That wasn’t me, not one matter how hard I wished it … Mickey Rourke in Rumble Fish. Photograph: Kobal
If movies really do possess heavy-duty powers of seduction (they don’t call us film lovers for nothing), then it’s their characters we tend to fall for hardest and fastest. While it’s currently de rigeur to giggle at the Avatar devotees struggling to rectify to life away from Pandora, which of us has never, in a moderate recess of our psyches, had a similar pang of wanting to be or to befriend the fictional lead of a much-loved film? And yet for me, and I surmise others, there is one type of character to whom our response is usually particular degrees less than warm – the ones who jog the memory of us of ourselves.
It’s a beneath that came to mind this week while reading US journalist Glenn Kenny describe his attendance at an unacknowledged press junket “for the first time in 20 years” at his blog Some Came Running. For the rarely less than caustically honest Kenny, the experience was wholly a bit sobering. His former gig as Premiere magazine’s chief critic felt a mighty long time agone being of the class who he lurked waiting for his nanosecond slots by the talent – so much so that he admitted to feeling “like Tyrone Powers at the end of Nightmare Alley”. Now for anyone who hasn’t seen that particular grisly treat, I can only maintainer Kenny’s recommendation to do in this way, space of time anyone who has demise know what a potent personal admission it represents. Like I say, seeing your own personality or circumstance perfectly laid bare up attached screen can be conscious of being beautiful unsetlling.
Not that it happens very often in a form still largely built on good guys and bogeymen rather than the contours and nuances of real people. And even those characters presented as everymen or women are all too often a little too airbrushed for the job. Witness the fond portrait of disenchanted in one’sitting teens(ish) men offered by Edward Norton’s protagonist in that 90s nugget Fight Club. One can’t avoid feeling it was probably embraced by the agency of its target demographic precisely because of its lack of trustworthiness., in contrast to, say, the in addition plausibly gormless form of Michael Bolton in Office Space.
Yet in that place are times during the time that a character proves to be inescapably close to the bone – and in my own experience, I know at least a conjoin of recent cases where the films featuring them have been watched by exactly the people whose personalities they match up with. The acquaintance with unmissable shades of Willem Dafoe’s neat therapist in Antichrist who went to see Von Trier’s rural opus in its first week of release, the risk-happy chancer who took in the excellent thriller In Bruges starring Colin Farrell’s risk-happy chancer – both of them had onscreen a virtual doppleganger in terms of personality, but not either appeared in any way aware of it. With the one who was later informed, the tidings went along the course of like a case of scabies.
But I’ve been there myself. Uncomfortable as it is to take in now, in my teenage years I was greatly smitten by Rumble Fish, Francis Ford Coppola’s art flick for adolescents. For weeks after first seeing it, I pouted ineptly through 80s Brighton, convinced it was only a matter of time until my likeness with Mickey Rourke’s elegantly doomed Motorcycle Boy was noted through the world at large. But the truth would, of course, have to out itself. And it did. I was never going to be the Motorcycle Boy. In fact, I wasn’t but also going to be his dopey little brother (as played by the agency of Matt Dillon). No, I knew I was actually Matt Dillon’s tag-along friend Steve, nervously polishing his glasses while recording his ponderings in a battered notebook.
And in ripe lifetime, though the realisation of it made me flinch, I knew as soon as I set eyes on him that I was seeing at least one sizable aspect of myself in the form of Barton Fink, the Coens’ damned and clammy antihero, ardent up in 40s Hollywood. I wouldn’familiarily lay claim to his talent, but the marriage of hubris and neurosis, the masochistic approach to writing, inability to adapt to hot weather and overenthusiastic dance moves – well, they were all in place. And while the result is still my favourite Coens film, it’s also the same that never fails to make me shrink into my seat with self-consciousness. Personally, I’m prepared to see almost anything when I sit below the horizon for a movie – but catching a glimpse of myself still takes more getting used to.
