I'm fascinated by antagonistic pairings of fictional characters—think Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. They seem like they've been together so long, they can scarcely stand each other's company; they squabble endlessly, each partner conversationally jabbing at the other's weak points. Didi and Gogo do have moments of happiness, but they never seem happier than when they're exploring the idea of committing suicide together. They'll never part from one another, but they seem doomed to a life of feeding off each other. Vladimir takes little bites out of Estragon's self-esteem, Estragon does the same to Vladimir, and so on into eternity. It's like Beckett's giving us a little taste of Hell.
I've cited a couple other famous examples of such pairings. There's J. J. Hunsecker, the powerful and egotistical newspaper columnist (modelled after Walter Winchell) who keeps hungry press agent Sidney Falco on a tether: sometimes Hunsecker prints the items Falco wants, but more often he doesn't, and he freely taunts Falco with the threat of cutting him off for good. Falco can't simply leave; Hunsecker has the power to destroy his life (which he ends up exercising at the end of the film). So Falco sticks close to Hunsecker's side, unhappy and bitter about being reduced to Hunsecker's servant, but too weak and morally compromised to pull himself free. He wants Hunsecker's sort of power and fame, and the only way he's likely to get such fame is through J. J. Hunsecker.
And then there's Ronald Reagan and PM Margaret Thatcher, who are themselves fictional characters even though they were also leaders in the "real world". To be a politician is to be an actor (Reagan merely made it more obvious) and presenting a carefully polished and rehearsed public image to the people, someone who's always calm and confident and giving an impression of great wisdom and unquestionable authority. Reagan attempted to enact such a role, but I daresay his GOP handlers were aware that their President was less than convincing at seeming wise and august. Fortunately they had an ally in PM Margaret Thatcher, who was the prime minister of the United Kingdom during the entire Reagan Presidency, and whose politics were at least as reactionary and oppressive as anything the GOP was cooking up in the 1980s.
Thatcher's power, compared to Reagan, was microscopic; the U.K. is immensely weaker and less influential than the United States. (Another famous British minister, Jim Hacker, once sadly remarked that in world politics, his country was little more than an American missile base.) But in the world of publicity, Reagan and Thatcher presented themselves as equal partners in the Special Relationship™, each backing up the other's ruinous policies. Furthermore, even though Thatcher was younger than Reagan, she carried herself with an air of maturity and intellect that Reagan conspicuously lacked, and that gave her a vaguely maternal aspect towards the man—almost as though our worries about Reagan's peevishness ought to be soothed by the notion that Maggie was holding Ronnie's hand, giving him the gentle sort of guidance you might expect from a stereotypical British governess.
(But this starts getting into the general weird way in which Reagan's marketers sort of...leaned into his childishness a bit, probably because they could pass it off as a simulation of youthful energy.)
You know I'm not entirely sure who wrote that. Probably more than one of us.
