Application
User Name/Nick: Karin
User LJ: mrs_persson
AIM/IM: ricksonjacket
E-mail: lingeanare at gmail
Other Characters: Una Persson
Character Name: Jack Carter
Series: Get Carter, dir. Mike Hodges, 1971.
Age: 37
From When?: The very end of the movie, when he's shot on the beach after killing Eric Paice.
Inmate/Warden:
Inmate. Carter is a brutal thug in a great suit. He treats women like crap and his methods are violent and murderous. On the plus side of the ledger, he brings about the downfall of a scummy crime lord whose pornography business includes the drugging and raping of young girls, and he also takes out several of the crime lord's henchmen and underlings. On the minus side, he's driven less by any larger sense of justice and more by implacable revenge. In addition to killing a lot of guys, he also murders a woman with a heroin overdose (after forcing her to strip naked) and dumps her body on the crime lord's estate as part of a setup for the police. He also stands by and says nothing as a car with a live woman in the trunk is pushed into the river. So despite the fact that he takes out some really bad dudes, Carter remains inmate material.
Abilities/Powers:
Carter's an ordinary human, but his stone-cold charisma very nearly counts as a superpower. (Only in a manner of speaking, though. It's possible that not everyone is as susceptible to 1970s!Michael Caine as I am.) He's a hardened killer and an expert shot, and extremely nasty in a hand-to-hand fight. He's intelligent, possibly more so than his bosses sometimes give him credit for; that, combined with a tendency to be "nosy" and a dogged persistence make him a difficult hunter to shake off.
Personality:
There isn't a lot that seems to ruffle Jack Carter's composure. He's a hard man and a cold-blooded killer, traits that have made him valuable as an enforcer to his London-based criminal bosses. Even when a couple of thugs catch him in bed with a woman, he remains unbothered; he simply grabs his shotgun out from under the bed and calmly "escorts" the thugs out, not even bothering to dress. That the sight of him stark-naked and wielding a shotgun causes an elderly neighbour to drop her morning milk in shock disturbs him not a whit. He has a very dry sense of humour, though in general the more genial and jokey he is, the more the person he's talking to should worry.
"Do you know, I'd almost forgotten what your eyes look like. Pissholes in the snow."
However, it is possible to get under Carter's skin, and it's his family that makes him vulnerable. Even though he wasn't close to his brother Frank, the ties of family are enough to draw him back to Newcastle to find out what really happened to Frank. More important is his concern for the well-being of his niece Doreen (who, it's suggested, may actually be his daughter, since Jack is alleged to have slept with his brother's wife at some point). The discovery that Cyril Kinnear had Doreen drugged and raped to make a pornographic film brings tears to his eyes and takes his vengeance against Kinnear to a whole new level. What we learn from this is that while Carter is usually a model of cool control, when he gets angry he gets explosively, violently angry. When he's in that state, he doesn't care who he hurts or kills.
"For Christ's sake, Jack!"
"You knew what I'd do, didn't you Albert?"
"I didn't kill him!"
"I KNOW YOU DIDN'T KILL HIM! I KNOW!"
Despite his awkward love for Doreen (which he can really only express by giving her money), Carter has very little use for women except as sex objects, or as tools to get at the men in their lives. Women in his world are possessions or prizes, not people, and he has absolutely no problem hitting a woman if he feels like he needs to. Admittedly, he's not particularly nice to the men who piss him off either, but at least they rate as mostly equal players. He enjoys being a seducer; he's having a fling with his boss's girlfriend, and at one point rings her up to have phone sex with her while his landlady is in the same room. He later beds said landlady. Later he sleeps with Glenda, one of Kinnear's girlfriends-but when he discovers that she was complicit in Doreen's rape, he assaults her and throws her into the boot of her car, which he then drives off to hunt down Kinnear's men. When the car-still containing Glenda-is shoved into the river by a couple of thugs, he does nothing. Finally, he murders Margaret, Frank's occasional prostitute girlfriend, and uses her body to set up Kinnear with the police.
Carter has three ways of dealing with problems: throw money at it, beat it up, or kill it. He doesn't do well with softer emotions at all. It's hard to say whether he enjoys killing or hurting people; he does appear to take a certain grim satisfaction in it, but he's no cackling sadist. It's more like the enjoyment of a job well-done; Carter is good at hurting people and in so doing, getting the required results. He wants to be in control of a situation, to bend it to his will and have it turn out exactly as it ought to.
