a meteor hurtling toward it: we don’t need characters to feel tension. We identify with Earth itself, which has no psychology. Thus, the audience’s emotions can be entirely dissociated from the psychology of the characters.

The Psychology of the Audience

To conclude, if there is psychology in cinema, it’s that of the audience in their relationship with the film. This psychology interests us because it concerns how the audience interacts with the work. As screenwriters, our role is to nurture this relationship so that the film enriches the audience. But this relationship isn’t limited to narrative: it also includes aesthetic, rhythmic, and physical experiences.

It’s important to recognize that the psychological perspective is just one representation of the world among many. We could easily conceive of a screenplay with a shamanic worldview, where characters encounter their spirit animals in trance-like states. In this case, the explanations for human actions would be radically different.

In short, our psychological, Western, and bourgeois worldview isn’t the only possible one. Stepping back from this perspective can enrich the films we write and make them more universal. The focus shouldn’t be solely on the characters, but on the relationship between the audience and the film, envisioned as a body, an interlocutor. This approach opens up far broader narrative and emotional possibilities.