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deathpixie) wrote2001-10-19 10:58 pm
deathpixie) wrote2001-10-19 10:58 pm
What is it about bastards?
A warning here, folks, I'm about to do something completely unheard-of in my LJ, at least recently.
I'm going to talk about writing. *grins*
This particular train of thought began tonight watching the TV with BRM - a BBC show called Rebus. Another of those dark-edged crime thriller dramas, with the title character a Scottish police inspector who seems to have been cast directly from the John Constantine mould. He drinks scotch like water, sleeps with the wife of a good mate, gets clonked over the head and punched in the nose, and spends a fair bit of time desperately trying to play catch-up in an invesitgation that is running rings around him. He bends the rules, breaks them when he has to, but somehow justifies it against a personal code. He's cocky, he's clever, and of course, sexy in a I'm-a-bastard-but-a-charming-one kind of way.
It's a character I'm seeing more and more. The flawed hero. The balancing act between good and evil. The Bastard. He's virtually every private detective and hard-arse cop. He's in books, in movies, on TV and in the comics. He's everywhere, and he always gets the chicks.
What is it about this character that we find so endlessly fascinating, be he John Constantine, Pete Wisdom, Jack Hawksmoor, John Rebus, Frank Burnside, Sam Spade? There's the way he's so hard to define, so hard to predict. There's that element of danger, of risk, the sensation of playing with fire. There's that underlying element of vulnerability, the knowledge that under the scruffy clothes and heavy drinking and chain smoking, there lies a fundamentally good man. The sheer contradiction.
For me, it's the complexity of the character. He is at once frustrating and fulfilling to write - he challenges me to extend myself beyond simple cliche, even with his status of Archetype. Writing the Bastard, I can't take shortcuts without it not ringing true, and the character himself is not backwards in telling me when I'm cheating. There's something liberating, too, about writing such a character. He is the id given free rein, doing the things we wish we could do.
*grins* I've been writing Constantine again, can you tell?
I'm going to talk about writing. *grins*
This particular train of thought began tonight watching the TV with BRM - a BBC show called Rebus. Another of those dark-edged crime thriller dramas, with the title character a Scottish police inspector who seems to have been cast directly from the John Constantine mould. He drinks scotch like water, sleeps with the wife of a good mate, gets clonked over the head and punched in the nose, and spends a fair bit of time desperately trying to play catch-up in an invesitgation that is running rings around him. He bends the rules, breaks them when he has to, but somehow justifies it against a personal code. He's cocky, he's clever, and of course, sexy in a I'm-a-bastard-but-a-charming-one kind of way.
It's a character I'm seeing more and more. The flawed hero. The balancing act between good and evil. The Bastard. He's virtually every private detective and hard-arse cop. He's in books, in movies, on TV and in the comics. He's everywhere, and he always gets the chicks.
What is it about this character that we find so endlessly fascinating, be he John Constantine, Pete Wisdom, Jack Hawksmoor, John Rebus, Frank Burnside, Sam Spade? There's the way he's so hard to define, so hard to predict. There's that element of danger, of risk, the sensation of playing with fire. There's that underlying element of vulnerability, the knowledge that under the scruffy clothes and heavy drinking and chain smoking, there lies a fundamentally good man. The sheer contradiction.
For me, it's the complexity of the character. He is at once frustrating and fulfilling to write - he challenges me to extend myself beyond simple cliche, even with his status of Archetype. Writing the Bastard, I can't take shortcuts without it not ringing true, and the character himself is not backwards in telling me when I'm cheating. There's something liberating, too, about writing such a character. He is the id given free rein, doing the things we wish we could do.
*grins* I've been writing Constantine again, can you tell?
Ah, the lovable and unlovable bastards
I think it IS freeing to write these characters. It's fun to play on the dark side and be unrepentant and unreedemable and snide and vicious and manipulative... etcetera etcetera etcetera.
Antiheroes and villains tend to be a bit more extreme anyway. And going to the extreme is one of those things that tends to be exhausting in real life but on paper... on paper it's exhilarating and there is none of the 'consequence' crap to deal with.
Or maybe we're just all closet bastards and bitches. Who the hell knows?