Bledsoe in a Sympathetic Light
Bledsoe is a striking character in the narrator's past. He only appears for three or so chapters in the book, and yet almost twenty chapters later he still affects the narrator. He’s an interesting antagonist who seems to be living
large by knowing how to play the game right. At the same time, after I had seen
him sans “mask” he quickly began to lose appeal. In fact after the exposure of
the contents of the letters he gave to the narrator, which had a huge build up,
he just disappeared. The sense of mystery was gone. But then, I thought back to
Swimming with Sharks, and realized
that Bledsoe could be the sympathetic antagonist, or rather a tough love father
figure, who teaches the protagonist harsh lessons through harsher means, but
with the protagonist’s best interests at heart. This would have been an even
more intriguing element to his character and would make even his supposedly
unmasked persona into a mask, covering a man with a hard outer shell but a
sympathetic heart.
In Swimming with Sharks, Guy, a young
Hollywood writer, becomes assistant to Buddy Ackerman, a big movie producer and
one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. The job working for Buddy is known
for having a “good lineage”: the previous 4-5 assistants have all gone on to
power and fortune in their next jobs. Guy starts his first day and Buddy seems
like a great guy until Buddy asks for a packet of Sweet ‘n’ Low, and Guy brings
him a packet of Equal. This does not go over well with Buddy, and he chews him
out until the point where Guy is afraid he’s lost his job. This scene is very
reminiscent of the scene with the Narrator and Bledsoe after he takes Mr.
Norton to Trueblood’s house and the Golden Day.
From this point on Buddy is shown
as being nothing but abusive, yelling, insulting, and throwing things at Guy
every time he makes a simple mistake. Buddy even seems to be pleased with
himself after he does this too, smiling to himself as soon as Guy leaves. This
too seems familiar to Bledsoe, with him taking pride in his “mask”. Over the
course of the movie, Buddy is shown further manipulating Guy, not only verbally
abusing him, but pretending to be on his side before stealing his work and
taking credit from the CEO. This is also like Bledsoe’s act in front of the
other board members. Guy does progressively learn though, and it seems that he
too is learning the ropes starting to get a hand on things, like the narrator
with his small moments of rebellion in the early part of the novel.
We then cut to a scene (more than a
year in the future) where Guy has evidently had it with Buddy. He breaks into
his house and tortures him for all of the bad things he has done to him. At
this point we begin to see a different side of Buddy. We learn Buddy’s wife was
killed and raped by gangsters after she tried to help a car that appeared to
have broken down on Christmas Eve. Buddy then says to Guy “I know what it’s
like, I can appreciate this. I hated authority, hated all my bosses…. Look it’s
like they say, if you’re not a rebel by twenty you’ve got no heart, but if you
haven’t turned establishment by thirty you’ve got no brains. There are no storybook
romances, no fairy tale endings. So before you run out and change the world,
ask yourself what do you really want?”
The movie then cuts back to Guy a
year into his job. He’s started to get cocky, he has a nicer car, he now wears
a suit and sunglasses, and is shown talking on the phone to people in the same
condescending and sarcastic manner as Buddy does when he doesn’t get what he
asked for. Guy then notices Buddy pretending to heap praise on him to the other
executives on the phone, but Guy notices the light go off signaling the line
going dead. We cut back ahead to Buddy’s house as he’s being held captive and
Guy confronts him about this asking “Did you really think I was that stupid?” Buddy then attacks him saying
“I told you what you needed to hear! You were getting lazy, complacent,
complete job burnout, and don’t think I didn’t notice. You didn’t give a shit
anymore, dragging your feet everywhere, telling people you were doing my job!”
This part of the movie has faint echoes of New York and the Brotherhood, where
the narrator starts to get cocky, he starts dressing the way Bledsoe does, and
starts “becoming” Bledsoe.
Another parallel is Buddy’s line “I
didn’t make the rules, I play by them.” This seems oddly reminiscent of Bledsoe’s
discussion with the narrator bragging about his mask where he says the same
thing.
At the end Guy learns Buddy was
being so tough on him, because if Guy could handle everything he threw at him,
he could handle any job. At the end of the movie Guy becomes an executive, and
all the little comments Buddy made, seeming to compliment only his own ego
shifted meaning, now seeming to be thoughtful advice sprinkled among the hate
he had to endure to get this position.
So what do you think? Can Bledsoe,
who keeps haunting the narrator’s dreams even now, be seen as someone who only
was hard on him so he could learn how to play the game as a black man in
America? Am I reading too much into this comparison? I’ll be glad to hear
anything you have to say.
Bledsoe giving the narrator a little "tough love"? Hmm . . . it's hard to tell much about his motivations, but in the end, all of the narrator's "disillusionments," however painful they are at the time, turn out to be necessary to point him in the right direction. But where he ends up--underground and self-obsessed--do we have any reason to think Bledsoe would be *pleased* with this?
ReplyDeleteBut maybe his personal motives don't matter much. It's the *effect* of what he says to the narrator that matters. (Likewise, his alter-ego, the Vet, seems to take a genuinely "mentor-like" role that afternoon on the bus, but the narrator brushes him off as "crazy." Ultimately, I'd suggest that what the Vet tells him is even more influential.)