Literary lubrication

What is it about alcohol & writing?

A couple of of rum punches and a casual remark about a crappy movie yields an insight into successful character creation. H asked, "are we supposed to care for this dude with the little glasses?" The response from the other females of the household came, "no, he was a jerk to his ex-wife, and he's obnoxious." My first thought - "but he explained she put her career over their relationship... he's an ok guy." And I realized - the best characters are those that can be sympathetic and unsympathetic to equal proportions of the audience at the same time. The callous, insensitive husband is the misunderstood man; the over-acheiving bitch is the modern woman struggling for personal identity.

And earlier, another chance remark I made, that we expect too much from movies - most are just comic books, very few can move us like a great novel. Novel and comic book are the wrong terms - it's more like merely diverting versus deeply affecting. And then there was the position taken by Artaud - that Shakespeare ruined drama by making it too realistic, causing us to expect the depth and complexity of real life from plays. Before Shakespeare, the Elizabethan masque - a comic book, merely diverting. Unless you were in the right frame of mind, the writing of the masque of such high quality that you were truly moved.