Category Archives: Alter Ego

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Darran McCann is George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life

It's a Wonderful Life

Darran McCann was born in Co. Armagh in 1979. He graduated from Trinity College Dublin and Dublin City University before becoming a journalist with Belfast’s Irish News. He went on to write, teach and study at Queen’s University Belfast. His debut, After the Lockout, a story about freedom and repression, is set in Ireland in 1917, and tells the story of socialist gunman Victor Lennon and his battle with the local parish priest Stanislaw Benedict for the souls of the people in his home village. Darran McCann’s filmic alter ego is George Bailey, protagonist of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). EITHNE FARRY

The narrative of It’s a Wonderful Life concerns the grinding-down of a good man, to the point of utter despair. George Bailey (played with never-greater integrity by James Stewart) is a character of uncommon ambition and wanderlust: his many and varied plans and ambitions are consistent only in that they will take him far from his little hometown of Bedford Falls. And his ambitions are within his grasp. Frequently, a train, boat or plane, or a job or investment opportunity or place at college awaits, and there’s always someone on hand to assure George that no one will blame him for taking it. He is always free to choose his dreams.

Yet George always chooses selflessly. The story of his life is a litany of frustration, his plans always deferred, each selfless act bringing fresh hardship and heightened frustration. Ultimately, George hits rock-bottom, and only the magic realist intervention of Clarence, his guardian angel, prevents his suicide.

So why would I, or anyone, wish to be George Bailey?

Well, after his trip with Clarence through a world in which he never existed, George attains a level of consciousness that is surely beyond the grasp of all but deities.

But that’s not it.

There’s a philosophical ruthlessness to It’s a Wonderful Life that belies the film’s Christmassy reputation. It’s an easy truism that doing the right thing is hard, but It’s a Wonderful Life dramatises just how hard. George is punished, not rewarded for his goodness, yet he never succumbs to cynicism. His dilemmas are ever more unforgiving, the price of character grows ever greater, the life he wishes for grows ever more remote; yet George always makes the hard (and right) choice.

Can there be a more straightforward definition of morality? Of heroism? Of goodness?

And who doesn’t want to be moral, to be a hero? To be good?

After the Lockout is published by Fourth Estate.

Darran McCann

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Nick Harkaway is Harry Palmer in Billion Dollar Brain

Billion Dollar Brain

Nick Harkaway is the son of John Le Carré and was born in Cornwall in 1972. He loves obscure cover versions of 1980s hits, with Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain’s version of ‘Life on Mars’ being an especial favourite. He abandoned screenwriting for the life of a novelist, and his second book, the gloriously inventive Angelmaker (William Heinemann) is Apocalyptically crammed with clockwork bees, doomsday machines, East End gangsters and sinister government agencies. His Alter Ego is Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer in Ken Russell’s Billion Dollar Brain (1967). EITHNE FARRY

Ken Russell’s movies are amazing, but mostly as places to visit. You wouldn’t want to live in those taut explorations of emotional inaccessibility, repression and sexual incompleteness – or the phantasmal horrors and erotic nightmares of Russell’s more Gothic efforts.

But in the midst of The Lair of the White Worm (titled woman in erotic relationship with snake god) and The Music Lovers (closet homosexual composer marries nymphomaniac) and the rest, Russell made Billion Dollar Brain, with Michael Caine as the slightly down-at-heel secret agent Harry Palmer.

The world Palmer lives in is brightly coloured, Byzantine and dangerous. He is assailed by thugs and beautiful assassins, hangs out in Frank Lloyd Wright ski chalets, drinks drugged champagne and sticks doggedly to his job. The enviable thing about Palmer is that somehow, in the face of the clear impossibility of his victory, he never seriously considers the possibility of failure – and neither do we. He’s not a genius, not a martial arts expert. He’s a bloke with a job to do. He’s perpetually on the make, but somehow he never goes bad.

Russell may have been working for hire on Billion Dollar Brain, but he was still Russell. It’s not a nice world or a safe one. And it’s 1967, with all that it entails: you can’t watch Caine slap Françoise Dorléac around without feeling a bit queasy. (Mind you, she has just tried to kill him. During sex, no less.) I’m tempted to say that I’d be a bit-part – a person inhabiting the world that Palmer protects, enjoying the ambience and avoiding the beatings, the losses, and the fear. But that’s a cop-out. I’d be Harry, and accept the risk in exchange for the dream secret agent lifestyle. Because, you know: how often do you get to say ‘I’d be Michael Caine’?

