6 August 2010

I have always been a dreamer, for as long as I can remember. My main fantasy, if you can call it that, it to be a hero of some kind, to do something that makes me the subject of awe in others.

I was musing this morning as I sat on the train about how unlikely it would be for me to be portrayed in a film, or at least about the problems of doing so. The thing is, that films always seem to show the hero in a constant state. He may get worse, he may get better, but he never seems to get worse, then better, then worse again.

There are no great number of cripples in film or television drama, at least not as the hero. Of course there was Ironside, and there's House (now that's my kind of hero - the misanthropic almost anti-hero) but neither of them gets better one day, then worse the next. If they do change, it's central to the plot, not an adjunct. It's as if it would be a distraction from the central story. A bit like a character going to the toilet for no reason other than to have a pee - no clandestine meeting with an emeny agent, or secret assignation with a rent boy, just to answer the call of nature!

But then I guess it wouldn't work. People like things to happen in a linear fashion, nice and neatly packaged for them. And perhaps for most people that's how life happens - you get older, richer, poorer, sicker, in a nice neat readily understandable progression.

I don't yearn for my life to work that way. I'm quite content with the unpredictability. It is what it is.