In an interview with Reuters, FitzGerald said he felt at the time that Thomson was coming to grips with the business-savvy legacy of his family.
There are also expectations that Thomson will maintain its long-held corporate culture of keeping a tight rein on operating costs at its publishing assets. In , he joined Woodbridge Co. He is just someone the young hero likes to hang about with all day for lack of anything better to do, as shown by the recurrent shot of the two sitting on a swing or a seesaw Looks and Smiles , TwentyFourSeven , The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael , Summer Scars , Better Things , Somers Town.
A couple of sidekicks can even be used in a subplot in the form of a running gag, especially to bring humour in genre films such as gangster or survival films Love, Honour and Obey , Wilderness , Attack the Block. The hero likes his sidekick because he makes him laugh and acts as a sort of sparring partner.
The hero and his sidekick often quip in concert. They have routine jokes and sets of impressions. In case of a duo, the roles can be divided. But the roles can be inverted between the funny man and the straight man. The sidekick can thus also be less outrageous than the hero and humour then derives from his impassive or shocked presence Withnail and I. He can play pranks on the hero just to have a laugh with the rest of the gang The Football Factory.
The sidekick is therefore never completely crushed in that relationship and, most of the time, he takes the shape of the foil whose main role is to enhance the heroic status of a character that originally was not larger-than-life. The hero is literally magnified and even eroticised through the comparison made with his foil Seaton vs Jack in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
He is made to look taller when he mixes with what looks like vertically disabled acquaintances A Kind of Loving. This device can sometimes be used with a comic effect, especially in the case when one of the two characters is black, like the giant American Elmo and small Liverpudlian Felix The 51 st State.
In this case, the sidekick is also here to reinforce the humane aspect of a hero who would otherwise run the risk of being too brutish and rough.
It is quite rare for a sidekick to be more attractive or charismatic unless the hero is mocked for his shortcomings racism in Love Thy Neighbour ; cowardice in Carry On at Your Convenience ; impotence in The Football Factory. The inversion can also be used to play with the assumptions and expectations of the audience the debunking of the archetypal American hero in Green Street Hooligans or when the hero is portrayed as a sort of intellectual. This opposition is later confirmed by their respective marriages.
The same pattern is used in the world of juvenile delinquents. Similarly, the cheekiness and social irreverence of the hero are often emphasised by the opposition with a more conventional and deferent sidekick who warns the hero of his impending nemesis due to his dissolute lifestyle and inability to comply: Porter and Cliff in Look Back in Anger ; Seaton and Bert in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ; Fisher and Charlie in Billy Liar.
The foil device is pushed to the extreme in Borstal or jail films. The rebelliousness of the hero never appears as strongly as when it is opposed to the conformism of a fellow inmate. In The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner , Smith is in a sort of duel with Stacey, the other bad boy who still hopes to get in the favours of the director by obeying the rules.
The same opposition is found in other Borstal films Scum , Made in Britain , Wilderness , Shopping and in youth films about specific subcultures in which the hero resists selling out whereas the sidekick often gives in to mainstream temptation Absolute Beginners , Young Soul Rebels.
Going beyond the role of a mere assistant or foil, this close companion holds a strategic position. Although he may not be in the limelight, he has powers over the hero who cannot do anything without him. The bond uniting the hero and his sidekick often clearly turns into a symbiotic relationship. He provides an alternative point of view on a given situation and often is the only one who can make the hero see things in a different light whether the subject is personal or professional.
When the hero is a strike-breaker, the sidekick represents the mob despite his guilty conscience The Angry Silence. When the hero is a striker, the strike-breaking sidekick becomes a tragic figure Brassed Off , Dockers. Similarly, the sidekick is the only person allowed to tell the hero when he is crossing the line, like Cliff Look Back in Anger who can make Porter stop shouting, playing the trumpet in the middle of the night and gibing at his wife or her friend. In coming-of-age films, the sidekick can help the hero grow up when he has managed to get out of the estate and the violence of the underworld to make a better life for himself Shifty , Adulthood.
