How Not to Write - The Bronson Effect

 The Expendables

 Everyone knows what a ‘nameless expendable’ is. For anyone who isn’t everyone, here’s the basic concept. The nameless expendables are the Mexican sex traffickers trying to kill Rambo at his ranch in Arizona. They’re the silat master dope fiends living in that apartment block in The Raid. They’re the aliens flying all over New York in Avengers Assemble.

They’re not a new concept. They’re a tradition dating back to the neckless thugs of detective noir films. That guy trailing Humphrey Bogart? Nameless expendable if I ever saw one.

They also don’t have to be villains. Any movie with a high body count could potentially have expendables at both ends of the morality spectrum (again, The Raid is a prime example of this).

Nameless expendables are endemic to action, martial arts and metahuman movies. They epitomise one of the writer’s most serious problems. ‘I don’t have enough pages to flesh out every character but somebody still needs to die’. Unless the story you’re writing is a tight drama featuring five, maybe six, characters, not everyone’s getting their fair share of the limelight. It’s particularly hard in stories about war, because war.

The Austin Powers series of movies played on the trope by cutting to grieving family members of the expendables after Austin (sometimes accidentally) murdered them. It was a gentle touch on the shoulder and an ‘I noticed you’ for every Russian guard with bad aim who toppled off a gantry during the 1980’s.

The Bronson Effect

 In the final level of Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine stumble across dead members of their operational team in an Umbrella facility. Chris cries out, with all the depth of emotion you’d expect from a game like Umbrella Chronicles, “No! Bronson!” And so, the Bronson Effect was born.

Presumably a backlash to the nameless expendable trope, the Bronson Effect refers to a writer’s attempt to give a minor character extra depth before (or after) killing them off. Unfortunately, the attempt has no conviction and ends up being straight lame. Most often, it involves just giving the character a name. Congratulations, you’ve been upgraded from ‘nameless expendable’ to ‘expendable’.

The Resident Evil franchise was awful for this from about Resident Evil 5 onwards. Writers kept tacking names onto BSAA operatives and then killing them five whole seconds later. In fact, having only one name quickly became the franchise’s kiss of death. Chris Redfield seemed to be contractually obliged to yell out “No! Insert Name Here!” at least thrice every game.

But it isn’t the only culprit. I’ve read a number of books featuring expendables with only a name to their name and my opinion is always the same. Develop or divest. Either make that person interesting or make way for someone who is.

We Need to Talk about Bronson

If you can avoid using nameless expendables in your story, do so. It’s always better to have a small, tightly-written cast whose lives and deaths have weighted impact. But where a mass murder must occur, it’s generally better not to hamfist a back story for minor characters, especially ones the protagonist or the reader are supposed to feel sympathy for. Giving Bronson a name didn’t make me upset that he was dead. It just made me name a bad-writing phenomenon after him. Probably not the legacy he deserved.

If you don’t have time, inspiration or inclination to flesh out a minor character, don’t. If you don’t care about them, chances are the reader won’t either. In the same breath, maybe if you flesh out that minor character, you’ll find a hook you didn’t know you had. Maybe they’re useful in the way their death affects another character.

If you want to make a death impactful, there are better ways to do it than tacking a name onto the body lying in the corridor. How does it make the protagonist feel? Angry? Hopeless? Guilty? Conflicted? How often do they think about it after the fact? Is it ever mentioned again?

Nameless Tools

Don’t be in too much of a rush to name your nameless expendables. If a squad of soldiers is running across a mine field, we don’t feel more strongly for the guy who steps on the mine because his C.O. shouts: “No! Gary!” That said, what is it telling us that he’s on first-name basis with his commanding officer? There’s an exception to every rule.

Ultimately, the nameless expendable is a writer’s tool. They’re for us to show how dangerous a situation is, how powerful a villain is, how strong or resourceful or furious a hero is. When you name the expendable, it becomes a different tool. Both are valid, but they serve different purposes.

Let me put it this way. Do you want the focus of your story to be on your protagonist or that guy who just died? It should be an easy choice to make.