While watching the above clip of Tom Hanks on The Daily Show, I was appalled -- appalled -- to hear Hanks admit that there is no such thing as a Harvard professor of symbology, the credential boasted by his character, Robert Langdon, in Angels And Demons.
This was very disillusioning, and forced me to abandon my twenty-year plan to become a Harvard symbologist, which I believed was on track when I correctly figured out that on Survivor, fire represents life.
But as I considered the matter further, I realized that giving a character a credential of some kind is a good way to make him believable and worth listening to. Perhaps the problem with some characters who are not taken seriously is that their resumés have not been fleshed out.
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