Sleeping beauties

Getting to know someone is no easy feat. Humans are social animals and as such we are aware of the potential negative consequences  of misbehaving, so we all know how to be not exactly on our best behavior, but on the one that best suits a given formal situation. No one would act the same being introduced to your parents-in-law and in a job interview. That is why more and more people are starting to give up on job interviews as part of the selection process. One of my favorite journalists, Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell, reported in a podcast episode how the first time he interviewed someone to be his assistant he did not know what to ask, so they just had a 30-minute long chat and Gladwell promised to call back with a decision within a week. Then, after ten minutes he realized that the candidate was convivial enough and that he would not know more about her performance unless he employed her, so he did and they successfully worked together for many years.

Many years ago, when I was just 16, I attended a summer training camp for youth club leaders and I spent one whole week with 20 other youngsters from different parts. Of course, the beginning took some ice breaking, but soon everything started to roll: we were divided into groups and given different assignments, so even on the first day we were actively discussing over lunch with people we had just met. One key aspect of the experience was the sense of community that was instilled upon us by the camp leaders, that we gladly embraced. I was lodged in a single room but I have to admit that I spent very little time in there. The evening conversations in the garden drew long until one or two in the morning and the wake-up call camp at 7 a.m. sharp, so I certainly depleted my sleep reserves in exchange for a wonderful week. This amount of time spent together in a variety of situations, including stress about getting our project ready, make us feel that we had gotten to know each other pretty well. On the day of the departure many of us left with the impression that we had made some friends for life, and even if that did not hold true in the end, it certainly was eye-opening.

 

Photo: The Sleeping Beauty by John Collier

The same need of shared time is applicable when trying to know a fictional character. The most brilliant writers are able to unveil their personalities bit by bit, putting the characters in successive situations and surprising us every now and then with a reaction which is different from what we had anticipated. But in the end, fictional characters are reflections of real ones and can have the same complexity as real people, having to deal with conflicting interests, responding in radically different ways depending on the context, even evolving in their taste and affection as it happens in real life. And as in real life as well, it is necessary to spend some time "with the character" to be able to know them. This can happen by being spectators of their adventures but also by the character's internal monologue, listening to the thoughts racing through their mind, if that is the way the author has decided to present them, but there is a certain limit to the amount of information that can be presented in a page, so a deep description of a character requires several pages.

This intrinsic limitation often keeps me away from short stories. They are certainly fun and easy to write, because you do not have to make a very careful design of the characters and the world they inhabit, but reading them often leaves me wanting for more. By the time I build some rapport with the characters the story is over and I am left with the bitter-sweet feeling that I liked the story but I would have preferred to have it told more slowly, so that I would have know more details and had more time to enjoy it.

The same effect happens in visual entertainment too: after the 100 or 120 minutes the movie is over and the characters that you have quickly learnt to love are frozen in the limbo of the ending, never to age a single day longer, sometimes with only prospects of being able to solve a problem they have, to find a person they are missing, to complete a book they are writing. Perhaps that explains the recent popularity of movie series, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the X-Men film series or the saga of The Lord of the Rings. All these collections have the advantage of leveraging on a set of main characters that appear in various installments, allowing for broader narrative arcs and deeper character development, much in the fashion of regular TV series, but with the advantage of much larger production budget. When properly written, each movie can be understood on its own, but it still brings enough new insights into the characters as to make them interesting to the follower of the series.

The development of streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime has brought about a change in the release of series. Whereas in TV broadcast it was common to air one 44-minute episode per week for the length of a season (e.g. 22 episodes) it is not uncommon now that the whole series get released at once, normally with a somewhat reduced episode count (somewhere between 8 and 12). In the end the effect is like having an 8-hour long film that can be either binge-watched or perhaps two or three episodes at a time. The simultaneous release means that many viewers will not have a "mental gap" between consecutive episodes, so the need to have a recap is much less urgent (as a matter of fact, Netflix can automatically skip the recap at the beginning of an episode if it detects that you have just viewed the previous one).

However, sooner or later all  movies and series reach the end. Yesterday evening Karen and I watched the series finale of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and the feelings were, just as with any ending, mixed. After 176 episodes we got to know many of the characters pretty well. Some we loved, we hated others, many were indifferent or ambivalent, but all of them where to a greater or lesser extent familiar. The overall narrative arc received a well deserved ending after seven seasons, but one can only wonder what is going to be of Major Kira, Dr. Bashir or Chief O'Brien. There will probably be the occasional cameo in episodes of later series of the franchise, but otherwise they will become, once again, sleeping beauties: masterly crafted characters that will fall in a deep sleep until the next viewer wakes them up with a touch of the remote control. Paraphrasing the old philosophical question, do characters exist when nobody is reading the book in which they are contained or watching the movie where they are portrayed? In the 1982 film Star Trek: the Wrath of Khan, McCoy states "He is not dead. As long as we remember him". So perhaps once we have known a character they continue to live in some form in our memory, so that the preservation of that beautiful creation is not limited to the digital media. Instead, we also become containers for those sleeping beauties. Have a nice weekend.