Opinion Piece - I'm Sick of Seeing Characters Like Me

I know the title sounds a little odd but this is one of those posts where you're going to need to hear me out on it. It's confusing though, right? I mean, who doesn't want to see themselves portrayed on screen? Me apparently and it's a revelation I reached while watching the film Adventureland. The main character of Adventureland is a typically nerdy Jesse Eisenberg who plays a loser who moons after this girl he finds at his job but spends most of his time talking to his equally nerdy work colleague. Now, aside from getting the girl, Eisenberg plays a character who is pretty much me down to a tee and I could not stand the prick at all. Obviously, you usually want to see characters like yourself on screen because you relate to them but I've realised over the last few years that it can be much more interesting to see characters less like me and not even because of diversity or anything like that. Often, by focusing on a character less like me, films can end up touching me more than they could otherwise.

Before coming to this realisation, I'd always cherish characters like me in films or TV and its only looking back that I realise how much they're actually annoying. Maybe this is all down to a sense of self awareness making me hate anything that reminds me how much I hate myself but that's beside the point. One example of a character like me being done fairly well is The Way, Way Back about a loser kid who spends a summer away from home with his family and falls in love with a girl who doesn't fall in love back. That last note is pretty much the only thing surprising about it because of how anti-Hollywood a moment it is because otherwise, it being a character like me, most of the beats proved entirely unsurprising. Another interesting example is the main character Clay from 13 Reasons Why. I really enjoyed that first season because that anguish he was going through was exactly what I would have been experiencing in that situation and watching him going on that journey felt like a journey of personal discovery. It's also why that second season was so aggravating because it made Clay a much more irritating character who became too like me in that he was just kind of on the sidelines complaining about stuff and that's the real danger. When you make a movie or show with a character who is too much like your audience, it can make them ignore everything you've made and remind them why they hate themselves.

So to a more positive area then, one which came out more when watching films like Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird. The former is about a young gay man discovering himself and blooming romantically whereas the latter is about a young woman in the year of her life before she leaves for Uni. In both cases, there's huge elements I relate to but at least one key element that is entirely different to my life and somehow, they tell stories that I fall in love with. No, I can't relate to falling in love with a man in my family's Italian home (because to remind my Uni housemates, I'm not actually gay) and no, I don't know what it's like to be a teenage girl in 2002 Sacramento and yet CMBYN was my favourite film of last year and Lady Bird is currently my favourite of this year. Another one of the most beautiful films I've seen in recent years was Moonlight where again, it focuses on a gay man discovering himself but it touches on many little things that remind me of myself while also teaching me something about who I can be. All three of these films have been praised for their diversity and inclusion and all that but I think really what they should be celebrated for is showing us people who are not ourselves that we relate more to than we could ever imagine.

In many ways, that's the conclusion these beautiful films help me come to. Films and TV about characters like me are set in the past, they show me versions of myself that I've grown out of and come to hate whereas films that are about characters to whom I can only partly relate to, help teach me about who I can be and really should be. It's about me stagnating as a person versus me growing and evolving into less of a piece of shit than ever before. Anyway, that's why I hate Adventureland.