Movie Story Type: Mistaken Identity

In Hollywood movie circles, there are genres like Horror or Science Fiction, cross genres like Action-Thriller or Drama-Comedy, and sub-genres like Romantic Comedy or Mystery Thriller.

Then there are story types, a shorthand way to describe a specific narrative conceit that is almost always tied directly to the movie’s central concept. They can be found in any genre, cross genre, or sub-genre.

In July for this series, we will explore 31 of these movie story types, one each day. Knowledge about and awareness of these story types can be a boost not only to your understanding of film history and movie trends, but also as fodder for brainstorming new story concepts. Mix and match them. Invert them. Gender bend them. Genre bend them. Geo bend them.

Movie story types exist for a reason: Because they work. Hopefully this series will help you make them work for you.

Today: Mistaken Identity.

The basic premise is that a primary character is identified wrongly as someone else. Some great examples:

* The Wrong Man (1956): Hitchcock film where the Protagonist (played by Henry Fonda) is wrongly identified as a criminal.

* Life of Brian (1979): A Monty Python movie in which the main character (Brian) spends his whole life being mistaken as the Messiah.

* Being There (1979): The Protagonist Chauncey (Peter Sellers) is a dimwitted soul whose utterances are mistaken for profundity.

* Galaxy Quest (1999): Members of a canceled sci-fi show are mistakenly identified by aliens as being actual space warriors.

But possibly the most famous mistaken identity movie is another Hitchcock movie North by Northwest (1959).

Here is the IMDB one-line description of the plot:

A hapless New York advertising executive is mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies, and is pursued across the country while he looks for a way to survive.

Hitchcock and screenwriter Ernest Lehman don’t waste any time playing the mistaken identity card, whereby Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is perceived by two suspicious onlookers to be someone named George Kaplan. How? By taking a phone from a passing bellboy who has been calling out Kaplan’s name.

In this interview with Lehman, looking back at the movie, he concluded he didn’t do a good job with the setup:

Once I decided Cary Grant had been mistaken for a nonexistent man called George Kaplan, my first problem was how to do this. It’s a very hairy thing in this film. I once showed the film to a class at Dartmouth College. After we ran it, I asked them how many understood how he had been mistaken for George Kaplan, and only half of the students said they understood. It wasn’t really done properly in the film, either by me or Hitch. It was a little too subtle.

It raises a critical point: In the case of mistaken identity, as screenwriter we absolutely have to sell that conceit or else a reader is unlikely to go along for the ride.

Another classic example of mistaken identity is the 1998 movie The Big Lebowski:

“Dude” Lebowski, mistaken for a millionaire Lebowski, seeks restitution for his ruined rug and enlists his bowling buddies to help get it.

In both North by Northwest and The Big Lebowski, the entire plot spins out based on the central conceit of the Protagonist being misidentified as someone else.

A mistaken identity element is not only a great way to propel a story forward, it also helps to create a bond between the reader and the Protagonist: We know they’re innocent even if other characters in the movie do not.

What other mistaken identity movies can you think of?

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