Protagonists you don't like

I recently watched The Social Network, and if you read my glowing love letter to Scott Pilgrim vs. The World you can appreciate the weight of meaning when I say that The Social Network was the best movie of the year. I know it didn't win the "big" Oscars, but I'm a writer, so the only Oscars that really matter to me are the writing ones, and in that category The Social Network had no serious competition. The dialogue and pacing and storytelling in that movie crackle with more life and energy and creativity than any movie in recent memory, which is pretty amazing for a movie about socially inept people looking at computer screens. The first scene sold me, practically the first line of dialogue; it had an organic ebb and flow to the language that we use all the time in real life (though not with that level of rapid-fire cleverness), and yet most books and movies are never able to catch. In an entertainment industry where most characters speak because they have important plot elements to reveal, these characters speak because they have things to say. It was refreshing and brilliant and depressingly rare in writing.

And yet–and yet–no matter how much I loved the characters and their story and the things they said to each other, I never actually liked them. They are not likable people. Peel back the excellent writing and this is a movie about mean, dishonest people being jerks to each other, often for no real reason other than "we're jerks, and this is what we do." I'm not making a comment on the real people involved, just their characters as portrayed in the film. This is a movie without any good guys, and yet somehow I was pulled in and absorbed and emotionally involved. Interesting.

Meanwhile, on cheap cable TV, the movie Jumper came on one afternoon, and because I was bored and because I have an ongoing quest to like Hayden Christenson in a movie, I watched it. It was better than I'd been told, with some very interesting ideas and a fantastic performance from the perpetually undervalued Jamie Bell; Hayden Christenson was, as always, stiff and incomprehensible. Jumper, for those unfamiliar, was about a boy who can teleport, and the mysterious organization that tries to hunt and kill him. And here's the thing: just like the Social Network, there are no likable characters, and no good guys anywhere to be found. The protagonist is a thief and a leech without the slightest pang of conscience, and the mysterious organization is completely justified in hunting him down, and yet they're kind of viciously overzealous about it (and needlessly homicidal in at least one scene) so you don't really like them either. When the movie switches gears in the second half, focusing full force on its "let's stop this mysterious organization from killing our kind" finale, you just don't care because you've never become invested in them. You don't actually want them to win, because the first half of the movie drove home so solidly the fact that these guys are all bad. Hayden Christenson bears a lot of the blame, definitely; if the kid who played his younger self in the opening scenes had stuck around, we would have liked the character a lot more. But this goes far beyond that–even Jamie Bell, who as I said was excellent, still wasn't likable.

So: two movies with unlikable protagonists, and in one I get sucked in and one I don't. In one movie I can't get enough of the little twerps–I don't like them, but I love them–and in the other I just keep watching my clock and wishing it were better than it was. What's the difference? This is of special interest to me for obvious reasons: I write about a sociopathic proto-killer, a classic example of "unlikable but we like him anyway," and figuring out how people create characters like that, both successfully and unsuccessfully, is part of my job. I've come up with several theories:

1) The characters in The Social Network are never depicted as heroic, yet the characters in Jumper are obviously portrayed in a heroic role–despite never actually being or feeling heroic. In other words, I like the characters in The Social Network more because they feel like they fit their own story. They're not trying to manipulate me, through the contrivance of the plot structure, to cheer for a "hero beats the bad guys" ending that doesn't make any sense in the story.

2) The characters in The Social Network are hard workers. Whether you like them socially or not, you can't help but admire their work ethic–everything they get, they earn. They are good at what they do and they dream big, always trying to make something bigger or better than it was before. The characters in Jumper, on the other hand, work for nothing: their teleporting powers are innate and accidental, their wealth is stolen, and the most ambition they can summon is to spend their days roaming the world, stealing surfboards and eating fast food. Every single person who watched that movie could think of a better use for teleportation than the characters did. If they could at least embrace their role as supercrooks–if they had any lasting impact on the world in any way–we could get behind it. Instead we see the misuse (and even worse, the non-use) of unearned power. The characters were spoiled and boring.

3) This goes along with the last point, but the characters in The Social Network are competent. The third scene of the movie shows the protagonist hack a series of photo databases and construct a complicated website from scratch in the time it takes a group of older, richer, more successful students to get drunk at a party. The comparison is explicit: this guy is really good at what he does. The characters in Jumper, on the other hand, are competent enough with their actual jumping, but not really good at anything else: when the bad guys show up the protagonist is completely outclassed and barely escapes with his life; when he decides to take the fight to them he proves inept at evading them, tracking them, fighting them, and pretty much everything else he tries to do. Your characters have to be good at something, even something stupid, or the audience just won't care about them.

4) The quality of the dialogue in The Social Network is, as I said, stellar. You can sit and listen to them snap at each other for hours because they're just so frakking entertaining as they do it. When Jesse Eisenberg tells a lawyer that no, he's not worthy of his attention, yes he's being a jerk but you still want to stand up and cheer because he was being a jerk so well. He gives that lawyer a verbal slap across the face that every one of us has wished we could give to a similar pompous windbag at some point in our lives. This is the same as the "he's funny" principle I talk about with John Cleaver: if my sociopath can make you laugh, you'll like him no matter how dark and creepy he gets. The characters in Jumper don't have anything like that–they're not clever, funny, charming, or anything else that would help get you on their side. The closest it gets is when Hayden Christenson gets into a bar fight and ends up jumping the other guy into a bank vault and flashing a truly awesome evil smile right as he jumps back out. That's the kind of "look how awesome I am" attitude that could really win over an audience, but it's the only one in the movie, and it still doesn't work because it's surrounded by so many weird things: a bar fight with a drunk guy is not the best way to show yourself in a good light; Christenson himself started the fight; the other guy was just drunk, not evil (ie, he didn't "deserve" it); the moment was dark, but the movie was not prepared to go any further down a dark path with Christenson's character and thus the moment was squandered; and perhaps worst of all, the girl in the scene immediately distracts us from the moment by demonstrating a superhuman lack of believable motivations.

Any ideas of your own? Any other examples you'd like to share? What makes an unlikable character likable, memorable, and more?