Angelmaker is published by William Heinemann.

Nick Harkaway

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Katy Darby is The Last Seduction’s Bridget Gregory

The Last Seduction

Katy Darby’s debut novel, The Whores’ Asylum mixes thrilling high drama with a Gothic sensibility. In the seedy back streets of Oxford in 1887, the close friendship of two worthy men is threatened by the delicious Diana, a woman with a troubled past and a dark future. London-based Darby teaches writing at City University and co-runs the monthly live fiction event Liars’ League. Her filmic Alter Ego is Bridget Gregory in The Last Seduction. EITHNE FARRY

‘When women go wrong, men go right after them.’ (Mae West)

If I had to be a film femme fatale, I’d bypass the obvious choices (Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct) and squeeze myself into the slinky shoes of Bridget Gregory in The Last Seduction (1994). Bridget is quite a piece of work, as is this pitch-black neo-noir crime thriller, an underrated classic if ever there was one. I flirted briefly with the idea of nominating Sean Young’s cool replicant Rachael in Blade Runner – but Rachael, being not quite human, is essentially innocent; and if there’s one thing a femme fatale is, it’s guilty as hell.

Bridget is certainly no innocent: having made off with $700,000 stolen from her crooked husband Clay (Bill Pullman) and gone on the run, she stops off at a bar in Nowheresville, where local boy Mike (Peter Berg) tries to chat her up by telling her he’s hung like a horse. She promptly invites him to sit, sticks her hand down his pants, and says, ‘Let’s see’: now there’s a woman with balls. Soon she decides to rid herself of her annoying ex by manipulating Mike to kill him, then double-crosses Mike too – getting away with the money, and murder, by playing the ‘helpless victim’ card.

Bridget is, unapologetically, a nasty girl. Not conflicted, not confused: just out-and-out bad. She knows it, and uses it to get exactly what she wants. Many femmes fatales, especially in film noir, come to a sticky end because, after all, they’re bad girls, and that’s what happens to them, right? Wrong. In this film Bridget isn’t a plot device, a cardboard villain, or a temptress leading the protagonist astray: she is the protagonist. It’s absolutely her story, and she wins in the end – and we love to watch her do it, leaving broken hearts, cast-off underwear and smoking cigarette butts in her wake.

The Whores’ Asylum is published by Fig Tree.

Katy Darby

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Tom Benn is Roy Batty

Blade Runner

Tom Benn was born in 1987 and grew up in Stockport, but now lives and works in Norwich. His debut, The Doll Princess, is a gritty urban noir set in 90s Manchester in the wake of the IRA bombings. A speedy, adrenaline-fuelled chase through the underworld, it centres on Bane, a loan shark and fixer on a mission to find out who killed his childhood sweetheart. Tom Benn’s filmic Alter Ego is Roy Batty in Blade Runner. EITHNE FARRY

Roy Batty is my favourite sympathetic villain. He’s vicious, noble and fashion-conscious (the very foundations of cyberpunk were built upon his coat collar). He also has an extremely flexible girlfriend.

Roy, a replicant (an artificial human being), has come to Earth to try and force a meeting with his maker, in the hope he will be able to extend his life beyond its programmed four years. Our gumshoe hero, Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, must ‘retire’ Roy and the rest of his gang.

I’ve always felt for Roy. Most of us are full of questions, frightened of death, and at some point in our lives, want someone to blame for our design flaws. We’d probably be better off accepting what we can change about ourselves, and what we can’t. God is the ultimate absent dad. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t come sooner,’ Dr Tyrell, Roy’s maker, tells him. It’s very satisfying watching Roy beat him in a game of chess.

Rutger Hauer is otherworldly: his platinum hair and permanent sweat-glaze make him a lizard in the neon jungle of future LA. I watched the final cut of Blade Runner recently, and while the visuals are gorgeous, the dialogue is still one part stoic, two parts characters explaining things they’d already know. But Hauer delivers even the most wooden line with a regal menace.

Roy isn’t just a badass; he’s the most fiercely human character in a film where potentially no one is. I may not be as stylish or murderous as Roy, but he still speaks to me, and I always root for him over Deckard.

And although Roy doesn’t find the answers he needs to be able to cheat death, he does discover what it means to be human.

The Doll Princess is published by Jonathan Cape.

