Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...protagonist is a black detective named Jonah Rhodes. He was killed in a riot before the first episode, and the story unreels in flashbacks from his diary. Jonah, at 35, is patriarch of a family of 13, including his troublemaking dropout brother, two deaf-mutes and his aunt and uncle, who are welfare applicants. In the beginning, he attends night law school and tries to make it within the structure. He becomes increasingly militant as he encounters usurious used-car dealers, unscrupulous real estate men and venal cops down at precinct headquarters. The whites, however, come off as no more...
...Africa after college to write. Brown's character, "Mr. Jiveass Nigger," is really named George Washington. A black boy on a trip to Copenhagen, he is so busy hustling the world that he has forgotten whether there is anything inside his put-on. Armah's gentle protagonist, Baako Onipa, is a "been-to"-a Ghanaian who has returned from abroad-who finds that, while he has been learning to reject the jive of commercial civilization, the disease has taken corrupting root in his homeland. What links the two disparate men is their common discovery that their insides...
...misery is equally unsatisfying. You can't feel sorry for anyone because you can't begin to identify with any of the characters, particularly the protagonist. My standard for identifying with movie characters is not high: the character may be as unintelligent or misguided as he likes, but he must have some glimmer of good intentions. La Strada , for example, which was very depressing, reached me because I could well have been the clown on the road...
...Coming Apart's interest slim as it is, consists in having two avant-garde elements at its center. The protagonist is that archetypal figure of the West in this country: the psychiatrist. In theory this could have been one of the movie's strong points: how the man's highly developed self-consciousness affected the way he lived, etc. In practice, however, Torn is unable to convince you that he is a shrink at all, let alone that any psychiatrist would be motivated to scale the heights of promiscuity in such...
...severely restricted point of view causes this incompleteness of knowledge about the protagonist's motivation. If filmed in a more typical way, the story of the psychiatrist's disintegration might have been augmented by scenes describing what he does when the movie camera is off and the nature of his relationships with his mistress and wife. The fixed-camera experiment is a radical application of the modern assumption that the teller's point of view is all-important in the interpretation of a story. The viewer never knows the "whole" situation, but only the portion that...