"Sympathetic" figures in books/movies..

Cafe Society
1

That were actually loathsome and awful?

I don’t mean delibrately. I just got done reading “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls, and wanted to throw up at the grotesque behavior displayed by the parents.

The back of the book make the story out to be one of those “strange yet loving plucky family defies the odds” type memoirs. Instead, the story was about the sociopathic thief and narcissistic monster that the author overcame to become the apparently healthy normal woman she is today.

Highlights included Mom declining to pawn a found ring, despite the fact the family was literally starving, because “it will enhance my self esteem. In times like these, self esteem is more important than food.”, and Dad, who uses his teeenage daugter as a sex toy to fleece the man he’s playing pool with.

What other books made you want to take a shower?

2

Philippa Gregory’s Wideacre, a historical novel set in 18th century England. In blurbs the heroine is compared to Scarlett O’Hara because she’s willing to fight to keep the land where she was born. Her bizarre efforts include committing multiple acts of murder, participating in very creepy incest, and betraying people who love her. It’s a nasty book.

3

Lysitheia - I read that book. I think I was angriest at her mother when the kids were starving in WV, and she’s getting fatter and fatter, then they find her huddled under the blanket with a giant Hershey bar, which she justifies eating while the kids starve because “she needs the sugar - they can go out and scrounge for food”. I can’t understand how she and her brother could continue to associate with her parents after they escaped.

StG

4

*Ironweed * by William Kennedy. Yes, I know it won a Pulitzer Prize. I want to un-read it.

5

Anais Nin in her diaries. Well, I only read the first one. More than enough. They were really popular way back when I was in college for some unknown reason. Man, does that woman come across as a self-absorbed egotist. I know it’s a diary, but still. After loads of pages about her “inner” life, bohemian friends, etc., we get something like “Oh and then I had to leave Paris because France was invaded.” (!) pretty much the first inkling there was an outside world.

6

[QUOTE=Eleanor of Aquitaine]
Philippa Gregory’s Wideacre, a historical novel set in 18th century England. In blurbs the heroine is compared to Scarlett O’Hara because she’s willing to fight to keep the land where she was born. Her bizarre efforts include committing multiple acts of murder, participating in very creepy incest, and betraying people who love her. It’s a nasty book.
[/QUOTE]

I think that was one of the only books I’ve ever been willing to burn in my life.

In Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, the tyrant king Brandin of Ygrath goes war against the neighboring country of–you guessed it–Tigana. He sends out his son to fight; his son dies, as people going to war often do. Brandin is so pissed off that he wipes out Tigana’s army and erases their name–nobody but the people who were living in Tigana can remember it or hear it spoken. The country falls apart in ruins.

One of the people he kills is the father of Dianora and Baerd. Dianora is so distraught by her father’s (and his best friend, Prince Valentin of Tigana’s) death that she ends up sleeping with her brother Baerd. She later gets captured by Brandin’s people and ends up in his harem, and Dianora and Brandin fall in love and he makes her his queen and they die a tragic and beautiful death in each other’s arms and it’s all bittersweet and wonderful.

Kythereia: (reading) “–wait, what?”

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a good book. But you read their relationship and you really have to remind yourself that these are two very, very, very messed-up people, one of whom is an evil mass-murderer.

7

I thing the book recognizes the fact that Brandin is a tyrant (although he is one of those larger-than-life, world-changing tyrants, like Augustus Caesar or Peter the Great) or that Dianora is messed up (a fact that she is well aware of - she worked he way into Brnadin’s harem to kill him, and ends up falling in love with him). We’re supposed to feel happy, or at least satisfied, by his death at the end - not to mention awestruck by the *manner * of his death - but we can’t overlook the fact that he was a man capable of loving and being loved, which turns the victory into something more poignant.

Very few fantasy writers are capable of capturing the virtues and vices of both sides of a conflict. Kay experimented, once, with standard “evil overlord” tropes in his first and justly reviled series, and he seems determined never to drink from that trough again.

8

[QUOTE=Lysitheia]
That were actually loathsome and awful?

I don’t mean delibrately. I just got done reading “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls, and wanted to throw up at the grotesque behavior displayed by the parents.

The back of the book make the story out to be one of those “strange yet loving plucky family defies the odds” type memoirs. Instead, the story was about the sociopathic thief and narcissistic monster that the author overcame to become the apparently healthy normal woman she is today.

[/QUOTE]

I read that too. My teenage daughter will be reading it soon, since it’s on her school’s summer reading list. I’m not sure what they’re supposed to learn from it. Maybe there will be a class discussion along the lines of, “If your parents act like this, run away!” or “See, your parents aren’t so bad just because they won’t give you a ride to the mall.”

