Saturday, September 29, 2012

Bledsoe as a Well-Meaning Character


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.

1 comment:

  1. 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?

    But 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.)

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