“Bad writers and directors.. always want to offer us the easy way out–the lie that we’re superior to the characters on the stage or the screen; put another way, they create false, two-dimensional characters we can only feel superior to. It’s the genuine artists who bind us to great sinners like Lear and Othello–or more likely, in modern art, to petty sinners, who throw their lives away for pride or spite or else carelessly, without thinking about it, and then realize, too late, what they’ve done.”