9

The first example that comes to my mind is Henry from The Time-Traveler’s Wife. I really like the book despite the flaws I’ve mentioned a time or two.

But Henry begins the book as a self-absorbed, and nearly sociopathic. He does become a better person through the book, in a large part to be someone whom he can imagine deserves the love that Claire shows him. But, to say he’s got issues is putting it mildly. Perhaps the best example I can think of was the first time that Claire’s friend Gomez spends some time with Henry. Because of the time-travel fillip things are confusing for both the main parties. Gomez is uncertain of this new (to him) person in his friend’s life, and Henry is treating Gomez as the friend he has become in Henry’s time.

The best summary I can think of is Gomez’ account of their evening to Claire a couple of days later.

ETA: It’s worth noting, I think, that this is actually an example of the reformed Henry, too. :eek:

10

[QUOTE=Alessan]
I thing the book recognizes the fact that Brandin is a tyrant (although he is one of those larger-than-life, world-changing tyrants, like Augustus Caesar or Peter the Great) or that Dianora is messed up (a fact that she is well aware of - she worked he way into Brnadin’s harem to kill him, and ends up falling in love with him). We’re supposed to feel happy, or at least satisfied, by his death at the end - not to mention awestruck by the *manner * of his death - but we can’t overlook the fact that he was a man capable of loving and being loved, which turns the victory into something more poignant.

Very few fantasy writers are capable of capturing the virtues and vices of both sides of a conflict. Kay experimented, once, with standard “evil overlord” tropes in his first and justly reviled series, and he seems determined never to drink from that trough again.
[/QUOTE]

I agree, Dianora is clearly broken. She illustrates both how special and how evil Brandin really is. Tigana is really about free will, and Dianora is someone who exists to have her will taken from her again and again. Even when she gets what she wants (taken from the inn in “Lower Corte” to Brandin), it’s against her will.

On the other hand, bite your tongue regarding The Finovar Tapestry. One, evil is far from monolithic there (Darren, Galaden, Arthur, The Wild Hunt) and two, it’s awesome. Tigana is better written, but arguably more sentimental. There is a lot to be said for deconstructing a genre, but there’s also a lot to be said for embracing a genre and showing what can be done inside its limits: I liken Finnovar Tapestry to writing a perfect sonnet before moving on to experimental verse.

11

Vinegar Hill. All of the characters, pretty much, except the kids, but especially the mother, “Ellen”. It’s a story about a woman who ends up moving with her husband an kids back to her hometown and in with her in-laws. Things go downhill rapidly- her husband sinks into impotent melancholy interspersed with rage, and his parents are just all-around rotten. All through, the protagonist is presented as a victim of circumstances, doing the best she can to keep her family together,

(minor spoiler, but you shouldn’t read the book anyway) and in the end she does take control and get her kids out of the toxic environment,
but my sister and I had the same reaction (I told her not to read it, but she wanted to see if it was as bad as I said)- too little, too late. She allows her kids to be bullied and harassed by their grandparents, and to see her beaten down as well. It would be more palatable if the author had acknowledged that Ellen had a hand in the making of the circumstance, but she is presented as a plucky dame, trying her best. Not so! She clearly prioritized her relationship with her husband and the approval of her family over what she knew was right for her kids until far too late, and then never really acknowledged that she wasn’t just a victim.

Actually, probably why I hated the book so much was that it attempted to have a larger scope and to “explain” why the husband and mother-in-law were the way they were- more victimization sob stories, but then stopped without going back to show what the father-in-law’s story was. I think you can’t have it both ways- if 3 adults (Ellen, the husband and the mother-in-law) get to have their actions rationalized away by creating traumatic backstories, the grandpa should, too. I ended up sympathizing with the ogre grandpa/father-in-law just because I figured the author had it in for him and we just weren’t seeing his point of view. We all make choices, people! I don’t think I can be accused of “blaming the victim” in this case, because everyone in the damn story is a victim- the buck has to stop somewhere, and in Vinegar Hill it just keeps rolling along.

I only finished the book because it was one of a limited stock I brought on a 2-week long camping trip and I figured it was better than twiddling my thumbs. It was, but only because my sis and I got to bitch about it for like 3 days. We had some very tangentially similar experiences in our mutual childhood, but never to such a horrific degree, because- get this- the adults responsible for us stepped up to the plate and did what was right, instead of whining about their horrible lives and expecting sympathy.

12

[QUOTE=Lysitheia]
That were actually loathsome and awful?

I don’t mean delibrately. I just got done reading “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls, and wanted to throw up at the grotesque behavior displayed by the parents.
…
Highlights included Mom declining to pawn a found ring, despite the fact the family was literally starving, because “it will enhance my self esteem. In times like these, self esteem is more important than food.”, and Dad, who uses his teeenage daugter as a sex toy to fleece the man he’s playing pool with.

