It’s raining again in the bay. The rain is so miserable here, unlike the rain in Pittsburgh. I think it’s a matter of expectations. If you don’t come to expect blue skies, then you will never be disappointed when it rains.
An old coworker of mine, before she became a technical writer, worked as a paralegal for an unscrupulous law firm somewhere in the bay. One afternoon, during the daily episode of writer’s block, she peeled an orange outside my office door at IBM while describing to me the most horrific lawyer she ever had the misfortune of meeting. She and her officemates, through a long series of events, became aware that this lawyer had accidentally run someone over on the highway in the middle of the night and proceeded to leave the scene without telling anyone. The pedestrian died, and the lawyer continued about his daily business as if nothing had happened. My coworker later decided, in a fiction writing class she took, to write a story about a man who killed another man with no remorse. Her teacher had handed the story back to her and told her to rewrite it, on account of the fact that “no one could be that evil.”
Many years ago I made the poor decision to watch a really bad movie (out of choice, to my horror!) called Dragonheart, in which the supporting actor, as it were, was a villain of unbelievable proportions. The movie was really not “bad” in that you wanted to jab your eyes with a pointed object after ten minutes of it (that’s more like the South Park movie), in fact, it had the general makings of a decent movie — a fairly interesting if somewhat predictable plot, acting that’s better than daytime soaps, and a few flashy special effects. While it limped along with some torturous script writing, I didn’t want to run out of the theater at any point (that’s Star Wars episode II). What really irked me about this movie was the “bad guy.” The bad guy was an evil prince saved by a generous dragon who gives him half of his heart. Well it turns out princey is a real ass to pretty much everyone, and you spend the whole movie waiting for him to die, or at the very least, to do what your creative writing professor always insisted in college — to show his other side. Well, this guy had no other side. He was evil till the end, dying only when the dragon finally admitted he made a huge mistake and committed suicide in order to remedy it (haven’t we all had days like that).
This movie annoyed me on two diverging levels. Firstly, this character was what we, as snooty writers, call “flat.” Just like my coworker’s writing teacher who told her “no one is that evil,” I stubbornly believed that this bloodthirsty villain should still have a soft spot. He never repents, not even as he breathes his last breath. On the other hand, in my version of reality, such people do exist, even if I don’t want to watch them in movies. I think that generally, many people want to believe the best, that even hardened criminals have an inner pinkness, that even the seemingly unremorseful can be rehabilitated. No one wants to think, this person really doesn’t care, this person is only out for himself, I can never believe what this person says. If we thought this about everyone, we’d never function as a society, or at best, we’d all be living in New York City. Yet, do we subconsciously do this when we lock our doors, remove our stereo faceplates, ask to see receipts before reimbursing someone?
Where has this element of trust gone? Can someone be evil down to the last? I asked myself this very same question last night as I drove down 280 in the darkness, listening to Vitali’s Chaconne on the radio. I went out last night with an old “friend” who I thought, in some magical, mystical moment was actually feeling sorry about his impending departure from the state and from me. To my surprise I thought I saw a flat character growing round before my eyes, a man with a hint of emotion where there was none before. His persistence, or insistence, as it were, that I stay at his house waned and waxed, and I became aware of that doubt I have so often felt in the past year, that uncertainty that someone was not telling me the whole truth. By the time I was skirting my way out the front door, he had become completely plastic to me, and I drove away feeling like Indiana Jones escaping an elaborate Aztec trap. I was more relieved than elated, more sad than triumphant. I had wanted to exit glamorously and confidently, but the uncomfortable doubt he had instilled in me left me shaking my head down the highway. Could it be that everyone is only out for themselves? The truth is difficult, no doubt, but I wonder why it is so often withheld from me, unless it is simply to further someone else’s personal interests. I sincerely hope that is untrue.