This device is partly used to better point out the psychological complexity of the hero by decomposing it into two separate characters as gang members are often both victims and criminals. In hooligan films, the leadership is also often twofold and stresses the borderline personality of the firm members.
The sidekick is then used as a sort of inverted mirror to point out the evolution of the main character. War veterans generally work like couples of trusted friends as war or army days seal intense friendships. In other words, the sidekick embodies the mad soldier the hero could have become see also Looks and Smiles. When the sidekick is the more extreme character, because of his — sometimes lethal — addictions or viciousness, he appears as unredeemable whereas the hero does not look so bad by comparison Small Faces , Downtime , Trainspotting , Boy A , Kidulthood and is even spurred to get a grip on his life Withnail and I , Human Traffic , Trainspotting.
When he is not as reckless as the hero, he survives the latter Shopping , The Firm , The Veteran or can act sanctimoniously Shifty. This may be accounted for by the fact that women were often side-lined in films and have tended to be depicted first as secondary characters around the male hero mother, sister, girlfriend, wife or as solitary figures single mothers. The corpus shows that female groups are far from being prevalent in all the genres or subgenres studied although recently more and more films have tended to apply the same pattern when they focus on girl groups.
When one of the two members suddenly reveals their new feelings, they destabilise the close friendship. Of course, the male sidekick enables the hero to stay young and carefree whereas a woman almost always stands for maturity The Leather Boys , When Saturday Comes , Sweet Sixteen , Shaun of the Dead. Yet, the relationship between the hero and his sidekick is much more profound than a mere regressive temptation and male bonding is widespread among youths, hooligans and gangsters.
Homoeroticism is thus felt by all of them even though it is repressed. Real couples are not those officially registered but those born out of the special relationships developed between some of the firm members, such as John and Bob in I.
Pinball thinks he is being side-lined and accuses Liam of being a traitor because of his infidelities. Liam thus faces a dilemma and as he cannot bring himself to kill him, Pinball tries to commit suicide in front of his friend to make it easier for him.
However, the hero also shows signs of spite and possessiveness. Tommy The Football Factory feels threatened when Rod moves in with a lawyer he met during one of his trials. The hatred he feels for the woman, a combination of social contempt and misogyny, shows the passionate nature of his friendship.
Conversely, the beaming smile with which he welcomes his friend back just before the final fight shows how proud he is that his friend chose him over his partner. The male bond thus testifies to the evolution of the sidekick from the position of a double to that of a partner in a couple as the hero simply cannot live without him. He often becomes crazy or desperate if the latter disappears.
The words used by the hero to express his affection for his sidekick are always marked by ambiguity. What was I to do? Desert him? Just because of a few words spoken in front of an altar? The sidekick can also symbolically take on the role of the wife, like Pete The Leather Boys after another domestic row which sees Reggie leave Dot.
In his company, the hero sleeps in a double bed, one of his obsessions, for the first time. The assent often comes in the form of self-sacrifice. Extraordinary circumstances are sometimes required. It is only because his friend and flatmate Ed has become a zombie that Shaun Shaun of the Dead , now on his own almost like a widower, can move in with Liz, his long-time partner. With the rise in knife and gun culture or under exceptional circumstances, he even dies for the hero more and more frequently, thus showing his loyalty and providing emotional power to the film For Queen and Country , 1 Day , Shawn of the Dead , Attack the Block , Comedown.
But more surprisingly, the hero can also make extreme choices out of loyalty for his sidekick. He can botch up a job interview or a trial Looks and Smiles , When Saturday Comes , go to jail Bradford Riots or decide to become a vigilante to avenge his death Harry Brown.
The hero is therefore no longer protected by his leading position. Some recent films are somewhat ambiguous concerning the hierarchy of the main characters as they seem to show an inversion of status. Shifty supposedly focuses on the title-role yet the film opens on his sidekick who stays with him in practically every scene and eventually saves him by convincing him to leave the estate.
Hillier Outlaw finds in Bryant the leader he needs for the vigilante group he wishes to create. It later fell into disrepair and was demolished.
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