I’ve gotten myself meme’d by Edward Copeland: my ten favorite characters in cinema. Here are the rules.
1) Name 10 film characters that are your favorite and explain why. We aren’t talking about the actor who played them. Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes or Bond may be your favorite filmic sight on screen but you may hate the Mel Gibsons, Basil Rathbones or George Lazenbys who’ve played them. Of course no one’s stopping you from mentioning your favorite players if you like.
[The meme’s originator, Film Squish, says it’s okay to do more than ten, but if I’m going to indulge myself it would be up to 50 or 60 in no time.]
2) Tag 5 more film bloggers when you’re done, e-mail them, let ’em in on it, link back.
3) Read their posts and enjoy!
Jesus, this one is hard. I don’t have it in me to do ranks; this is by chronology.
Okay, so I’m kinda violating one of the rules right off the bat. By limiting myself to just those two movies, I’m implicitly stating that I don’t like the character so much as Boris Karloff and James Whale’s interpretation thereof. But anyone can see that the Monster in those first two films just isn’t quite the same person (so to speak) in the further sequels, or in the dozens of other films based upon Mary Shelley’s oft-ripped off book. In the earliest Universal pictures, he’s a tragic innocent, only able to articulate in halting words the simplest, and therefore most universal feelings: fear, confusion, anger, and above all, the need for affection.
Perhaps the most fatale of all 1940s femmes. Nobody would mistake her for a well-rounded human being, and in a more enlightened age, the rampant misogyny demonstrated by her character (and the entire film noir genre) is the very definition of problematic. But for my money, there’s not another one of the many deadly women in cinema who can match Phyllis for sheer seductiveness, especially as embodied by the beautifully icy Barbara Stanwyck. Most noir heroes are obviously pathetic, led on by an unambiguous villainess to their dooms, but it’s hard not to see why Walter Neff goes along so willingly, even though he’s always aware of the fate ahead of him. Phyllis is pure Code Era sex, and the famous description of her allure – “murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle” – explains why she’s just as appealing to the audience as to the dupe who gives up everything for her love.
It is perhaps only my stunted imagination that leads me to put two film noir villains from 1944 on the same list of ten. But dammit, Waldo is simply my favorite example of the well-spoken, effete immoralist out there, narrowly nudging out George Sander’s venom-spitting theater critic in All About Eve. Once again, we have problematic representation to contend with – played by known homosexual Clifton Webb, he comes across as one of the most straightforward Evil Queers ever – but that shouldn’t detract from how much more enjoyable he is than everyone else in the film, surely not by accident. Half again smarter than everyone else he meets, prone to bitchy gossip and withing snark, he’s the first pop post-modernist, spiritual father to every blogger ever, and the most modern character in the genre that invented cinematic modernism.
A magnificent bastard with a perpetual shit-eating grin and the finest monologue in cinema history, Lime is barely onscreen for 15 minutes, but he’s still the character that we all remember, largely because his outsized presence is the driving force behind nearly every action in the film. Not an evil man so much as the embodiment of pure selfish vice, Lime represents the id of a generation that came out of one of the most destructive periods in human history, faced with rebuilding an entire world and forced to choose between hard work or just saying “fuck it” to everything outside of the shallowest pleasures of money. Not to mention, it was the role that allowed Orson Welles to give his best performance in a film he didn’t direct himself.
Please forgive me for putting two Billy Wilder characters on the list, but the man was a genius writer – I could have done a top 10 without ever leaving his canon, and it would be fairly easy to defend. Anyway, the second and last Wilder creation here is Jack Lemmon’s half of a pair of shady musicians in the 1920s who dress as women to escape from the mob. Contrived? Yeah, probably, but it results in the best farce of the last 50 years (exactly 50 years after its release), and a startlingly liberal-for-the-’50s drag role that doesn’t just blur gender roles so much as grind the idea of gender into the ground with its heel. Going so subtly that you don’t even notice it from horndog enthusiasm at being trapped on a train with a whole mess of trampy blondes to positively giddy delight – and “giddy” is the best conceivable word – at receiving a marriage proposal from an aged millionaire, Jerry’s joy at being Daphne showcases how mutable identity – not just sexual – can be; the rest of us still haven’t caught up to him. Her. Him.
