Sunday 1 February 2009

Award-Winning Tragedies

(Note: If you have not seen The Reader or Revolutionary Road, or read the books, and you don't want to know what happens, then don't read on!)

Kate Winslet won two Golden Globes for her performance in The Reader and Revolutionary Road and is now up for the Baftas and the Oscars.

She is excellent in both and they are good films.

However, it is hard to escape the fact that the two characters she plays kill themselves off at the end.

Does one have to die in a tragedy?

I think not.

If our heros, heroines, villains and tortured souls all killed themselves off - directly or indirectly - what would that mean for the rest of us?

2 comments:

Paul Taberham said...

good question. i think the idea goes, and will continue to go in hollywood that a good role that an actor can really sink their teeth into is when they are asked to portray extreme psychic states.

it's a shame really, since most people very seldom are in extreme psychic states. life is generally compised of that space in the middle, but this frame of mind is seldom celebrated. it should be

Karen Burke said...

I think we should see more tragedies in which people survive. Surviving is more difficult to do.