Everyday people.

I was watching a Brit Box police procedural, one of my favorite pastimes, when something jolted me.  One of the characters was the manager on a construction site, and he was portrayed as sort of dimwitted and comically inept.  I still liked the show, and hope they renew it in the future, but the moment reminded me of my strong bias against stereotypes, which I think can be a form of pernicious, soft bigotry.

            Some of my best friends have been construction managers, and let me assure you, they are anything but dimwitted.  It’s impossible; the job is much too demanding and complex.  But scriptwriters often believe everyone shares their casual prejudices, most obviously toward so-called working-class people, or anyone who wears a company uniform or lives outside an urban zip code.  This predisposition isn’t just about lower social status.  As soon as a wealthy businessperson shows up on the scene, you know he or she is a villain.  That’s their theatrical responsibility. I’ve known a lot of these people as well, and I’d only call a few avaricious sociopaths (names withheld to protect the innocent, namely me.)

                Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy for writers to be trapped by stereotypes.  It’s partly a matter of efficiency – to telegraph the nature of a particular character without a lot of description, tapping into preconceptions.  But it’s also human nature to let lazy assumptions slip out of our jumbled unconscious and creep into the work.  

                There’s a creative consultant in the advertising world named Tom Monahan who has a simple solution.  He would advise us to sketch out a character as they first present themselves, then turn the dial 180 degrees.  I loved that idea, and quite intentionally applied it in fiction.

 

            It led me to make the most benign ensemble player in one of my series an old-money billionaire.  One of my librarians was a card-counting kleptomaniac.  A CPA was a handsome playboy.  And naturally, my protagonist is a cabinetmaker.  In an earlier iteration, he was a corporate executive, and before that a championship boxer.  If anyone asked if that was realistic, I’d say I once knew one.  My grandfather.

            I’m not the only one who likes to do this.  In fact, I feel that mystery and thriller writers tend to upend stereotypes as a matter of course.  It’s another way to inject surprise and uncertainty into the narrative.  It’s part of our unifying philosophy that nothing is ever quite what it seems.  And what’s better than sliding in a little social commentary under the radar?

            To be fair to the arts, we’ve come a long way from when representations were all color coded, so to speak, and we're better for it.  One of the last to fall has been portrayals of the disabled.  When a character shows up in a wheelchair (my mother used one of those), I’m always tense until, at the end, they’re just another player in the drama who happens to be paralyzed from the waist down.  Characters with autism (a condition shared by one of my grand children - I have a family full of steroetypes) are starting to demonstrate that a different sort of brain can actually confer special abilities. 

              I appreciate another Brit Box show, Code of Silence, where the deaf protagonist’s skill as a lip reader is the central superpower underlying the concept.  Though aside from that, she’s just a regular young woman trying to fumble her way through life’s indiscriminate abuses like the rest of us. 

            In the aforementioned British show with the foolish construction manager, one of his crew, a seemingly loutish lad, turns out to be the evil genius behind the crime.  For me, all was redeemed, though on further thought, was the boss a fool because he was in construction, or because he was a manager?