the protag, the chosen one, and helpful neighbors

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…