Notes on two character types, the everyman hero and the straightman null

an observation on tintin (and all successful heroes that exist as blanks for the audience to project themselves upon) from an article on the oubapo

"distilling Tintin’s words—relatively ample, compared to some other artistic comic books—to no more that two punctuation marks: ! and ?. These minimal signs remind us that Tintin does not really control much in the story; indeed, he is always surprised or puzzled—a fundamental element of his apparently inexhaustible youth."

on the reactions of the victims of the protagonist in the comedy (2012) taken from the imdb message boards

"In this movie, for instance, they were obviously going for an EFFECT. They were trying to basically suck all of the air out the movie. That's part of the statement it's making. If people had reacted to the character's shenanigans, then the movie would have degenerated into an ACTUAL comedy, and that's precisely what they were trying to avoid - which, mind you, wasn't an easy thing to do. It's hard to make a movie about people who take nothing seriously and who are constantly screwing around and have it NOT play for laughs AT ALL.

Take the scene at the beginning with the male nurse. Sure, someone MIGHT have told him off. Someone might have just rolled their eyes and laughed too. But, I can also believe that someone could have just stared blankly at him too, and it's enough that it's BELIEVABLE. And, in the end, it's not just about picking the MOST realistic option; it's about picking the one that gets the point across. In this case, the non-reaction does nothing to defuse the scene. Swanson's hateful baiting just hangs in the air like a wet fart. THAT'S the point. And, I'll admit that makes the movie a fairly ugly and unpleasant experience and I can totally sympathize with someone who dislikes the movie on those grounds, but that's what they were going for. And that alone shows you that "realism" isn't the primary concern."

The lament of the mythopoeticist

we move like rubble and pick up the rough outliers
the peaks of the past,
momentary protrusions that belie a deep interconnection
running through our ruinous civilisation
born of something beautiful
the sickness of our souls
that rejects the individual as the locus of meaning
and places us in opposition
to all current myths
thank the gods
that we can't fit
our own comfortable lies.