His Hellboy and Yours

I was saying the other day that "self-inserts", as they've come to be called, used to be cool in fiction. It was a variation of "write what you know"; write the protagonist as someone with formative experiences and/or opinions similar to your own. I revisited an example of how that philosophy once held sway over the weekend, 2004's Hellboy.

The first film adaptation of Mike Mignola's great Dark Horse comic, it was directed by Guillermo del Toro. Mignola and Del Toro held discussions about the creative direction of the film adaptation and Mignola felt that, as director, Del Toro ought to be free to express his own creative vision. The biggest change to the story Del Toro made was to introduce a romantic relationship between Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and Liz (Selma Blair). It was a kind of Beauty and the Beast story that he would explore again in his Oscar winning film The Shape of Water. It's not hard to see how this might be a personal story for Del Toro. At the time he made Hellboy, he was married to Lorenza Newton, an attractive young woman beside Del Toro, who grew up a nerd without good looks.

So the film has a lot of angst that's not present in the comic. Hellboy is self-conscious about his looks in comparison to the human, attractive Liz. The satisfying emotional arc of the story is in how both characters come to terms with their respective monstrous qualities and see how they're united by them. Some would say Shape of Water is the more mature film because being monstrous doesn't come with really useful superpowers. Hellboy may be a monster, but he's also really cool and admired as a mysterious and strange hero. But, hey, Del Toro's pretty cool and admired among filmmakers, so maybe that's as valid an aspect of the character.

The modern dislike of "self-insert" characters seems, like the scorn for people believing themselves to be "the main character of their own story," to come from a weakening grasp of what fiction can be. It's almost as though modern armchair critics are jealous of anything gratifying that writers take from their own work.

Which is not to say I think it invariably works. I certainly don't commend Vincent Gallo's unabashedly narcissistic films. But as with many other aspects of fiction, I would say writing about oneself, or using oneself as fodder for character building, will vary in quality depending on the honesty and courage of the individual writer.

Hellboy is available on Netflix.