Butch? Or Sundance?

Butch? Or Sundance?

by Nancy Martin

The first movie that made me bawl BUCKETS of tears was not Bambi or Dumbo (because we lived in a small town too small for a movie theater, I didn't see those movies until I was way, way too cool to cry at stories)  but the movie Becket.

Becket stars Peter O'Toole as King Henry II of England and Richard Burton as his (at first) lusty drinking buddy Thomas Becket. These two happy-go-lucky ne'er-do-wells have some fun, romping adventures until Henry gets the idea that he can solve all his kingly problems with the Pope by appointing Thomas as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Things go awry when Thomas decides to give up good times for religion, and the two buddies become sworn enemies until Henry--in a drunken rage---hints that somebody ought to kill the "meddlesome priest," so some henchmen go murder Thomas, and that's the end. 

 

Yeah, okay, we could talk about all the big religious themes and meaty subject matter of statesmanship wrapped up in this story. To me, though, the story was the tragedy of two buddies--men who share some common qualities and reflect the best (strength?) and worst (ego?) back at each other-- who ended up at odds with each other, and that just broke my pre-teen heart.  I hid from my famiy in the bathroom and wept.

But, in retrospect, this is also the first movie where I became aware of the Kirk vs. Spock conundrum.

Ladies, if you needed a fictional boyfriend, would you choose Captain Kirk, the lusty, chatty, party boy, man of action? Or the cool, cerebral Mr. Spock who undoubtedly hides a complex heart and a prodigious sexual appetite beneath his quiet exterior? 

 

Let me put it another way. Butch or Sundance?

 

Or:

Mel Gibson or Danny Glover? Turner or Hooch?  How about some more current examples, Nancy?  Well, I must rely on the backbloggers for that. Suggestions?

In romance writing parlance, this question might come down to: Do you prefer thrusters? Or sliders?

Which character deserves love and self-actualization?

Here's a wonderful video by the AV Club that examines some characters who don't deserve love because they're just not fully-fleshed by the writer(s). (Those of you who adore Bridget Jones should brace yourselves) :

 

As NaNoWriMo winds down, all the writers who've been slugging coffee and banging out pages for a month now face the even greater challenge: The re-write.  How to shape 50,000 frantically typed words into an 80,000 word novel?

The question up for today's discussion is: Too shallow to be loved? Can you develop a thruster into a character with enough depth worthy of the reader's attention? Can you give a slider enough personality to make him remotely interesting beneath the strong and silent routine?  Can you make your reader bawl buckets the way Becket turned me into a quivering mess of emotion, hiding in the bathroom? How do you shape a caricature into a character with complex goals, and complex past, a hole-in-the-heart worthy of reader interest and---oh, yeah---all without resorting to a dump of backstory in the first 50 pages?

Or, if you prefer the pass/fail question: What the hell makes either of these archetypes so damn sexy??