I feel like we’re finally getting broad acknowledgement that origin stories are terribly played out, at this point, after so many years of superhero and action movies that rehash the same origins that were been part of our collective memory already. From my viewpoint, it seems like movie execs are finally catching on to the fact that nobody needs to see Bruce Wayne’s parents getting shot outside the theater again. There’s a deeper point, though: despite what so many seem to think, backstory is not inherently interesting.

I like Pacific Rim a lot, but nobody would mistake its characters for memorable or satisfying. It’s hard to generate any particular emotional connection to them at all. It’s not for lack of trying, though. In fact there are a number of scenes that I think the filmmakers thought of specifically as character-building scenes. The problem is that they keep with the trend of the past decade in building character through establishing backstory rather than through revealing personality in meaningful exchanges with other characters. So we know that Raleigh is scarred by past events and motivated for revenge against the kaiju because we see a scene with his brother getting killed by a kaiju. Likewise what we know about Mako as a character comes from our understanding of a similar tragic backstory. We also know about Stacker Pentecost’s relationship to Mako, and the origins of his paternalistic attitude towards her, from the same flashback. This is, generally, how action movies do character now: tie observed traits back to specific instances, usually in flashback, that explain those traits.

The problem is that there’s nothing particularly interesting about establishing character this way, and it cuts against how we experience human beings in real life. Very few of us are ever privy to the origins of the personality traits of our friends, and of course, in actual humans it’s rare that you can tie specific traits to particular events, anyway. This overdetermined connect-the-dots vision of human personality does not ring true to us and our lived experience, and so it rarely works to make us care about a particular character. The question screenwriters should ask themselves is, why should the audience care about a character’s backstory before they have an emotional connection to the character in the first place? This is a failure, I think, associated with being too worried about storytelling logic. The way we interpret other human beings is not a matter of logic.

So look at the three Indiana Jones movies for an example of character done right. The character of Indy is those movies. There’s fantastic set pieces and complex plots and brilliant settings and great practical effects and compelling villains and convincing romance and just enough comic relief. But none of it works if Indiana Jones isn’t the character that he is. He’s incredibly realized– there are tons of facets to his character, aspects of himself that don’t seem to make sense together like we all have, clear internal conflict, a sense of how he sees himself and moments that reveal the distance between that self-perception and reality– and all delivered in a remarkably understated, low-key series of performances from Harrison Ford. It’s essential to understand that this character does not emerge from knowing his origins. It emerges from the flashes of traits that we can’t yet ascribe to any particular motivation, from little aspects of personality that are disconnected from the plot but that deepen the complexity of the character within the plot. Marlon Brando was a master of this, working in little bits of weirdness and eccentricities that would never make it into an elevator pitch for the movie. He understood that what made a character seem like someone who could walk off the screen and into real life was exactly that such a character isn’t defined entirely by what matters to the immediate narrative.

To me, the quintessential Indy moment is in Temple of Doom, the weakest of the three Indy movies but still a fantastic film. After Indy, Willie Scott, and Short Round have escaped from a plane without a pilot into the foothills of India, they come upon a destitute village. The fact that the villagers have had their children stolen is what kicks off the actual plot. But there is a wonderful moment where we see Indy in his real complexity before that. The three of them are offered food by the villagers, an act of real sacrifice for people who are so poor. Willie, being a spoiled brat, turns it down despite her hunger and despite the sacrifice they’re making. Ford shows great delicacy in displaying controlled anger, controlled for the sake of showing respect to his hosts.

“This is more food than these people eat in a month. Eat it,” he tells Willie. She again refuses.  Again, with quiet anger: “You’re insulting them, and embarrassing me. Eat it.”

It’s maybe my favorite moment from the three movies. And it demonstrates an essential part of Indy’s character: his cosmopolitanism, his worldliness. Indy is an two-fisted, brawling adventurer, but he’s also someone who’s deeply informed about and respectful towards other cultures. In the time period of the films, it was perfectly common for people to believe in the natural superiority of Western  civilization, and to embrace the classic “white man’s burden” vision of paternalistic imperialism. But Indy, who is an academic as much as he is an adventurer, has the scholar’s deep interest in how other people live and the traveler’s understanding of the ubiquity of hospitality across cultures. When I watch Indy’s restrained scolding of Willie, I see a character who has seen the kindness of strangers, and been forced to rely on it, again and again. In other words, it’s a moment that broadens him and his experiences. It speaks to a whole range of experiences that makes him seem more real.

If Temple of Doom were made today, I feel like the screenwriters would find it necessary to “explain” this aspect of Indy’s personality, and explain it by tying it into some flashback. So maybe Indy and his dad were traveling, right, to do some of Henry’s research, and they got caught up in a storm. So they had to stay at some poor village, in the home of a poor-but-proud family that offers them their hospitality. And Henry, being a respectful, educated guy, he shows lots of gratitude and respect back. But Indy, being a young brat, rejects their hospitality, rudely complaining about the food and the bed and the way the house smells, which naturally cheeses off Henry. So Henry sends Indy off to bed alone. So Indy sneaks out in anger, only as he looks around the village at night, he sees the depths of their poverty and their suffering– maybe a boy, his very age, desperate for the food that he himself rejected!– and Learns The Important Lesson. And maybe when he went back and cried to Henry about it, Henry would say some wise thing that perfectly encapsulated the trait the filmmakers wanted to show in Indy.

That would suck.

And it would suck in large measure because it would shrink the character rather than grow him. It would reduce complexity and diversity of experience to a simplistic bit of personality math. But it would satisfy the dictates of a lot of bad writing workshops and useless screenwriting how-to books, and allow the screenwriters to tic the box in their planner where it says “ESTABLISH CHARACTER MOTIVATION.” That’s one of the many terrible choices made in the creation of the Star Wars prequels, the flatly wrong assumption that what fans of the original movies wanted was to learn the origins of every character, where every miscellaneous bit of lore from the first films “came from.” I don’t want to know who built C-3PO! And the fact that it was Darth Vader as a kid makes the vast universe of Star Wars smaller and less interesting. The easiest way to kill my interest in a character is to explain everything about them. Boba Fett was cool because he was mysterious, because we didn’t know where he came from. Now we know that Boba Fett was an annoying-ass little dude who was cloned from his father. Now he’s not cool.

Now the Indiana Jones movies are interesting in this light because they actually do include an almost archetypal example of this kind of backstory building, in the long prologue to the final film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Many of the previously-unexplained aspects of the Indy mythology get explained in the River Phoenix portion: the hat, the whip, the fear of snakes, the scar. I’m legitimately conflicted about that sequence and I do feel like it is somewhat reductive and on-the-nose. But ultimately I think it works and pays off, precisely because we already care about Indy and his more obvious attributes. We’ve had two movies to learn about his whip-cracking and his fear of snakes and to associate his iconic hat with him. These days, I feel like the River Phoenix sequence would come first, before we have any reason to care, before we want to know where he first used a whip, where he got that scar.

Besides: that sequence reveals character in the old fashioned ways, too. When Indy rushes in to tell Henry about the theft of the Cross of Coronado, and Henry rebuffs him and tells him to count to ten in Greek, it tells us so much about Henry and about Indy. We don’t wonder how Henry got to be so obsessed with his work. We just see that as a wonderfully real, complex moment between a father and son. It does more to reveal character than all of John Carter‘s desperate attempts to make its titular character meaningful through its reference to past events. Or take the perfect line from young Indy at the very beginning: “Everybody’s lost but me.” That line, right there– that’s character. That’s a reason to care.