A super-objective is something that drives a person on his or her life's trajectory. At the risk of psychologizing, I might suggest - just as an example - that our most recent president, George W. Bush, was and is guided by an intense desire to please his father. Toppling Saddam was an objective. Calling out the armed forces was an action. Conflict was with the situation. But toppling Saddam in the first place could well have been driven by a desire to balance the books with Bush Sr's old nemesis. Super-objective helps explain the seeming contradictions in a character's behavior. Aristotle taught us that contradictions do not in fact exist. If you find yourself looking at one of them, check your premises. Human behavior is a messy affair. We are the only animal that can know a thing is bad for us, and yet still do it. We, unlike animals lower on the food chain, are perfectly capable of operating against our own self-interest.
How could Macbeth have been convinced to commit murder? He was not a bad fellow. He was not a killer. On one level, his behavior was irrational. But on another, the potential for murder was there all along. Find his super-objective, and you will find that potential for murder.
Another real-life example: How could Bill Clinton have risked his entire presidency for a cheap sexual tryst? It doesn't make sense, does it? But if you were cast to portray the ex-president, it would be necessary for you to justify what he did. The answer, I propose, is in finding his super-objective. For some reason, the presidency itself did not make him feel powerful enough. He needed the attention of a White House intern. Such behavior is Shakespearean.
We will go see twenty or thirty productions of "Hamlet" in a lifetime. But surely we know the plot after the first production or two. Why keep on attending? The answer - again - is in super-objective. Every actor who portrays Hamlet is going to deal with the same words and will have to discover the same actions and objectives. The big question is "why"? What we in the audience want to know is what this actor thinks make Hamlet tick - in other words, what is his super-objective - and what that actor thinks makes Hamlet tick. The majesty in the role as Shakespeare conceived and wrote him is that he will tolerate different interpretations.
Again, we act to survive. If you position a man at the edge of a cliff and slowly drive a car toward him, he is going to do absolutely anything he can in order to live, even if he must kill the driver of the car. He's going to do that even if he is a priest. We are hard wired by nature to act to survive. Medea killed her children for evolutionary motives. Her husband betrayed her. Kill a man, and you kill him once; kill his children, and you kill him again and again and again. Super-objective is the key for the actress who would portray Medea.
One really interesting aspect of super-objective is that the character - as in life -- most often is unaware of it. This is the kind of thing we attempt to discover in psychotherapy. George Bush would probably deny he has any father issues. Bill Clinton would probably explain Monica Lewinsky as a "man thing". Macbeth would be unaware that he could be manipulated by a strong woman.