That said, he is more of a follower than a leader; however, Carter won't follow just anyone. If he doesn't fear or respect the person in question (and he doesn't fear or respect very many people at all, if anyone), he has to at least be getting good compensation of some kind out of the arrangement. And he doesn't like being used. When Cliff Brumby tries to pay him to kill Kinnear, it just makes him angry-and he only gets angrier when he discovers that Brumby showed the film of Doreen's rape to Frank to get him to go to the police over Kinnear, which led to Frank's murder. Carter's also none too happy when he realises that his boss, Fletcher, is trying to drag him back to London and stop causing trouble for Kinnear, who is one of Fletcher's pornography suppliers.
Possibly as a reaction to a deprived childhood in a grim northern town, Carter does have a taste for the finer things in life, as his beautiful blue mohair suit, fine cufflinks, Rolex watch, and good shoes suggest. He's an intelligent man, and in another life he might have been a solid detective. He's also something of a reader, with a fondness for Raymond Chandler (and, presumably, other crime fiction as well). He has a moderate dependency on amphetamines, taking them as casually as most people take aspirin, and will have withdrawal symptoms to cope with after his arrival.
Path to Redemption:
There are two main lessons that Carter needs to learn, and they're tough ones. First, that his brand of rough justice is no real justice at all, however satisfying it may have been and however deserving the subjects were. Second, that his treatment of women is unacceptable, to say the least-it may have been common in his criminal circles, but that doesn't make it right. What will really make the first one sink in is if his warden can make him see that his violence bred violence to the extent that his death has left Doreen alone in the world. He'll try and deny that as much as possible and for as long as possible, of course. For the second, that will hopefully just come with time and exposure to the Barge's tough-ass variety of woman.
History:
Jack Carter was born in Newcastle and had an unrelentingly grim childhood. His brother Frank got a job in a factory as an ordinary working man, but Jack fell in with the local criminal element, and distinguished himself with his chilly ruthlessness and willingness to do whatever it took to get the job done.
Eventually he left Newcastle for London, but not before making a reputation for himself as someone to be feared-and around the same time, having an affair with Frank's wife, the result of which is very likely Doreen (who is fair-haired like her putative uncle). This affair was probably one of the motivating events for his relocation.
Once in London, Carter rose quickly in the ranks of the enforcers of Gerald Fletcher, an organised crime boss with fingers in lots of different pies, including pornography. Carter was, for the most part, indifferent to the substance of Fletcher's work, being more interested in simply getting his job done. He shed his Northern accent, sounding more and more like an East Ender.
Things were generally going pretty well for him, in fact, until he received news from Newcastle that Frank had died in a drunk-driving accident. Carter smelled a rat; he knew that his brother wasn't that kind of man. Furthermore, he was also concerned for Doreen (to whom he had occasionally sent gifts and money, despite being somewhat estranged from his brother).
What happened next? The summary for Get Carter says it all. Frank, as it turned out, had been murdered to stop him going to the police after he was shown a pornographic film in which Doreen was drugged and raped. Carter proceeded to kill all the men involved in his brother's murder, directly or otherwise, and arranged for the arrest of Kinnear (as a little something extra, he murdered Frank's girlfriend, who had helped entice Doreen, and dumped her body on Kinnear's estate, thus ensuring additional police attention). After he killed Eric Paice, the last of his brother's killers, Carter was himself shot in the head by a sniper sent for him by Kinnear.
Sample Journal Entry: [5-10 Sentences]
Gentlemen, ladies. The name's Carter. Pleasure's all mine, I'm sure. Now I'm going to go along with all this and assume this isn't all some kind of bad dream. I get the idea of what this place is, and I get that I'm probably not here on account of good behaviour. So what else should I know?
[Filtered to inmates only.] Who's really in charge here? I don't mean the wardens; I mean amongst you lot. And the wardens-who's their unofficial leaders?
Sample RP:
Enough was enough, Carter decided. The spooks and the Hammer horror bollocks-that was a laugh, it really was, and it was especially funny to see all those soft wardens and inmates dithering over it like a bunch of old ladies. This Flagg craphead was a joke too; if he thought he could bribe Jack Carter with a pretty little bauble like that, he had another think coming, he did.
But these faceless sods stalking the halls? They were just bloody inconvenient, and Carter was getting really damn tired of being inconvenienced. And his warden hadn't let him have a shotgun before pissing off to wherever he was now, more's the pity. So he took a chair in his room and smashed it up, breaking off the legs until one of them came off with a satisfying little nail sticking out the end. Just what the doctor ordered. He hefted it in his hand, pleased. Could've been a little heavier, but it would do.
He pushed open the door and as luck would have it, one of the faceless bastards was right outside, back to him. Wakey wakey, Carter thought, and brought the spiky end of the chair leg down on its skull.
Special Notes: I realise that Carter's history is pretty much made of triggers, and I'll be sure to warn for it early and often. Also, Carter appears in Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1969, but I don't plan on using any of that. Too much metafiction.