What other books made you want to take a shower?
[/QUOTE]

Or the revelation that her mom owned a fortune in land that she’d sat on all those years. And the fact neither parent would hold a 8-5 job with benefits for more than a few weeks at the very most, which is absolutely fine as a life decision if you’re just supporting yourself I suppose but NOT WHEN YOU HAVE KIDS. I hated her parents long before the end of that book, especially after they squandered an inherited house that should have fixed all of their problems.

For similar reasons I hated Angela’s Ashes. The father was a complete oxygen thief, but the mother (the sympathetic character) wasn’t much better for

1- staying with him
2- continuing to have babies with him when the ones she had were literally dying from malnutrition and neglect
3- not doing whatever it took, be that selling potatoes that fell off truck or singing “Lovely Ladies” down by the wharf, to make some money somehow (her sons defend her by saying that there were no jobs for an unskilled woman, but I’m sure that somewhere in Ireland there were unskilled women who held jobs doing something)

As with Glass Castle, the children would probably have been better off in foster care.

There was a movie some years ago called The Yarn Princess (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111790/ my computer won’t let me hyperlink at the moment) that was based on articles about a family here in Alabama. The movie was heartwarming; Jean Smart plays a retarded woman who has five children with her husband (played by the late Robert Pastorelli), a schizophrenic laborer, and its’ about her struggle to keep the state from taking them when he has a mental collapse. You root for her.
The truth was a bit different. I remember when this was in the papers and I knew the area where they lived and people who knew them. As with the movie, those who knew the family had absolutely no doubt that the real life retarded mother loved her children, none, and from the emotional side it’s horrible that she was separated from them, but she simply was not able to take care of them. She could not cook, could not drive, could not even dial a phone, could not work outside the house, could not read- she was basically in all but age a child herself. The family was in poverty and living in a falling down shack, the father could be abusive and physically dangerous when he was around unless he wasn’t kept doped into submission, and the kids were being neglected and physically abused and coming to school filthy and all that. Sadly, love just wasn’t enough.
I think the real life mother should have had liberal visitation with the kids, but this wasn’t the plucky mom fighting the system from the movie in real life. I’m not sure how the real kids turned out, but if it was okay then that’s a blessing and triumph over the odds.

13

[QUOTE=Manda JO]

On the other hand, bite your tongue regarding The Finovar Tapestry. One, evil is far from monolithic there (Darren, Galaden, Arthur, The Wild Hunt) and two, it’s awesome. Tigana is better written, but arguably more sentimental. There is a lot to be said for deconstructing a genre, but there’s also a lot to be said for embracing a genre and showing what can be done inside its limits: I liken Finnovar Tapestry to writing a perfect sonnet before moving on to experimental verse.
[/QUOTE]

Oh, I love the Tapestry. I’ve probably read it at least five times. The thing as, as much as I love the series, I’m well aware of its massive flaws, and one such flaw is that while the subordinate antagonists can be interesting, the Big Bad himself is profoundly boring.

14

I own a copy of the Tapestry, but it’s guilty reading–it has beautiful touches, and a bad book by Kay is still a good book by anybody else’s standards, but on the whole it comes off like a knock-off of Lord of the Rings with random Arthurian / Celtic stuff thrown in to me.

Alessan and Manda Jo, I agree with you both–it just felt like the book was making Brandin out to be a lot more heroic and sympathetic than he really was.

15

Nicholas and Alexandra is a great and tragic love story, and I felt great sympathy for their children, but the couple themselves- not so much. I just kept thinking about how romantic and sympathetic they’d have been if you’re from one of the countless families literally dying of starvation with a brother dying at the front of an unnecessary war while they’re living in incomparable luxury and got us into the war in the first place.

16

The few Tennessee Williams plays I have read, my reaction was usually, “Stop whining, you idiot!” Perhaps they are better onstage.

In the original The Thomas Crown Affair, the title character robs a bank. This film was made in the 1970s, when capitalists and corporations were everybody’s favorite villains.

One of Crown’s henchmen shoots a bank guard. Crown barely seems to notice, and doesn’t seem to care. I work with a cash register, and I have been on the receiving end of armed robbery, so at that point, Crown loses my sympathy. For the rest of the film, I watch rich pretty people play aristocratic games, and I think of that working-class guard, laying in a hospital somewhere, utterly forgotten by everyone else in the film.

I am a capitalist. I like rich people. I despise people who view the entire world in terms of class conflict. But The Thomas Crown Affair makes me want to send the aristos to the guillotine, starting with Steve McQueen!