Friday, May 16, 2008
Yap: Iron girl
By Januar E. Yap
Meanwhile
MY BEST friend dozed off just before Tony Stark managed to engineer his power suit in an Afghan cave. She was the Rip van Winkle of the movie house and history passed with the carefree heir of an arms industrialist turning into an armored crusader.
“He was a developing character,” I said, and in my report, I must’ve blurted out the phrase three times.
“You are such a teacher,” she said, and I was roused from three hundred years of sleep. “A changed man” would’ve worked just fine, but I plucked out a terrible term from a textbook with an obscure copyright.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” In this parking lot, lit by a line of lethargic mercury lamps, I blushed in shame.
Well, it’s like this. Tony Stark bares his heart, already a downsized energy reactor gadget, to his dad’s best friend and business partner. He tells him it is what sustains him, and that the technology works. The brobdingnagian reactor need not be in the size of ten elephants. The sneaky confidant in the name of Obadiah Stone eventually leaps to the other side, and becomes the enemy.
Stone, too, was a developing character, I suppose. Although he must’ve been inherently wicked.
Well, here. The other term for developing character, says my dusty reference, is dynamic character. These are thinking individuals reshaped midway by the turn of events. Forrest Gump does not fall under this—a moron, by any other name, is still a moron. When you say “round characters,” however, you mean someone stunned between choices, and stunned because he sees gray, not black and white.
The human brain is an ugly organ with endless odds and ends, and it takes the nature of a 3D image. When you say “static character,” you mean one who is hard core, say, for example a brain-dead, incurable leftist. “Flat characters” are what you call stereotypes, unchangeable, predictable.
Politics, of course, is a saga stuffed to the rafters with the developing and the round. Junie Martinez, for example, shakes hands with the governor, that’s one. If they say there is a falling out between Rep. Cuenco and Mayor Tommy, you have our prototypes on a silver platter.
There is, by the way, a rather unglamorous term, which certainly my yellowed tome does not recommend, and that is “balimbing,” a highly angular fruit that is perfect image for multiplicity.
If, by some magical extension, President Arroyo hangs Abalos on a tree, we shall have our evolved protagonist at the palace. A car smuggler starts singing “Jesus is alive!” and the Red Sea parts again. If the Presidential Anti-Smuggling Group suddenly discloses names, we shall have the stuff of Hollywood in our backyard.
One of my favorite writers David Mamet rethinks, “Why am I no longer a brain-dead liberal?” The world is not a classroom teaching values, but a marketplace, he says. “I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama,” he says.
Round characters, I was thinking. My best friend caresses my belly. Blame it on Talisay’s lechon. Not beer, because, like my poet friend, I have dropped boozing as a way of life. My “iron girl” dozes off in my arms while Tony Stark battles drooling devils in the dunes.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (May 16, 2008 issue)
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