User LJ: mrs_persson
AIM/IM: ricksonjacket
E-mail: lingeanare at gmail
Other Characters: Una Persson
Character Name: Jack Carter
Series: Get Carter, dir. Mike Hodges, 1971.
Age: 37
From When?: The very end of the movie, when he's shot on the beach after killing Eric Paice.
Inmate/Warden:
Inmate. Carter is a brutal thug in a great suit. He treats women like crap and his methods are violent and murderous. On the plus side of the ledger, he brings about the downfall of a scummy crime lord whose pornography business includes the drugging and raping of young girls, and he also takes out several of the crime lord's henchmen and underlings. On the minus side, he's driven less by any larger sense of justice and more by implacable revenge. In addition to killing a lot of guys, he also murders a woman with a heroin overdose (after forcing her to strip naked) and dumps her body on the crime lord's estate as part of a setup for the police. He also stands by and says nothing as a car with a live woman in the trunk is pushed into the river. So despite the fact that he takes out some really bad dudes, Carter remains inmate material.
Abilities/Powers:
Carter's an ordinary human, but his stone-cold charisma very nearly counts as a superpower. (Only in a manner of speaking, though. It's possible that not everyone is as susceptible to 1970s!Michael Caine as I am.) He's a hardened killer and an expert shot, and extremely nasty in a hand-to-hand fight. He's intelligent, possibly more so than his bosses sometimes give him credit for; that, combined with a tendency to be "nosy" and a dogged persistence make him a difficult hunter to shake off.
Personality:
There isn't a lot that seems to ruffle Jack Carter's composure. He's a hard man and a cold-blooded killer, traits that have made him valuable as an enforcer to his London-based criminal bosses. Even when a couple of thugs catch him in bed with a woman, he remains unbothered; he simply grabs his shotgun out from under the bed and calmly "escorts" the thugs out, not even bothering to dress. That the sight of him stark-naked and wielding a shotgun causes an elderly neighbour to drop her morning milk in shock disturbs him not a whit. He has a very dry sense of humour, though in general the more genial and jokey he is, the more the person he's talking to should worry.
"Do you know, I'd almost forgotten what your eyes look like. Pissholes in the snow."
However, it is possible to get under Carter's skin, and it's his family that makes him vulnerable. Even though he wasn't close to his brother Frank, the ties of family are enough to draw him back to Newcastle to find out what really happened to Frank. More important is his concern for the well-being of his niece Doreen (who, it's suggested, may actually be his daughter, since Jack is alleged to have slept with his brother's wife at some point). The discovery that Cyril Kinnear had Doreen drugged and raped to make a pornographic film brings tears to his eyes and takes his vengeance against Kinnear to a whole new level. What we learn from this is that while Carter is usually a model of cool control, when he gets angry he gets explosively, violently angry. When he's in that state, he doesn't care who he hurts or kills.
"For Christ's sake, Jack!"
"You knew what I'd do, didn't you Albert?"
"I didn't kill him!"
"I KNOW YOU DIDN'T KILL HIM! I KNOW!"
Despite his awkward love for Doreen (which he can really only express by giving her money), Carter has very little use for women except as sex objects, or as tools to get at the men in their lives. Women in his world are possessions or prizes, not people, and he has absolutely no problem hitting a woman if he feels like he needs to. Admittedly, he's not particularly nice to the men who piss him off either, but at least they rate as mostly equal players. He enjoys being a seducer; he's having a fling with his boss's girlfriend, and at one point rings her up to have phone sex with her while his landlady is in the same room. He later beds said landlady. Later he sleeps with Glenda, one of Kinnear's girlfriends-but when he discovers that she was complicit in Doreen's rape, he assaults her and throws her into the boot of her car, which he then drives off to hunt down Kinnear's men. When the car-still containing Glenda-is shoved into the river by a couple of thugs, he does nothing. Finally, he murders Margaret, Frank's occasional prostitute girlfriend, and uses her body to set up Kinnear with the police.
Carter has three ways of dealing with problems: throw money at it, beat it up, or kill it. He doesn't do well with softer emotions at all. It's hard to say whether he enjoys killing or hurting people; he does appear to take a certain grim satisfaction in it, but he's no cackling sadist. It's more like the enjoyment of a job well-done; Carter is good at hurting people and in so doing, getting the required results. He wants to be in control of a situation, to bend it to his will and have it turn out exactly as it ought to.