Tom Benn

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Scarlett Bailey is Scarlett O’Hara

Scarlett O'Hara

Scarlett Bailey has loved writing stories since childhood. Before writing her debut novel The Night before Christmas she worked as a waitress, cinema usherette and bookseller. Passionate about old movies, Scarlett loves nothing more than spending a wet Sunday afternoon watching her favourite films back to back with large quantities of chocolate. Her filmic Alter Ego is Scarlett O’Hara. EITHNE FARRY

Maybe it’s a little odd to want to be Scarlett O’Hara, manipulative, sociopathic, vain and cruel heroine of 1939 Victor Fleming epic Gone with the Wind. And yet for all of her faults, which are legion, Scarlett remains an iconic heroine, blazing a trail through adversity, against all the odds. Scarlett is a survivor and a fighter, with a nifty sideline in turning curtains into frocks, and I think that there aren’t many of us who don’t wish for at least some of those qualities at least once in our lives.

And it’s fair to say that Scarlett is not all bad. She’s a woman of character, who flourishes in a time of crisis, her troubles only making her stronger. Fiercely loyal to her love for Ashley, even when he chooses boring, nice and predictable Melanie, Scarlett never turns on him with stereotypical female vengeance, but continues fighting for him, as much as for herself, to the very end. Yes, she might marry out of spite or for money, might like kissing a certain Rhett Butler, while pining over Ashley, so addicted to wanting what she can’t have that she barely notices when her feelings for Rhett begin to change from lust to love. But when it comes to the crunch Scarlett is the one you want in your corner. She’s got the guts of steel to nurse the terrible wounds of the injured soldiers, when Melanie can’t. And she’s the only one who’ll stand by Melanie during the birth of hers and Ashley’s baby, getting her out of a burning Atlanta like Boudicca in her chariot. After facing so much adversity, who can blame Scarlett for vowing never to go hungry again and for doing whatever it takes to stay alive? It’s maybe a bit of a stretch to compare Civil War America with our current global economic crisis, but for those of us who make a living from our wits, right now is not at all a bad time to be a little bit like Scarlett O’Hara.

The Night before Christmas is published by Ebury Press.

Scarlett Bailey

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Nick Lake is Zatoichi

Zatoichi

Nick Lake is an editorial director at HarperCollins Children’s Books. His books, Blood Ninja (Corvus) and Lord Oda’s Revenge (Corvus) – jam-packed with assassins, samurai, ancient curses and blood-sucking warriors – were inspired by his interest in the Far East, and by the fact that he is secretly a vampire ninja himself. Below he explains why his filmic alter ego is blind swordsman Zatoichi, as seen by Takeshi Kitano. Eithne Farry

My favourite Japanese film is the 2003 version of Zatoichi. If you don’t know the movie, it might be described like this: if The Seven Samurai is a cappuccino, then Zatoichi is an espresso. It’s an economical, intense, brutal action film – with just a slight froth of humour and musicality, of balletic grace to its violence.

Zatoichi, the titular character, is an old blind man, who roams the countryside with a sword hidden inside a cane, protecting the weak and the poor from the depredations of ronin and samurai. He’s the ultimate underdog. Even his name signals his base status. It’s actually Ichi – the ‘Zato’ bit means ‘4th class’, because he is a 4th-class blind person, lowly even by the standards of the blind, who rank somewhere alongside beggars and fools in feudal Japan. In other words, he’s nobody. He isn’t even allowed to carry a katana, hence his hidden blade. But time and again, he rids villages of troublesome gangsters, rescues the vulnerable – revealing, when he draws the blade from his cane, a stunning skill at fighting, due to his remarkable hearing.

So much do I love Zatoichi, in fact, that I more or less stole him for my own books. I thought that Shusaku, the ninja mentor of my hero Taro, was going to die at the end of the first book. Then I remembered Zatoichi – and I decided to burn out his eyes instead. So the first scene of Blood Ninja II has a blind man fighting multiple enemies on a dark night, in the rain…

Zatoichi is actually a relatively recently created character – nowhere near as old as Robin Hood. But I think that, in his infirmity, his old age and his contemptible social status, but amazing talent and moral rectitude, he encapsulates something timeless. You can see him as a metaphor for justice. You can see him as an avatar of the common man, rising up against his oppressor. He, of course, doesn’t need to see at all.

