TLV Application: Chris Pratt - The Lookout

[workbackwards]

User Name/Nick: Starrah
User DW: funkybrewsta
AIM/IM: ashamefulbabby
E-mail: paperlights at gmail
Other Characters: N/A

Character Name: Chris Pratt
Series: The Lookout
Age: They don't exactly state in canon, but with a little math, I put him at around 22.
From When?: On the night of the robbery, Chris decides to change his mind about helping the gang rob the bank. However, they don't care and hold him at gunpoint until the job is done. One of the guns will accidentally go off, killing Chris which will mark his arrival onto the Barge.

Inmate/Warden: Inmate. From the beginning of the movie, Chris is guilty of the crime of teenaged stupidity. To impress his ex-girlfriend, Kelly, on prom night, he causes an accident that kills two of his friends and seriously injures Kelly and himself. He doesn't do time for this in actual jail, but there are other prices he has to pay that don't include iron bars.

Later on, he gets mixed up with a bad crowd and ends up getting himself involved in a bank robbery. Here we have the crime of robbery and murder, as various people get killed during it, and if we're going to include a few biblical sins in there, the crime of pride as his involvement is based on Chris being embarrassed of his current mental and social state.

Abilities/Powers: None.

Personality: The best way to describe Chris Pratt is to split him into who he was and who he is now.

Chris Pratt used to be one of the kids in high school everybody wanted to be. Popular, rich, a jock, not in the least bad looking. People knew his family and knew him and his reputation as an all-star hockey player preceded him. He was young and with his family's money in his pockets, he had the world at his feet. Nothing could go wrong.

But it does. And it did. Badly.

Chris Pratt is a young man with brain damage from a car accident now living with a visually-impaired roommate named Lewis in a shabby apartment in a neighborhood far removed from the tony suburbs full of McMansions where he grew up. His personality is completely different to how he was four years ago. He is much more sullen, quiet, even quick to anger. He's easily frustrated, confused, forgetful, and not to mention, full of guilt from what he did. He can no longer do the daily activities most people take for granted without personal assistance or helpful reminders. Chris needs tabs, notes, stickers, and cards to help him remember how to perform self-hygiene, when to go to class, when to take meal breaks, even when to meet with his life skills case manager, Janet. Even Lewis makes up a plate of food for Chris. Problems with sequencing is another big issue that comes up often. What goes first, toast in the toaster or butter on the toast? Does he brush his teeth first and then eat or does he drive to class, shower, and then go make coffee? Chris cannot make sense of simple actions like these without a step by step list of how, why, when, where, and who he's doing it with.

Along with a severe case of short term memory where he tends to forget bits of information from even five minutes ago, limited range of motion with his left arm and hand, and frequent narcolepsy, Chris suffers from disinhibition due to some front lobe damage which results in him saying and doing things that he soon regrets. An example of this is him crossing the lines of professionalism with Janet by telling her that he thinks about fucking her everyday--in those exact words--in the middle of a busy diner, even after Janet rebuffs his previous romantic advances by telling him it's not a good idea for them to date. He just doesn't know when to stop until it's too late and when he does stop, he's ashamed and embarrassed and instantly just wants to shut down. Who could blame him?

Chris, on the outside, looks calm, but he's really a boiling pot waiting to explode. He's feeling guilty for what he's done to his friends and himself. He's no longer the way he wants to be. He, in his own words, wants to be how he used to be. He can't be that and every day is a reminder. When Lewis leaves him in the morning and Chris is left to his own devices to make coffee and he screws that up, it's frustrating. Such a simple action shouldn't be so difficult, right? But it is. He can't even read the newspaper because words confuse him now and that pisses him off. He cries and sometimes he doesn't know why. He calls tomatoes lemons when he knows this is wrong, but his brain just doesn't want to work with his mouth and it results in him punching a wall.

Things that used to be easy for him, like social actions, are pretty much impossible. Those don't come with notecards. He's tried to hit on women and failed miserably. He's copied what he's seen other more confident men do and nothing but total disaster happens. Chris can't help but feel like a complete loser where his only friend is Lewis and even Lewis seems to be able to get a woman (or at least manage to get a woman to not slap him.) Chris no longer fits in with his upper crust family because his brother makes fun of his no-name brand clothes, his father, who financially supports Chris just enough to get by with the basics but not enough to fully support himself, wants his old son back, his little sister seems to just be checking out of life because she's a teenager and his mother is... his mother. She loves her son, but she clearly doesn't know what the hell to do with Chris other than baby him. The only person Chris gets along with is his older sister, Alison, who seems nice enough to talk to him, not at him. But she can't be there for him when she has her own child and husband to deal with and Chris obviously knows this.

He's frustrated with his station in life too. With his injuries, there isn't much he can do as employment and while he dreams of being a bank teller and has even bigger dreams of running a eatery with Lewis, his memory issues get in the way. He spends his nights mopping the floors of the same bank he ends up being convinced to help rob, playing imaginary hockey, pretending he is the old Chris Pratt. The Chris Pratt who could do things and live, not the one scrubbing public bathrooms at three in the morning, wishing his boss would just give him a fucking chance for once.