That said, he is more of a follower than a leader; however, Carter won't follow just anyone. If he doesn't fear or respect the person in question (and he doesn't fear or respect very many people at all, if anyone), he has to at least be getting good compensation of some kind out of the arrangement. And he doesn't like being used. When Cliff Brumby tries to pay him to kill Kinnear, it just makes him angry-and he only gets angrier when he discovers that Brumby showed the film of Doreen's rape to Frank to get him to go to the police over Kinnear, which led to Frank's murder. Carter's also none too happy when he realises that his boss, Fletcher, is trying to drag him back to London and stop causing trouble for Kinnear, who is one of Fletcher's pornography suppliers.
Possibly as a reaction to a deprived childhood in a grim northern town, Carter does have a taste for the finer things in life, as his beautiful blue mohair suit, fine cufflinks, Rolex watch, and good shoes suggest. He's an intelligent man, and in another life he might have been a solid detective. He's also something of a reader, with a fondness for Raymond Chandler (and, presumably, other crime fiction as well). He has a moderate dependency on amphetamines, taking them as casually as most people take aspirin, and will have withdrawal symptoms to cope with after his arrival.
Path to Redemption:
There are two main lessons that Carter needs to learn, and they're tough ones. First, that his brand of rough justice is no real justice at all, however satisfying it may have been and however deserving the subjects were. Second, that his treatment of women is unacceptable, to say the least-it may have been common in his criminal circles, but that doesn't make it right. What will really make the first one sink in is if his warden can make him see that his violence bred violence to the extent that his death has left Doreen alone in the world. He'll try and deny that as much as possible and for as long as possible, of course. For the second, that will hopefully just come with time and exposure to the Barge's tough-ass variety of woman.
History:
Jack Carter was born in Newcastle and had an unrelentingly grim childhood. His brother Frank got a job in a factory as an ordinary working man, but Jack fell in with the local criminal element, and distinguished himself with his chilly ruthlessness and willingness to do whatever it took to get the job done.
Eventually he left Newcastle for London, but not before making a reputation for himself as someone to be feared-and around the same time, having an affair with Frank's wife, the result of which is very likely Doreen (who is fair-haired like her putative uncle). This affair was probably one of the motivating events for his relocation.
Once in London, Carter rose quickly in the ranks of the enforcers of Gerald Fletcher, an organised crime boss with fingers in lots of different pies, including pornography. Carter was, for the most part, indifferent to the substance of Fletcher's work, being more interested in simply getting his job done. He shed his Northern accent, sounding more and more like an East Ender.
Things were generally going pretty well for him, in fact, until he received news from Newcastle that Frank had died in a drunk-driving accident. Carter smelled a rat; he knew that his brother wasn't that kind of man. Furthermore, he was also concerned for Doreen (to whom he had occasionally sent gifts and money, despite being somewhat estranged from his brother).
What happened next? The summary for Get Carter says it all. Frank, as it turned out, had been murdered to stop him going to the police after he was shown a pornographic film in which Doreen was drugged and raped. Carter proceeded to kill all the men involved in his brother's murder, directly or otherwise, and arranged for the arrest of Kinnear (as a little something extra, he murdered Frank's girlfriend, who had helped entice Doreen, and dumped her body on Kinnear's estate, thus ensuring additional police attention). After he killed Eric Paice, the last of his brother's killers, Carter was himself shot in the head by a sniper sent for him by Kinnear.
Sample Journal Entry: [5-10 Sentences]
Gentlemen, ladies. The name's Carter. Pleasure's all mine, I'm sure. Now I'm going to go along with all this and assume this isn't all some kind of bad dream. I get the idea of what this place is, and I get that I'm probably not here on account of good behaviour. So what else should I know?
[Filtered to inmates only.] Who's really in charge here? I don't mean the wardens; I mean amongst you lot. And the wardens-who's their unofficial leaders?
Sample RP:
Enough was enough, Carter decided. The spooks and the Hammer horror bollocks-that was a laugh, it really was, and it was especially funny to see all those soft wardens and inmates dithering over it like a bunch of old ladies. This Flagg craphead was a joke too; if he thought he could bribe Jack Carter with a pretty little bauble like that, he had another think coming, he did.
But these faceless sods stalking the halls? They were just bloody inconvenient, and Carter was getting really damn tired of being inconvenienced. And his warden hadn't let him have a shotgun before pissing off to wherever he was now, more's the pity. So he took a chair in his room and smashed it up, breaking off the legs until one of them came off with a satisfying little nail sticking out the end. Just what the doctor ordered. He hefted it in his hand, pleased. Could've been a little heavier, but it would do.
He pushed open the door and as luck would have it, one of the faceless bastards was right outside, back to him. Wakey wakey, Carter thought, and brought the spiky end of the chair leg down on its skull.
Special Notes: I realise that Carter's history is pretty much made of triggers, and I'll be sure to warn for it early and often. Also, Carter appears in Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1969, but I don't plan on using any of that. Too much metafiction.