When somebody destroys me, I want to feel it

[sovay]

I was browsing in Rodney's yesterday when I ran across the novelization of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003). I was morbidly curious, so I took ten minutes and read it. Like most novelizations, I think it was done from the shooting script, so it's an improvement on the finished film in that it includes some evidently deleted scenes in which character development occurs rather than clichés and explosions, but that didn't make it good. Mostly it reminded me that the movie annoyed me so much that I wrote 4300 words about it in 2006. I still like Jason Flemyng's Jekyll. He could have done with a better film around him.

And he's not the only one. Among characters I like, there is a small subset I have mentally classed as "better than the stories they came from." Sometimes it's an actor salvaging their screentime—I'm thinking of the time I kept watching The High Bright Sun (1964) just for Denholm Elliott's cynical British agent, or Mercedes McCambridge's torch-singing survivor standing head and shoulders above the psychobabble of The Scarf (1951), or the compulsive professionalism Peter Cushing brought to otherwise deadly roles like Henry Miles in The End of the Affair (1955). Sometimes it's the sense that a character got away from their author, like Waldo Butters in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files; he is so instantly and eccentrically himself that I was not surprised to find out he was intended as a one-off who just refused to stay offstage. Sometimes it feels like structural failure elsewhere in the narrative: Nicholas Flokos' Nike (1998) disappointed me by slamming a sudden hard right into tragedy for no good reason I could discern then or now, but its protagonist Photi Anthropotis is a lovely sad clown of a modern Greek luftmensch and I still feel very tender toward him more than fifteen years later. And every now and then I have absolutely no idea what happened, but it's a fact that I actively like Licinus Honorius of Mary Gentle's Ilario: The Lion's Eye (2006) even when I want to clobber much of the novel around him.

I could go on, but I'd rather ask you. Who are your favorite characters who deserved better stories? What narratives do you revisit just for the supporting cast or a choice subplot? (What narratives would you never revisit, but you remember that one bit really fondly?) Recommendations? Warnings? Can you fix it with fic? I'm going to see if it's too late in the day to buy donuts.

Comments

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I remember two pairs of characters from two separate John Woo films who strike me very much as being like this: Castor and Pollux Troy (Nicholas Cage and Giovanni Ribisi) from Face/Off, as well as Emil Fouchon and Pik van Cleaf (Lance Henriksen and Arnold Vosloo) from Hard Target. In both cases, I can think of two separate fic writers who became totally obsessed with these characters and wrote a boat-load of fic that was all about them, to the exclusion of everybody else in the films. But it's difficult, because the films are not exactly terrible on their own...I mean, Face/Off is a crazy classic, while Hard Target is more of an acquired taste. For my money, though, both remain imminently watchable and full of people I'd hang with, on both sides of the moral divide. It's just that I definitely feel more of a pull towards villains, and always have. (In both cases, these characters also form sort-of couples--Castor and Pollux are brothers, one continually taking care of the other, while Emil and Pik may not be overtly sleeping with each other, but DAMN do the actors play it like they are.)

Oh yeah, and I'd totally watch an entire film about the central outlaw vampire trio of Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark, even though I love the film itself as it is: former Confederate soldier Jesse Hooker (Henriksen again), his woman Diamondback (Jeannette Goldstein) and their daredevil, spurs-wearing "son" Severin (Bill Paxton). Paxton used to joke that they sat around between takes brainstorming a prequel, and I would eat that up with a spoon.

[sovay]

(In both cases, these characters also form sort-of couples--Castor and Pollux are brothers, one continually taking care of the other, while Emil and Pik may not be overtly sleeping with each other, but DAMN do the actors play it like they are.)

There were a pair of gunmen like that in The Big Combo (1955) and I was really impressed; they were as explicit a couple as the writers could get around the edges of the Code and everyone in the theater seemed very sorry that they did not succeed in getting out of town before their boss sent them a bomb instead of a payoff. They were not very bright, but devoted to one another. Plus the immortal line, "The police'll be looking for us in every closet in town!"

Oh yeah, and I'd totally watch an entire film about the central outlaw vampire trio of Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark, even though I love the film itself as it is: former Confederate soldier Jesse Hooker (Henriksen again), his woman Diamondback (Jeannette Goldstein) and their daredevil, spurs-wearing "son" Severin (Bill Paxton).

Oh, God, I need to see that movie. lesser_celery has been telling me about it for years and all signs point to me loving it.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I like most of the Raymond Chandler I've read, but one of the reasons for this is his talent for making the minor characters intriguingly three-dimensional even if they only get a scene or two two stretch their legs. I'd love a story devoted to Marlowe's colleagues in "Trouble is My Business" who are basically cisswapped Nero Wolfe and Archie; to the T.S. Elliot-loving chauffeur in "The Long Goodbye;" or the psychiatrist who threw away his career and eloped with his dangerously unstable patient in I-forget-which-one.

[sovay]

I'd love a story devoted to Marlowe's colleagues in "Trouble is My Business" who are basically cisswapped Nero Wolfe and Archie; to the T.S. Elliot-loving chauffeur in "The Long Goodbye;" or the psychiatrist who threw away his career and eloped with his dangerously unstable patient in I-forget-which-one.

Congratulations; you have succeeded in making me want to read Raymond Chandler.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I still don't recall which Chandler featured the psychiatrist, but I've encountered two novels by different authors in which a doctor abandons ethics and common sense to fall for a dangerously unstable patient, and then there's Cat People, so it may qualify as a minor noir trope.

[sovay]

I've encountered two novels by different authors in which a doctor abandons ethics and common sense to fall for a dangerously unstable patient, and then there's Cat People, so it may qualify as a minor noir trope.

I think it is. I mean, it's also one of my benchmarks for a depiction of a terrible doctor, but I've seen it more than once myself.

(Even in The Seventh Victim (1943), where it doesn't get him killed, Dr. Judd still has the poor sense to get involved with his patients. The hot, disturbed, female ones, anyway.)