- Sometimes I'm not sure who I am any more.
- Sometimes I don't like who I am any more.
- Usually I'm almost positive this whole caring about people thing is a very raw deal for the person who cares for a lot of people.
- Especially for the person who generally cares about others before oneself, when most care for themselves before others.
- I feel like I don't have faith in anything any more.
- I have no idea what I want and I hate that.
- Life isn't fair and I should just accept that, but that's not really working out.
- I'm pretty sure I'm making everything a lot more complicated than it really is.
- I'm really not sure how I'm going to deal with any of this. And I hate that too.
Now that I've gotten that fully and compltely out of my system, I'm going to stop wallowing. Though I have a feeling that one of these days, I'm just going to explode...
Anyway, I watched Cat on a Hot Tin Roof the other night, and I was a little disappointed in the alterations, especially to the ending. At the end of the play, Maggie takes a stand against Brick, insists that he help her cover up her lie, and tells him that she loves him, truly, and he smiles sadly and says, "Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?" In the movie, he's the one that says they're going to cover up her lie and that's it, pretty much, if I recall. But there was something to the ending in the play - a sort of bittersweet surrender, on Brick's part, to the buried affection deep inside him - not reborn desire for his wife. It was quaint and sad and fit right into the dramatic romance. Edward Albee noted in his foreword to the "definitive" edition of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that Tennessee Williams was a master at creating dramas that are both romantic and tough - they are both delicate and rough, loved by both men and women. The movie messed that up a little, to me.
I think they changed the Maggie/Brick/Skipper situation a little too. One of the things I loved about the play is its ambiguity about Brick and Skipper's friendship. Though it may be a provacative statement about homosexuality in the fading Old South, I prefer to think of it as Brick thought of it: something pure and real and dependable - something beautiful and untainted - a true comraderie and deep love. Brick still can't get past the fact that others - people who supposedly love him - are defiling it, that they're taking that away from him. They had something innocent and good, and so-called "loved ones" ruined it for him, even disgracing the memory for him. It's like taking a dewy half-blown blossom and throwing it in a mud puddle and stomping on it. I can fully understand Brick's resentment for that.
In doing some reading on writing effective dialogue, I'm coming across a lot of stuff that says to be very familiar with your characters' motives - that that's the most important part. You have to be very clear in understanding what your characters want, why they do what they do, what their goals are. Isn't that helpful in life, too, though? To understand why people do what they do, and what it is they want - to understand them in general. I guess that's what I love so much about people I don't immediately understand, people with lots of little idiosyncrasies and contradictions - they're complicated (or simple?) to the point that they fascinate me. Like in Pride and Prejudice:
"'I did not know before,' continued Bingley immediately, 'that you were a studier of character. It must be an amusing study.'
"'Yes, but intricate characters are the most amusing. They have at least that advantage...people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.'"
Oh, to be able to create such memorable characters as those. I guess it's worth a shot.
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Now playing: Matchbox Twenty - Bent
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