Characters

Last night we were talking about how awful the acting and dialog was in the last of the Star Wars movies. If you haven't seen it, well, it stinks. Cardboard cutouts stiffly delivering awful lines. Really, even worse than Mark Hamill in the first movie. OK. Maybe not worse, or that much worse, but worse.

However, the thing with The Return of the Sith is that it is still a good story and a thoroughly enjoyable film. The pacing is good, the music works, the visuals are Geroge Lucas good, and you get through the film happy.

How important are characters? I tend to favor characters over story and, thus, prefer post-war European films to the Story! Story! Story! of Hollywood. But I have to recognize that a good story can also do perfectly well without good characters.

I have come up with a way of telling whether or not the author is creating good characters: if the Gastapo were to be inserted in the middle of the book and were to round up the characters to be hauled off to death camps, which characters would you care about? Sometimes it might be all of them. Sometimes it might just be a few, and they might be evenly distributed among the good guys and the bad guys, as it really has nothing to do with whether you like the character or not. It has to do with whether or not the author has actually crafted people out of the words. If he has, then you simply could not stand to have the Gastapo haul them away. Even the bad ones. If they need punishment, you want them to have creative punishments, perhaps ironic punishments, perhaps nasty, cruel, long-drawn out punishments, dealt out by a good guy who might have a sadistic streak as his flaw. But not the cold, efficient bureaucratic death of the Gastapo.

Pride and Prejudice is an example of a book where the whole load of characters could be taken off to Dachau and I, for one, would only hope that perhaps the chirpy narrator might be shocked out of her stupor long enough to write something interesting for once.

If, on the other hand, Odysseus had been arrested and loaded into the green minna somewhere after his encounter with the cyclops, it would feel absurd, an outrage! At one level it would call to mind Monty Python's Holy Grail, but on the other, it would be like blasting all humanity in the face.

Now, the films that have neither characters nor stories, those have their place as well, so long as they are beautifully filmed and musically made. Anyway. Lunch is nearing its tragic end. I hope the Gastapo doesn't cart off my grilled cheese sandwich.