The nameless gunslinger who does what he has to and disappears is an iconic figure in the very American Western genre, but Kurosawa Akira and his frequent actor Mifune Toshiro perfected the trope in a Japanese samurai picture adapted from a Dashiell Hammett detective novel. Mifune’s unnamed swordsman (he calls himself “Sanjuro”, which simply means “thirty years old”, and his family name is taken from the local fauna) is as ruthless and effective and awesomely badass as any of the many figures in the same mold, but where even a supremely talented filmmaker like Sergio Leone allowed that to be the entirety of the character, Kurosawa and Mifune make it clear that he does have a personality and an identity, he’s just not going to share it with us. With his cynical sense of humor and strong, if unusual, codes of honor and morality, the samurai obviously has a lot more going on under the surface than your average perfect killer.
Seeing the film for the first time in high school, I obviously identified most with Ben, the lonely, confused boy looking for himself in the face of idiotic parents and corrupt adults. But every time I’ve seen it since, I’ve become more and more aware that, all in all, Ben is a bit of prick and a moron, masking his outrageous laziness with generational anxiety, and cheerfully turning himself into a stalker, no matter how schmoopy his stalking may be. While Mrs. Robinson, brilliantly acted by Anne Bancroft, seems more and more to be the actual tragic center of the story. Consider: she’s well into middle age, caught in what is obviously a loveless, sexless marriage. Perhaps unwisely, she allows herself to enter a fling with a sex-starved young man who treats her, for a while at least, as the center of his universe. And then he drops her like a hot potato to chase after her callow daughter, a literal expression of the adult fear of the younger generation taking over despite being entirely unworthy of the task. Sure, she reacts with a bit too much jealousy and bitterness, but the last chance she’ll ever have at fulfillment has been taken from her in the least-classy way available. Would you really react differently?
The man in the battered fedora, having spent the better part of the last 24 hours digging a temple out of the desert sands, flops heavily on his side and stares off into the middle distance. “Snakes,” he moans. “Why did it have to be snakes?” That moment exemplifies everything I adore about Indy: he’s an extraordinarily weary hero, who somehow manages to survive every damn thing he encounters but not without a healthy amount of complaining and resignation along the way. For all that the Indiana Jones films are unabashed throwbacks to a long-dead B-movie tradition, the man at the center is weirdly contemporary. He may dress like a matinee hero, he performs the actions required of a serial star, but he has an unexpectedly postmodern viewpoint about all of it. And for an indestructible action hero, he gets the shit beat out of him a lot.
The great counterpoint to all of the crap tossed at the Coen brothers, about how they’re fundamentally inhuman filmmakers. Jerry (played by William H. Macy as only he could possibly do it) isn’t a bad guy, in essence, but he makes one spectacularly bad mistake that compounds when everything that can go wrong does so in the most outlandish way possible, and as a result he’s confronted with all of his must humiliating weaknesses and fears. It’s bad enough that his father-in-law treats him like an imbecile, but by the time that the kidnappers who he’s paying to do his bidding start treating him like a dumb kid, you can’t shake the conclusion that this man simply cannot get any breaks. He’s the most sympathetic character in the movie, as much as we might not want to admit it, because he’s the one who represents all of the failures we don’t want to acknowledge. Marge Gunderson may be the hero, but she gets to end the film with her simple worldview basically intact; the last time we see him, Jerry has been reduced to a bawling wreck stretched out on a bed. It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s a heartbreakingly pathetic one.
The cutest character in the history of movies, full stop. Pixar’s own WALL·E gives her a stiff run for the money, but he turns into a plucky and resourceful hero, while Boo remains at every moment nothing but a little girl. She’s both the audience’s best identification point – like her, we are experiencing the world of Monstropolis from an outside perspective, and if the filmmakers are doing their job, we have a similarly wide-eyed perspective – and the point on which all of our anxieties are focused: it’s almost reflexive that we want to protect a fragile little innocent like her, even if she’s mostly made up of ones and zeroes. Voiced by story artist Rob Gibb’s daughter Mary, largely by capturing her random prattle as she played in the recording studio, Boo manages to come across as perhaps the most unforced child character in the movies ever, doing only what comes naturally to a toddler, and triggering that deep mammalian instinct in all of us that absolutely loves a little kid. So yeah, it all basically comes back to: she’s just too damn cute.
And now, the trickiest bit: whom do I punish next?
-Neil at The Agitation of the Mind
–Burbanked
–Cinewhore
-Nathaniel at Film Experience
-Glenn at Stale Popcorn
Let this be a lesson to those who would dare to blogroll me.