Word: protagonist
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...point, McDonell’s protagonist, Mike, wants us all dead. As he walks across campus on a late December evening, Mike tells us: “I imagined that it wasn’t Christmas Eve and people were around, but everyone was frozen, suffocated under the snow. It was a very beautiful scene...
...four years ago, three years after the novel's publication, when writer-director Mike Mills invited me to his house in California to discuss his adaptation of the book. He had shortened the time span of the narrative, combined several young female characters into one and focused on the protagonist's complex relationship with his unhappy mother. He had improved my work, in other words, and I knew from the moment I read his script that his movie might be better than my book...
...move through the world unseen: it is a primal, universal fantasy. Most people who indulge it probably imagine the advantages that H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man expected from it, "the mystery, the power, the freedom." But novelists, those eternal spoilsports, keep pointing out the fantasy's downside. Wells' protagonist eventually despaired of himself as a "helpless absurdity" before being hunted down and beaten to death. Now two contemporary writers, an artful veteran and a clever newcomer, offer variations on the theme that are hardly more optimistic. Their central characters, while not quite killed, lose virtually everything else along with their...
...contrast, the protagonist of Thomas Berger's Being Invisible cannot seem to invent an identity for himself on paper or in person; when he uses his invisibility, clumsily, to filch $2,200 from the cash drawer of a bank, he is so conscience-stricken that he returns the money before closing time. Fred Wagner, a copywriter for a mail-order catalog and a would-be novelist, is the sort of wimp whose wife of four years would leave him out of "contempt for his habitual failure to claim justice from the petty tyrants of quotidian life." One day he discovers...
...story 20 years ago: Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour and Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her spoke of suburban housewives who supplemented their allowances by turning tricks. The twist in Lizzie Borden's new film is that its call-girl protagonist Molly (Louise Smith) uses her earnings to support her half of a lesbian relationship...