Following up on my previous post, here are some other interesting questions my fellow bloggers have been asking.
Bryna, over at The Everyday Epic, has been wrestling with identifying the protagonist of her novel-in-progress. This, and her earlier post, made me think about Alfred Hitchcock, who played with the idea of a protagonist throughout his career. His films almost always appeared to have a "hero" and a "villain," but once he set up those roles, he often moved to make things a lot more complicated (and interesting).
There are the two examples I've talked about in my earlier post, Psycho and Family Plot. But there are many others.
- Jimmy Stewart, the ostensible hero of The Man Who Knew Too Much, drugs his wife.
- Sean Connery, in Marnie, rapes his wife.
- Cary Grant, in Notorious, throws it up to Ingrid Bergman that she's slept around, even while he's exploiting that fact for his own purposes.
- Jimmy Stewart, in Vertigo, is first a stalker and then later an obsessive manipulator (not to mention how he treats Barbara Bel Geddes)
- Stewart again, in Rear Window, is more interested in spying on his neighbors than he is in the fact that that he has Grace Kelly in his apartment. In a nightgown.
And that's just off the top of my head. Clearly, he enjoyed casting a likable actor and then having him do unlikeable things. Hitchcock always knew exactly how far he could take the audience.
Plus, of course, there are many movies where he shows the audience a criminal and then makes us root for that criminal not to get caught. One way that he did this in some pictures was casting a really good actor as the villain and then having a pretty-boy dud as the hero. You could sense where Hitchcock's interests really were. In general, probably no other director in history has had such a command of his audience's sympathies.
T. S. Bazelli decided to reveal a few things about her work-in-progress here, and one was her particular subversion of the "chosen one" cliche (which I groused about here). I'm always glad to see somebody twist that idea around, since such an easy prop for a lazy writer to lean on.
Oh, and Sonje Jones has good advice for aspiring writers. Now, who do I know...
Characters are always more interesting when they aren’t black and white. One of my main issues with David Eddings *Belgariad* series was that the Malloreans were just bad bad bad and evil to top it off. Yawn. No one is like that, certainly not an entire COUNTRY (continent?) of people. Not only does it make the bad guys boring, but it also makes it hard to root for the good guys when they’re trying to defeat something so … flat. (Eddings would later up my opinion of him by writing the *Malloreon* series, adding depth and shades of gray to the Malloreans.)
I agree, and certainly nobody is all good or all bad in my stuff. But a dab of solid evil can be effective. In the movie Lone Star, all the characters are very three-dimensional, and the “hero” is certainly not all good, but the “villain” (Kris Kristofferson’s character) is an absolute rat-bastard. He doesn’t appear much, and only in flashbacks, which may be why it’s so effective.
People react in sometimes surprising ways when put into situations beyond their normal experience. I enjoy reading / seeing characters that are full of contradictions. To me, completely logical character is a bit frightening.
You do need to take characters out of their “comfort zones.” That may even be an axiom of fiction.
I read something about Sherlock Holmes once where it pointed out that, despite the fact that he claimed to be entirely logical, he was obviously very emotional. Eager to help the weak, eager to tweak the pompous, possessed of an enormous ego, patriotic despite his country’s imperfections, very attached to his friend Watson, bored when there are no cases. These are all, after all, emotions.
I have three characters who are, perhaps, not human. They are fairly impassive, but in the current story I’m showing them out of their comfort zone, afraid, uncertain, which is revealing things about them (though, at least so far, not answering any of the big questions).
Firstly, let me say how happy I am that I’ve finally figured out how to logged in. Despite being married to a techy, my own abilities are sub par sometimes. : )
I love how Hitchcock’s characters have dimension and flaws–especially the protagonists–and how it’s never cut-and-dry. I suppose that makes me feel better about the complexities I’ve been suffering with. In his films, things are never simple. There is always an unexpected twist. Of course, I suppose that’s what keeps us coming back for more.
Thanks for the post. Looking forward to more Hitchcock discussions soon!
Hey, glad you figured it out, Bryna. Welcome aboard.
I may write more about Hitchcock at some point, though my next movie review is Touch of Evil, the one Orson Welles picture I haven’t covered. The studio took it away from him before it was released and re-edited it, and one of the main things they did was make the “hero” more of a hero and the “villain” more of a villain, whereas what Welles was aiming for was to show the parallels between the two men.
Then, about ten years ago, the film was re-cut in accordance with his original vision. The new version is not much different, but it’s also very different. It doesn’t take much in a movie (or a story) to shift the emphasis in some important ways.
BTW, your blog seems a bit weirded out. One of your entries appears to have wandered over in the sidebar. I saw it at work, but thought it might just be that browser, but it looks that way here at home, too. Hope it’s easy to fix, or maybe I’m just imagining it.
You’re right. Something did get messed up. At first, I thought it was just the preview acting strangely and didn’t think anything of it. I think I figured out what was causing the problem. Thanks for letting me know. : )
Sounds like an intriguing movie. I haven’t seen it before (that I know of), but I’d like to. I’ll have to check the library for it.
All fixed now, as far as I can tell.
If you do check out Touch of Evil, make sure you get the version marked “Re-edited” or “Restored to Orson Welles’ vision” or “1998 Re-Edit.”