I’ve often communed with outsiders – whether they’re white, black, Asian, gay, Jewish, etc., they are the black sheep, the double agent, the freak, the geek, the offender, the one who betrays the code of their tribe, doesn’t fit into a box but, can fall into multiple boxes if you dig deeper.  The common bond that I’ve enjoyed with these motley types is a familiarity with life on the outs aka rejection.  It becomes a badge of honor and if things come too easily, we get paranoid.  And if it’s not rejection, it’s resistance. Resistance stokes the flames in our belly, whets our appetite for a fight, and reassures us that we’re scrappy, spirited underdogs – not entitled, privileged fat cats.  Yes, the by-product of all this rejection includes various neuroses, a self-deprecating sense of humor, and an unabashed fascination with things that otherwise allegedly normal human beings would find obscene, esoteric, incomprehensible, etc.  But while life is unstable for outsiders, it is rarely banal, always interesting and often entertaining.

To pay tribute to the various outsiders, misfits, outcasts, and offenders who I’ve lived vicariously through film, here’s my list of those who never made rejection look so good.  Who are your favorites?

1. The young stylish criminals in Jean-Luc Godard’s, ‘Band of Outsiders’ – Odile, Arthur, and Franz.  No one can dance the ‘Madison’ like them (though Mia and Vincent pull off a fair homage doing the twist in ‘Pulp Fiction’).

2. Jim Jarmusch’s hipster trio – Willie, Eva, and Eddie ambling on an existential roadtrip in ‘Stranger than Paradise’

3. The out-of-work thespians ‘Withnail’ and ‘I’ of the aptly titled semi-autobiographical film by Bruce Robinson, born out of Robinson’s youthful misadventures as a struggling filmmaker.  Like many of us in our youth who engaged in codependent relationships with anarchic spirits, he was drawn to his larger than life, boozing flatmate and “Withnail” was an homage to him and his antics (eg: the scene where he drinks lighter fluid when he runs out of alcohol).  To the aspiring actors out there, enjoy Withnail’s logic, but beware of following his example -”What happened to my cigar commercial? What happened to my agent? Bastard must have died.”

4. Alex Cox’s “Sid and Nancy” – a spectacular hot mess, but exuberantly tragic duo.

5. Nola Darling’s bracingly modern sexual bravado and Mars Blackman’s geeky-hip charm in Spike Lee’s ‘She’s Gotta Have It’.  Who can forget Mars begging Nola ‘Please baby, please baby, please baby, baby baby please!’

6. Gregg Araki’s ‘Living End’ featuring the first HIV positive lovers on the run – Luke, the drifter who lives by his motto to “F*&k everything” (figuratively and literally) and Jon, the tortured film critic who evokes Morrissey in body and spirit.

7. “Good Asian Son” Marvin and “Bad Asian Son” Kazumi of Jon Moritsugu’s ‘Terminal USA’ were the post punk Asian twist on Cain and Abel.  Who knew beneath Marvin’s mild mannered demeanor there was a fetish for skinheads?