Comfort Characters and the Considered Life: Donald Scripps from "The History Boys"
This relatively obscure yet likeable and deep personality remains a favourite fictional character
"There is one journalist, though on a better class of paper, a career he's always threatening to abandon in order, as he puts it, really to write." - Mrs. Lintott
What can your comfort character teach you?
As an amateur follower and observer of pop culture, I have my share of comfort characters. Everyone has a comfort character(s) of some kind, whether from a film, game, television show, or novel. Every medium imaginable can provide a fictional individual or group of characters that makes you feel happy when sad, find clarity when confused, or even help you reflect on your own identity and struggles through identification with them. Comfort characters can be wholesome or traumatized, archetypal or complex, clear-eyed or conflicted. Take your pick; there are no hard rules.
My own comfort characters can be both recognisable and obscure. Some of them have remained with me for many years, others irrupt into a particular phase of my life, only to recede reasonably quickly. I find that the melancholic journalistic archetypes of Chow Mo-wan from In the Mood for Love and 2046, Marcello Rubini in La Dolce Vita, or Marcello Rubini in Roman Holiday tap into our reflections on desire by showing the characters’ struggle with the dichotomies of restraint and abandon. Their Apollonian and Dionysian clashes (and sometimes union of both impulses) have made them icons of cinema.
However, one character I particularly relate to, and who almost no one knows about, is Donald Scripps. Scripps is a working-class student from a British play called The History Boys by Alan Bennett, which was adapted into a movie in 2006. Scripps is played by a very young Jamie Parker in the film adaptation, who might be more recognisable in his minor role in Netflix’s much more recent The Crown. I watched the 2006 film sometime during my years of studying theology and Buddhist Studies over thirteen years ago, a period in which I was losing interest in academia and beginning to focus on the prospect of a career in journalism.
It was not Scripps’ future that I immediately empathised with. In the epilogue, the students’ teacher, Mrs. Lintott, would narrate the various careers of the students, with Scripps’ having been that of a reporter. Rather, his role as a kind of wry but nonjudgmental observer among the group of boys that form the emotional and narrative core of the play and movie made him the understated core of the group, even though the emotional heart perhaps lies with other characters.
In Scripps’ values and personality, you can find qualities that put him on a direct line from being the most “pious” of his group to his future as a journalist. He is the only one who is outwardly and proudly Christian, complete with a scene where he prays in a church while the group is visiting Oxford. In the play and movie’s timeline of the present, we know he loves God – “The things I do for Jesus,” he jokes to his classmates, as he prepares to block their teacher Mr. Hector from a blatant attempt to molest him – and he prays in church before they go to interviews for scholarships at Oxford.
Scripps is the one who everyone shares their secrets with, without, importantly, him reciprocating. This is his power as well as his burden. We know little about his personal joys and sorrows, while the preoccupations of the protagonists, such as Posner’s homosexuality and Dakin’s restlessness, are understandably more prominent. We do know that Scripps is a very good piano player, an instrument that is interwoven through some of the film’s narrative cores, like Posner’s confession of love to Dakin or Mr. Hector’s memorial at school (their teacher dies in a traffic accident).
He is, among the diverse cast of boys still finding themselves, both confident yet restrained, an exemplar of non-toxic but non-apologetic masculinity. He quips about the travails of his friends’ love lives, but also is ultimately sympathetic to them, giving them the space to deliberate, reflect, and act.
He does more listening than most of his classmates. There is a hint of his Christian righteousness and compassion when he takes issue with Mr. Irwin’s detached analysis of the Holocaust as a subject to be taught, angrily chastising his teacher, “Not good point, sir. True! To you the Holocaust is just another topic on which we may or may not get a question.” It is an unusual outburst since Scripps is almost never angry. It betrays what he takes seriously about life and the world. For his age, Scripps is remarkably emotionally balanced, authentic and spontaneous but also thoughtful and considered when the mood demands it.
It is remarkable that this character has remained so impressive and rich down the years, remaining as well-written and sympathetic as I remember when I first watched The History Boys over a decade ago. He ties everything he has to his Christianity, and that is another thing I admire about him, that he is clear-sighted about his faith, and the way it shapes him. His personality, though fictional, is a credit to Christians. That is why, perhaps, he is ultimately a comfort character to me, because he truly embodies that which he claims to be, while managing to be witty about it and not the least self-satisfied or smug. If only the faithful of all traditions, in real life, could be something similar.