On the Barge, Chris will probably have the natural reaction of hating the place. It's jail. It's another reminder for him and the last thing he needs is another one on the list. While he may have a part of him that feels like he belongs there, there is another part that feels like even that won't change him so what's the use? Later on, with a lot of hope and much more work, blood, sweat, and tears, he might even realize that the Barge is a good opportunity in disguise. Here, no one knows who Chris Pratt or who the Pratt family is. No one know what happened or how it happened. No one knows how much of a bastard he thinks of himself. Maybe, just maybe, this can be a fresh start for him?

Path to Redemption:

- Guilt: Chris has this in spades. One thing he has not be able to do since the accident is apologize to his ex-girlfriend who was the only other survivor. He doesn't have the bravery to go up to her and do it face to face, even though he sits in the park and watches her walk by daily. He would probably like to apologize and make amends for his other two friends as well, but with them being dead, that makes this more difficult. Once a week, he drives down to the scene of the accident to remind himself of how awful he is. His father's money may have fixed his legal problems, but it didn't erase what happened.

- Become normal (or at least more self-sufficient): While I hate using the term 'normal' I will here because this is what Chris uses in reference to himself. Unfortunately, he will never be normal again. The brain damage is permanent, the short-term memory loss may get better in time, but it probably won't ever go fully away. He walks with a slight limp and has a few visible scars on his forehead, scalp, throat, back and arm. None of these will disappear.

He can, however, with a lot of work, practice, and patience, learn how to sequence his daily activities better without reminders, learn how to control impulses, and relearn how to socialize in a more acceptable manner.

- Triggers: Chris does not like to be made fun of. If someone points out his disability and how it makes particular shortcomings, he tends to get angry. This anger unfortunately lets him make stupid decisions in other prove his worth somehow. So, if somebody tells him that he's a dummy and as a dummy with a broken brain he can't do something, he will go help them commit a crime just to prove his manhood. Rather childish of him, but remember, poor impulse control.

Related to this is Chris being extremely susceptible to peer pressure. It honestly doesn't take much. He wants to be with the cool kids. So if all the cool kids are jumping off a bridge, all they have to do is a little cajoling, especially if there's a pretty lady in the mix, and even if Chris knows it's a bad idea, he finds himself standing on the edge. He is easily molded especially if somebody uses his internal anger and convinces him to make it external. He goes from feeling everything is his fault to feeling the world is against him in the matter of a few days just because of one person's influence.

History: Film synopsis courtesy of Wikipedia.

Sample Journal Entry:

[The video snaps on to show the currently empty communal shower where Chris stands in a corner stall, fully dressed with the water off. He faces the tiled wall and it appears he's carefully affixing slips of torn paper with phrases like turn on water, use soap, use shampoo, rinse off and so on to the wall with tape. The total number of them are only about two handfuls, but it takes him so much longer than it usually would because his left arm keeps shaking uncontrollably. and Chris needs to take frequent breaks.

Finally, he manages to complete to task and turns to the camera, face neutral but his eyes pleading.]

Can you stop taking these down? I need them. I... [Suddenly, he seems shy in the way he's looking down at his feet, but it's more shame than anything if anybody really knew him.] ...just do.


Sample RP:

Life always seems like one big question of 'Did I leave the lights on?' for Chris, only the oven consisted of the entire world around him. Without his trusty notepad (Lewis says Chris should really give it a nickname for laughs, but then he would need to write the nickname down which kind of defeats the entire purpose), Chris is lost on what his next step should be most of the time.

Those life skill classes were bullshit. Everyday they wrote about their daily life and how to sequence it and it was just bullshit. Did any of it matter? Who cares if he shaved before he ate his cereal? Or saw Janet at one o'clock instead of having lunch at one and their appointment at four? People changed their days on a whim all the time. Why couldn't he? Oh yes, that's why. Dummy Chris even forgot how he fucked his own self up and now he can't do that anymore, much like play chess with his father anymore. It's a wonder they even still trust him with a car.

And Kelly. Jesus Christ, Kelly. Everyday he sees her and everyday he wants to tell her how sorry he is that he was a dumb teenager who just wanted to make prom night special for her and messed everybody else up instead, but he can't. He doesn't feel he has the right to, much less the actual courage. No words will bring her leg back, his two friends back, him back.

So now Chris finds himself an inmate again. This time, not of his own disability, but of a ship. The Barge and he only remembers the name because of course, he wrote it down on the back of his hand. A place where dead people come to atone for their crimes and oh, how many he has to ask forgiveness for. But still, he's like to give the place a big fuck you because damn it, he doesn't need this. Hasn't he suffered enough already? He was already pathetic in life, does he need to be in death?

The least they could have done was make him normal again, but clearly that's asking for the impossible.