Nick Lake

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Cressida Connelly is Dumbo

Dumbo

Writer and journalist Cressida Connelly is the author of an award-winning collection of short stories, The Happiest Days, and of a biography of the Garman sisters, a band of eccentric, artistic siblings who took centre stage in London’s bohemian Bloomsbury set, The Rare and the Beautiful. Her debut novel, My Former Heart, is about missing mothers, absconding husbands, splintered families and children’s ability to adapt to emotional upheaval. Eithne Farry

If I were a character in a film, I’d be Dumbo, the baby elephant in Disney’s 1941 animated film of the same name. Like Dumbo I used to get teased for having big flappy ears, but unfortunately I wasn’t able, as he is, to turn this to my advantage by learning to fly. The film is much more simply drawn than Fantasia, which preceded it, but it’s very beautiful. The scene where storks deliver babies and the sequence when Dumbo is, effectively, acid-tripping and sees weird visions are both incredible.

When my mother was a little girl in war-time London, her mother took her to the cinema. Before the feature there was a newsreel, and my grandmother thought she saw in it the man she was in love with, who had disappeared. This image has always appealed to me, so when I came to write a novel I made it my starting point.

The rest of the story is invented, including the fact that the film the mother and daughter go to see is Dumbo. I just wanted to find a film that would have been on show in 1942. What’s odd is that a lot of the book is about missing people, being torn apart from loved ones, and of course Dumbo is separated from his mother and misses her terribly. So the film flickering across the screen at the beginning mirrors one of the main themes of the book.

Cartoons are brilliant at depicting the sense of loss missing someone you love occasions. The characters appear to sag and crumple under the weight of sadness. Dumbo depicts this brilliantly, as does Bambi. More recently, Toy Story 3 exactly captures the longing and disappointment of missing a loved person.

Dumbo overcomes adversity and embraces the very things that frighten him. That makes him an excellent role model for a coward like me. I’m glad I’m not a circus star, but in other ways I’d like to be like Dumbo.

Cressida Connelly

My Former Heart by Cressida Connelly is published by 4th Estate.
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Simon Morden is Twelve Monkeys’ James Cole

Twelve Monkeys

Gateshead writer Dr Simon Morden is a rocket scientist and one of the few people who can claim to have held a chunk of Mars in his hands (the red planet, not the chocolate bar). He’s edited the British Science Fiction Association’s Focus magazine, judged the Arthur C. Clarke Award and is the author of a trilogy of thrillers set in futuristic England: Equations of Life, Theories of Flight and Degrees of Freedom, starring the immoral, charismatic Petrovitch, a survivor of the nuclear fallout in St Petersburg, and now residing in London’s dangerous Metrozone (all published by Orbit). Below, he explains why his apocalyptic alter ego would be James Cole in Twelve Monkeys. EITHNE FARRY

Apocalypses are like buses. You wait for ages, then three come along at once. It’s no fun dodging flaming meteors, global flooding and the imminent return of the Messiah – but once the last tree dies, the last mountain peak slips beneath the waves, and the heels of the last believer disappear into the clouds? What next? That’s when it gets real.

Post-apocalyptic landscapes: they’re all around us. Just take the wrong turning in town, and the bright lights are suddenly behind you. The boards are up on the windows, the weeds are sprouting in the gutter, and in the distance, a glass bottle kicks against the kerb.

You’re not alone, of course. You might be The Last Man on Earth, but alone? It doesn’t work that way. The ghosts are as hungry as the feral creatures that live in the slowly decaying ruins. There’s nothing to stop you from becoming an animal yourself: post-apocalypses are hard on the weak, the compassionate, the humane.

Which is why my alter ego is James Cole, reluctant time traveller and would-be saviour from Terry Gilliam’s masterful Twelve Monkeys. Cole is an unlikely hero – in fact, there’s a good argument to be had about whether he’s a hero at all, and that the proper hard work is being done by the scientists responsible for the time machine.

So, protagonist or patsy? Cole, haunted by visions of the past, of the future to come, haunted even by the present he finds himself in, behaves… more or less decently. He’s the guy who does his best: mostly crazy, banging around the time-lines like a pinball, he stumbles across enough clues to give the future a fighting chance. He even finds himself unexpectedly in love.

No gunplay. No big explosions. Just, you know, people. I can’t fool myself that I’d be a leader of a band of post-apocalypse warriors, or the lone survivor looking on the works of Man without despairing. But Cole? I could be Cole. So could you.

