Secondary movie/literary characters more interesting than the protagonist

Cafe Society
1

I once said that if I had written GONE WITH THE WIND the heroine would more likely have been Emmie Slattery or Mammy. Since The Wind Done Gone took care of Mammy (sorta kinda in a way) I’ll stick with Emmie as she’s really more interesting than Scarlett.

Emmie’s from a “po whitetrash” family where women folk are brown from picking cotton and slaves look down on her father. She has an affair with Jonas Wilkerson (the Yankee overseer) that results in a baby who dies at birth (I always had the suspicion Ellen O’Hara may have had a little something to do with that: “[Your child] was born and mercifully has died…”). Unlike Scarlett her life was one of constant hard work, no future, no barbecues, no hoop skirts, just deprivation and rejection, and her affair with Wilkerson was just a man using a whitetrash girl for sex.
But wait…
After the war, when like the O’Haras the Slatteries lost everything (not nearly as much but it was all they had), Wilkerson not only comes back to her, he marries her! Even though she’s penniless, with no education and with the stigma of a dead illegitimate child and he’s now rich as a profiteer and could have had younger/prettier/more refined women, he chooses her. Apparently it wasn’t that superficial a relationship. He tries to install her in a mansion. We’re told he’s hateful, but much of that is because he encourages blacks to read and vote and not act inferior (not exactly horrible things today).

Compare her to Scarlett who marries two men she doesn’t love (taking them away from women who really do love them) and bears two children she doesn’t love. Scarlett’s third marriage is torn apart by her burning desire to take yet another man from a woman who loves him. Like Emmie she profits from the war by marriage- but Emmie had a happy ending (until her husband is cut to ribbons, of course) in that the rich man she married- loved her. Scarlett, however, is the protagonist (which I know doesn’t mean she’s likable) while the Slattery-Wilkersons are seen as villains.

Anyway, there are several books where some side characters were, imo, far more interesting than the lead. Some of my picks:

Fagin- far more interesting than Oliver Twist, a man who seems to truly care about the well-being of the urchins he takes in and training them to steal is actually giving them an employable skill they wouldn’t get in a workhouse. OTOH, he agrees to kill Oliver for the right amount of money. What’s his background? We know he’s Jewish, but where’s he from and how did he come by his scheme of a school for pickpockets?

Many more, but I’ll yield the floor. (Hannibal Lecter is a good example of why sometimes characters are more interesting when they’re not fleshed out as each book after Silence of the Lambs gives him more back-story and makes him less rather than more interesting.)

What characters did you find way more interesting than the main characters (film, movie, graphic novel or other)?

2

I don’t want to see a topic with this much potential drop off the front page without a response, but I’m too drunk/busy to write anything of substance.

Han Solo.

3

Robin Hood - Prince Of Thieves would have been better if they’d just called it The Sheriff Of Nottingham. Rickman completely upstages Costner.

4

In The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, Lord Mhoram and Saltheart Foamfollower are conspicuously more heroic than the title character, who spends a lot of the time being a thorough-going asshole.

If it comes to that, Frodo is far from being the most interesting character in LotR, coming some way behind Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Galadriel and arguably Sam.

5

In the first Pink Panther movie, Sir Charles Lytton, played by David Niven, was supposed to be the protagonist. However, of course, Peter Sellers as Jacques Clouseau stole the show, and went on to star in the rest of the series. Is that an example?

6

Ellen James in The World According to Garp. At 10 she is raped and her tongue is cut off, yet she writes down a description of her two attackers and they go to prison, where they are killed. Her parents are killed in a car crash when she is 18, yet she manages one year of college before working in a day care center. A whole society of women form a group called The Ellen Jamesians Group and have their tongues vountarily cut off. She writes a letter to Jenny Fields before Fields is killed, later moves in with the Garps. She writes an essay “Why I Am Not An Ellen Jamesian,” which Garp gets published. She then takes a writing class, becomes a published poet and later the head of Fields Foundation. She lives alone, apparently has no sexual relationships. She introduces Duncan Garp to the transsexual who becomes his wife. Later in life becomes a long distancer swimmer, eventually dying during a swim.

That is some life.

7

I don’t know that she’s more interesting, but you could make a whole book out of the life of Clara Allen, the Love of Gus’s Life in Lonesome Dove. She kept several dashing Rangers dangling while a girl in Austin but married a boring horse trader from Kentucky and moved onto the Nebraska plain.

