T
Tegan
Guest
Original poster
"I always thought it would be kind of fun to introduce people to characters they maybe hadn't met before, or hadn't wanted to meet." -Lou Reed
The trend for playing/reading about Average Joe is put into a Not so Average situation is quite fun. What about Freaky Fred? It can be just as fun to create a character who deviates from what we would call 'normal'. No matter what your personal beliefs, there's no denying that these characters are fascinating and well rounded, because they force the audience to think outside of their comfort zone.
A few of my favorites:
Trans America:
Felicity Huffman does a kick ass job of portraying Bree, a middle-aged transexual on the verge of finally having her sex-change operation approved, making her a biological woman. However, when she receives a call from her biological son from a previous life time, Bree has to undertake a trans American road trip, under the guise as a friend of her 'male identity', to find her son a safe place to live, while not revealing to him that she is actually his father. From this movie came a memorable quote that is now sprinkled into gender studies discourses across academia:
"The American Psychiatric Association categorizes gender dysphoria as a very serious mental disorder. After my operation, not even a gynecologist will be able to detect anything out of the ordinary about my body. l will be a woman. Don't you find it odd that plastic surgery can cure a mental disorder?"
Trainspotting
It's a film/book about heroin addicts, drunks, rage-o-holics, bad parenting and how 'It's shite being Scottish!" Darkly funny and definitely not for the squeamish.
Freeway
OK, I'm just gonna come right out and say that this movie is just gawd awful and that you're going to think that pretty much every character in the film is an abhorrent piece of shit, except for Vanessa Lutz. You're rooting for her the whole way. Reese Witherspoon plays an illiterate teenage girl who decides to leave LA to live a better life with her estranged grandmother after her mother is arrested for prostitution and her perverted step father is arrested for child molestation. After her car breaks down, she's picked up by serial rapist Kiefer Sutherland and the two are at each other's throats for the rest of the film.
Though this could easily be called a bad movie, it's still well worth the watch because of scenes like this one. And, it draws light to Western society's tendency to place blame upon the victims of rape based on social class.
Secretary
BDSM is usually regarded as a 'taboo' act: purely for kink and a kind of sick sexual deviancy. However, that doesn't seem to be the case with this romantic comedy about a young twenty-something, Lee Holloway, freshly released from psychiatric care for being a teenage cutter and how she prefers being spanked and bound by her attorney boss to having sex with her boyfriend.
OK, so I know what you're thinking.
Unfortunately, there ain't much else I can say about this film without completely spoiling it, except that it is ultimately learning to love yourself so that you can love others. If nothing else, watch it for the Tomato Scene.
So who are your favorite Wild Side characters? It can be from anywhere: literature, film, music even characters of your own creation.