Simon Morden

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Naomi Wood is Sergeant Howie

The Wicker Man

Naomi Wood worked at a kids’ book publishers before she seriously started writing. She went to Paris to do the ‘living-in-a-garret’ thing where she wrote The Godless Boys: ‘nanny-ing in the afternoons, writing in the mornings, living on the 7th floor (no lift = year of great legs)’. Her debut is set in an alternative 1986, on an island where religion is outlawed. With shades of A Clockwork Orange, it is a tender, brutal tale of God, love and violence. Her next novel is ‘a fictional account of how Ernest Hemingway’s four wives – Hadley, Pauline, Martha and Mary – decided to walk away from their romance with the writer – or how Ernest himself walked out on them’. EITHNE FARRY

I wouldn’t like to think I have many of the qualities found in the stiff yet celibate Sergeant Howie in Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. Sgt Howie brings none of the humour nor any of the cheer to the bonkers ‘secret society’ of Summerisle.

And yet what he does bring to the Island is fresh curiosity.

Howie recognises that this is a society that he has no place in. He is excluded by the Islanders’ snarly sexuality as well as their non-cooperation. ‘Where is Rowan Morrison?’ he keeps on asking, only to be met with those irritatingly blank pagan faces.

Howie starts to ken that this society is keeping him out of a secret. And he learns, too, that it’s always harder to survive in a society when you’re the one left out of that secret.

When you watch The Wicker Man you can’t help but feel sorry for the poor figure. Among dancing nude Britt Ekland, masked children, bobbing hobby horses and the weirdest post-mistress this side of America, he is the vulnerable stranger – brash and cheerless, yes, but also persecuted by this viciously sensual community. No one who’s gone to a nightclub sober can feel entirely numb to his awkwardness.

That’s the thing: it doesn’t take a secret society, or a collection of Summerisle types, to make you feel a little baffled at the world. Sometimes, all it takes is looking at the minor societies around you: the weird unit of your family, or your happy band of friends, or your colleagues at work. I like to think I have some of Howie’s curiosity – and bafflement – in each part of the day, because the lives of others are so secret, and so intricate, and so baffling.

The only difference is my curiosity might not be articulated in so broad a brogue.

The Godless Boys is published by Picador.

Naomi Wood

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Philip Palmer is Thomas Jerome Newton

The Man Who Fell to Earth

Film and TV producer Philip Palmer is also the author of quirky, inventive sci-fi. Combining dark humour and playful prose with page-turning plots, he’s well versed in alien worlds. His latest book, Version 43 (Orbit), focuses on death, robots, a violent frontier world and a cyborg cop. July will see the release of Hell Ship, a pirates-in-space adventure. Philip Palmer has picked Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth as his Alter Ego. Eithne Farry

Aliens are usually nasty and ugly or boring. Ugly evil aliens include the Alien that Sigourney Weaver battled – a vast slimy vagina dentata creature. Or Predator, or the Klingons, or Jabba the Hut, or all the assorted bug-eyed monsters (BEMs) and reptilian giants and gross abominations who have snarled and slithered and lumbered on screen over the years.

Good aliens, however, tend to be, let’s face it, uncool. Spock is a great hero of a mine; but he’s a nerd. Mandy Patinkin as the cop in Alien Nation is less nerdy; but he’s ugly. Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still is utterly charismatic; but square.

So if I had a chance to be an alien from a movie, there’s only one choice for me; Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth (directed by Nicolas Roeg from a novel by Walter Tevis). Newton is an alien in humanoid guise, who is cool, beautiful and adorably eerie. The fact that he’s played by David Bowie – surely he was an alien? – adds to the allure of the character. Newton has no super-powers or ray guns; but he’s clever, and vulnerable. And impossibly slim; at one point, his girlfriend Mary-Lou angrily tells him, ‘You’re much too skinny!’ Newton falls to Earth in a one-person spaceship and turns into Steve Jobs – inventing a series of astonishing new gadgets that revolutionise the world and make him rich.

The scene in which Newton takes out his artificial eyes and wig and peels off his artificial nipples (ouch!) is hauntingly sensual; the ‘real’ Newton is spooky and monstrous, yet somehow captivating.

The film itself is flawed – oscillating randomly between pure Roeg genius and badly acted naff 70s excess. But Bowie is sublime as the most beautiful alien of all time.

Philip Palmer