There, she bore three boys, all of whom died, and she nearly died with them from grief. She lived for years in a dugout house, choking on the dust and icked out by the centepedes. It’s a hard life for a woman; she knows of one woman who killed herself out there, just because she couldn’t stand the sound of the wind any more. She produces two healthy girls and, when her husband dies, assumes the role of horse trader and is more successful at it – when she can get the macho cowboys to deal with a woman.

Not only does she endure the endless cycle of work, hardship and grief, she thrives. Eternally optimistic, she buys bulbs and plants flowers, even though the wind blows them away. She loves to read and takes many magazine subscriptions; she’d like to learn to write herself. The process interests her. She gets a piano and her girls learn to play. Her dreams for her daughters never die, though she lives life in a hard place.

I love Gus and would run off with him in a heartbeat – but I think of Clara nearly as much.

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And bring a friend! :cool:

I heard that Costner insisted that Rickman’s screen time be cut - and Costner still got out-acted…

9

And speaking of Alan Rickman…

The obvious choice is Severus Snape from the Harry Potter series, not only because Snape is such a complex character, but also becaus ethe title character is designed to be so typical, the better to get his fans to project themselves onto him.

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The Wicked Witch of the West has proven to be very profitable on Broadway.

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Dr. Marc C. “Blackie” duQuesne of E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Skylark books is a great example of this. He was the villian for several books but was so much more interesting than the hero he was eventually made protaganist of his own book in “Skylark duQuesne”

12

I wrote a review about the movie “Barbarian Queen” in which I pointed out that the Barbarian Queen’s little sister, who had maybe five minutes of screen time and a dozen or so lines, was the only really interesting character in the movie. Here’s a link, which is definitely NSFW as it contains nudity, bondage, nude language and adult facial expressions:

http://www.bondagerotica.com/articles/barbarian_queen/barbarian_queen.html

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Are you talking about the movie or the book? I ask because I really can’t see book-Legolas as being terribly interesting at all; he’s hardly fleshed out in any real way, and what we know of him isn’t something one can identify with. He’s not terribly human.

On the other hand, I think a reasonable argument can be made that Sam is as much the protagonist of LOTR as Mr. Underhill. Certainly we have much more of his POV presented – all of Book IV, really, and much of II and VI.

14

Return to Me with David Duchovny and Mimi Driver was a forgetable romatic comedy except for the constellation of friends and family surronding the leads.

15

While I love Jamie and Claire from Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, I was particularly smitten with Lord John Grey. Thankfully, so was Gabaldon, who brought the character back in a major (ha!) way after his initial brief appearance in the series, then spun him off into a series of his own.

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SPOILERS if you have not read any *Lonesome Dove * works

I know Clara from Lonesome Dove has already been mentioned- nothing beats Gus IMHO, but there are so many interesting characters that are thought provoking and just so real* that I think deserve mention.

Bigfoot Wallace- when he met his tragic end, and the lady in black sang for the dead- it seemed to be mostly for him. I was so sorry to see him go. He was just such a great character.

Mattie- who could forget the whore making turtle soup? Not to mention the cohones it took for her to even follow the Rangers on the Dead Man’s Walk.

Lorena- smart, knows what she wants and how to get it, gets nearly destroyed by circumstances but manages anyways (with help of course). Ok… maybe hooking up with Jake wasn’t the brightest move but at least she realized her worth at the end and the kind of man who deserved her.

Several of the Comanches were equally fascinating- Kicking Wolf, the horse thief and the one whose name escapes me- but he was the Arapaho scout that would leave expeditions to go look for a bird his grandmother told him about.

Inish Scull- just WOW… the man loses his eyelids and still manages to carry on.

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That’s standard Donaldson M.O. All his books have messed-up, angst-filled, often ineffective “heroes” surrounded by larger-than-life supporting characters. It works fairly well: the supporting cast provides the heroic fantasy (until they inevitably succumb to despair, only to be rescued by the cynical heroes), while the protagonists provide the moral ambiguity.

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Indeed; in the movies, I’d say there are quite a few characters that are more interesting than Mr Potter.

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He did the same to James Mason in Lolita.

20

Ruby was infinitely more interesting to me than Ada in Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain Stretngth despite adversity vs. weakness due to privilege.