Perspective on Power

So I’m always a little concerned, in writing for this blog, I know I have a lot of readers already (thanks everybody!) but also that a lot of my friends are reading it and they have heard me say a lot of these things before, sometimes many times before. But I do want to get these things written down somewhere so this is a good place to do it...

One thing my friends have heard – I do some (very) minor acting, just enough that I have a working knowledge of theater and video, along with directing and believe me, no matter how small-time it is, there is no such thing as “minor” directing. And I’ve had some interesting auditioning experiences and learned a few things from that which I hope to post about sometime. But one thing that stands out, as far as acting goes, is that I am always cast as the villain. I mean, like always. The worst case was when I was offered a role of a 70-year-old villainous judge when there were three other, better roles needing to be filled that were age-appropriate (apart from the lead which I really wanted but it went to a very well-suited actor). When I turned it down the actor they got was in his early 60’s, at least.

I’ve demonstrated a decent enough range of acting skills and usually get very good reviews so it has always seemed to me that I ought to be offered some different parts. Now recently I auditioned for a Woody Allen role which was essentially Woody Allen playing himself and I must admit the guy they got did an excellent job – I would have had trouble exhibiting that overall incompetence for everyday life. So, disappointing but understandable.

Seeming change of subject here – I write a lot of fiction. You haven’t seen it since I don’t seem to finish a lot of it, though I’m thinking about a “companion” blog where I’d post my stories, mostly older stories. In any case, I almost always write from the bottom’s point of view. While I have two male-bottom pieces which, like I said, I haven’t finished (in one the gender was intended to be ambiguous but my native sexuality can through pretty clearly), that pretty much means that I’m writing with the main character being a woman. In fact, this has confused some people at some time, if my pen name is not gender-specific. I am aware of the reason I do this, it’s because, or mostly because, I’m not comfortable, usually, writing about how I topped a woman and especially not comfortable writing a string of stories about how I topped women, which may be why my party reports often never get finished.

I was having a vanilla discussion on script-writing and I was pointing out that the movie (or whatever) always sympathizes with the weaker character – or at least weaker most of the way through the movie, since they always end up on top. This is no huge realization. And I credit that to the fact that the viewer always relates to the weaker character, no matter how powerful the viewer actually is. A humorous take on this is the cell phone commercial where the president/ owner of the cell phone company talks to some young guy about “sticking it to The Man.” YG reminds him “but you ARE the man.” No matter, he relates to NOT being The Man.

Almost universally the character is the person not in power – the entire story is driven by the protagonist being blocked from what they want. This is because the audience does not feel in control. And this explains why I’m always cast as the villain, despite the frequent age disparities – because I come across as being in control in normal life, and this is emphasized on stage. I move with purpose, I probably stand up too straight and am too stiff; I speak clearly and loudly (less so for camera work) and I have a bad habit of, when I enunciate I clip my words, which sounds hostile – or certainly forceful. (Actually, it is fascinating to sit down and try to determine what exactly you need to do differently to portray a character much different from yourself). In fact, this realization is going to do me a lot of good since now I’ll find villain roles I like and audition for those.

It also helps explain why I, along with everyone else, am not satisfied with stories of unmitigated success (well, a certain number of real-life tales can be very interesting and entertaining) – so if I’m going to write any of these they should focus on the obstacles overcome, I suppose. I tried to think of what type of stories do have strong male leads, like action flicks, and I have played around some with a powerful private detective who, like an action hero, is opposed by many forces of evil (this bunch is humorous, okay?).

What’s unusual about this realization coming so late is that I tried stand-up comedy for awhile, and I have always known that the funniest target of a joke is yourself, and the best way to ruin a joke is with a smirky “I got the best in the end” twist. So why it took so long to realize this explicitly for fiction writing is something of a mystery, apart from my absolute absence of formal training.

Even while I’m writing this I’m imagining readers saying – comedy? that’s a joke, right? because my writing sounds so serious which is not how I am in person at all. So I guess the next post will have to be a little lighter.