Just as successful is her even-handedness in attributing to both lofty and lowly characters an obeisance to the unspoken rules that govern the age they inhabit.
Shakespeare's songs are often reserved for lowly characters, and would have been performed at the Globe by professional musicians and highly trained singing boys.
It says something that the only star in the film (the popular actor Kenneth More) played a comparatively lowly, though heroic, character — Second Officer Herbert Lightoller, who managed to keep thirty men alive while they all stood on an overturned lifeboat.
One day the title character, a lowly government clerk, is paid in counterfeit bills, a mistake that sets off a series of events that leads Varamo, previously uninterested in literature, to sit down and write an avant-garde poetic masterpiece in a single night.
Mistry harks back to the nineteenth-century novelists, for whom every detail, every urban alley, every character however lowly added a vital piece to the full social picture, and for whom every incident illustrated the eventually crushing weight of the world.
The title character is a lowly soldier forced to earn extra money by performing menial tasks for an overbearing captain and by submitting himself as a guinea pig for medical experiments under a quack doctor.
For the other half, we are stuck in Long Island City, Queens, with the "lowly cubicle worker" Julie Powell, a character who is immature, self-pitying, and frazzled (which is to say, an average human being).
There was little for example, to connect LA Confidential director Curtis Hanson to Eminem's loosely fictionalised story 8 Mile, but to Hanson it evidently ticked the right boxes: lowly, trailer-park origins; a conflicted character; the ritualised combat of rap battles; plus the commercial potential of its established star.
Many factors have been advanced -- his rise from lowly origins, humility, compassion, integrity, self-made character, ability to overcome adversity, and humor.
