SHE WEIRD, HE WEIRD, WE WIERD

Find Out How You and Your Favorite Movie Character are Just Alike

The idea that anyone is weird suggests that there is a type of person that is normal. I don’t know about anyone else, but I haven’t met a normal person in my entire life. People are just weird. And when you can’t detect anything weird about a person… that makes them seem weird. 

Whether we enjoy the smell of people’s feet... Or talk in random made up accents... Or smear glue on our skin just to let it dry and then peel it off... Everyone has a THING. 

And one of the most comforting feelings in the world comes when you find out that other people also have THINGS. Even better… some of them have the same THINGS we have. This is where bosom buddies aka bff’s are born. We attract people who experience similar thoughts, anxieties, desires, fears, etc. And we love being around these people… just weirding it up.

Much of our sense of humor is based on what is weird about us. Personally, I have a goofy and often dark sense of humor. My laugh is also abnormally loud & obnoxious. I can’t help it. It just belts out like that. Another strange thing about me is the way my face decides not to show how I’m feeling. My husband (and everyone else) laughs about how I have the same expression when I’m mad as I do when I’m ecstatic. Basically I look a little zombified all the time. So this tick of mine is what attracted me to one of my favorite films. 

I love the movie, Pride and Prejudice (with Keira Knightly), for a bunch of reasons unrelated to what the movie is about. I love the amazing cinematography and the mesmerizing soundtrack... all because of one odd scene in the middle of the movie. 

So I was clicking through random channels and saw this scene where Elizabeth Bennet stares at herself in the mirror for hours. The sun literally goes down while she’s standing motionless in this one spot. It doesn’t even seem like she blinks the whole time. When I saw this, I stopped on the channel and watched the rest of the movie. 

Long story short, Lizzie was depressed because the guy she liked was super rich and she was kind of poor and he had just told her (in a weird way) that he liked her even though he didn’t really think she was good enough to be with him.  Whew. Read that back. I promise it makes sense. 

So anyways, Lizzie was having all of these feelings of inadequacy and indifference. Meanwhile, her facial expression was blank over the course of what seemed like an entire day. This caught my attention because I, too, have a blank face that does not reveal my emotions. So I empathized with a character that I otherwise had absolutely nothing in common with. 

I’m a black female, born in the 1990’s, to a single mother of three. Lizzie was a white female born in the early 1800s, to a family of four other girls. I had never experienced going to a ball and dancing with random men. My mother had never tried to marry me off to my cousin so that our family wouldn’t lose our estate. I’d never traveled anywhere by horse and carriage. And I’d never had a man propose to me (at that time). But I did know that look of indifference. And I definitely knew the feeling. 

Lizzie had a very weird moment in the guest room of her cousin’s house. I witnessed this weird moment. I thought of some of my own similar weird moments. Then I found a connection to a character who was seemingly nothing like me. 

And this is how storytelling works. BAM!... Knowledge. 

I said all that to say this; People read stories and watch movies in order to feel an exaggerated version of our own reality. We want to know that there are other people out there who are weird just like how we’re weird. Then we want to see what kinds of decisions these weird people will make so that we can deduce possible consequences to our own pending decisions. 

We feel a connection to characters because we recognize their weird. We’ve seen someone who has the same kind of weird or we ourselves have that kind of weird. 

Our weird originates in a variety of ways. It can come from our upbringing, our insecurities, our core issues (emotional soft spots), the type of people we have been exposed to, and on and on. This is why simply talking to people can be so exhilarating. We love hearing that people have had similar experiences to what we have had. And then we love watching people have experiences we would like to have.

It’s like a form of virtual reality.

This brings me to my ultimate favorite film; Love & Basketball. It’s a romance between two middle class African American basketball players. (The title is very self explanatory). So this film and I had a completely different relationship from the one I had with Pride & Prejudice. I had watched this one since I was a kid and I actually thought it was stupid back then. 

I thought that the lead character, Monica, was putting herself out there too much for the guy that she liked, Quincy. I hated how he treated her and I didn’t understand her attraction to him. It wasn’t until I reached high school that I started being able to empathize with Monica. 

She and Quincy had hard external shells and they put on a front (just like the rest of us) to make it seem like they cared less for each other than they really did. They had a common love for basketball since childhood and this is how they became connected. They had the same weird; an obsession with a sport. 

I hardly know anything about any kind of sport. No one ever taught me and I never cared to learn. SHRUG. Whatever. 

So I did not share Monica’s love for basketball, but I definitely have more in common with her than I did with Lizzie. Monica was a black female being raised in the 90s who had an older sister and struggled with showing vulnerability. Just like me. 

In a movie containing loads of basketball lingo, which I did not understand and still don’t, I still managed to get the gist of what was going on and find it compelling. Why?

Because the subtext of the film (what was being said without being said) was reminiscent of much of the subtext of my own life. Monica had been chasing her dream of being a pro basketball player, even to the point of choosing it over the man she loved. She achieved her goal and traveled overseas to play, but she began to lose her spark. Monica realized that basketball wasn’t fun anymore because she needed… love AND basketball. 

I was unable to understand her motivations when I was a child, but by the time I reached high school I was a hopeless romantic. I wanted a guy to say to me, “You’re the only one I know that’s for real.” - One of the most adorable lines in the film. 

I had also become perceptive enough to realize that Quincy loved Monica just as much as she loved him. He just struggled to show it. Knowing this, Monica put herself on the line to play Quincy… One on one for his heart. AHHHH. I tear up everytime I think of that line. 

Long story short, Monica loses at the game she challenged Quincy to play and just when she feels rejected and defeated he says, “double or nothing”, which apparently means I love you and I want to be with you and I don’t want to marry Tyra Banks (who plays his fiancé at the time). 

Moral of the story, we’re all just like our favorite character in one way or another because we recognize their weird and we empathize with it. We fall in love with characters because they remind us of who we are or who we wish we could be. They comfort us by letting us know that we are not the only ones out there thinking what we’re thinking or feeling what we’re feeling. Weird recognizes weird.

P.S. - If you have any weird characters floating around in your brain that you need to get down on paper… contact us to help you cultivate your story and bring your vision to life.

Also, if you have a product or service and you need to reach a broader audience… let us help you speak to people in their own weird language. They’ll be excited to find out how what you’re selling will improve their lives.