As we watched the movie (let’s withhold the title as being irrelevant to my point), I was struck that these were not characters I would – or could – ever draft. Even if I’d managed to conjure up the range of members of the extremely dysfunctional family, they wouldn’t be believable, arising as they do from a world quite alien to mine. (Not that my family didn’t have its, uh, dysfunctions.)
It’s an awareness I’m having with increasing frequency – or at least maybe it’s just a heightened recognition. It involves not just family dynamics, either, but extends to a perception of romantic attractions or destructive people in the workplace or political office and beyond.
In the case of this particular movie, each character was appalling in a distinctive way and played to perfection by a top-line cast, which only added to my admiration of the scriptwriter’s achievement, one author to another.
Could it be I’m simply becoming more and more aware of how wide and varied our world really is?
Jnana's Red Barn 
Didn’t Tolstoy say something about all happy families being alike and every unhappy families being unhappy in its own way? 🙂
And then he went on to show us that “good” characters are the less interesting ones in the story.
Maybe it’s me just getting older, but it feels like people’s clocks are wound up too tight. Strange things happen when the clock spring breaks. I had that happen to me.
True. But then there are some people who are just nasty from the day they’re born … and then just get worse.
I know some of those people. No fixing them, best to stay far-far away.
the world is an interesting place! as a practicing Christian i often feel like an alien these days!