Unlike outsider stories, which feature protagonists who are not a part of the world or culture they enter into, insider narratives focus on characters already well immersed in the story world and its social structures. These protagonists may face internal conflicts as they subvert the structures that define their world, and the arc of the plot can often be more about change within the character than change in the world at large.
One of the best examples of this kind of story is The Insider, the 1999 drama about tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand and his battle with two greedy behemoths – a multibillion-dollar tobacco corporation and CBS, which was more concerned with its own corporate interests than in airing Wigand’s information about the dangers of smoking. The movie is methodical and eschews the typical cliched elements of the genre: there are no car chases or sleazy sex scenes, and the characters are not perfect – but they are principled and morally driven.
Few filmmakers can take a whistle-blowing dramatization of real life potentially dusty legal shenanigans and news gathering and make it so chest convulsively taut that your heart beats faster than the Candid Camera clip – but Michael Mann was up to the task with The Insider, which became an Oscar-nominated film and one of the best-selling movies of all time.
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