The Rise of the Anti-Hero
In the last five years or so, there hasn’t been a movie or tv show that has a typical “villain” who is all bad and has no redeeming qualities. This is pretty easy to see in most Marvel movies; the villain is usually someone who was experimented on, was done a great injustice by the people in power, or was lead astray into thinking their way of doing things was correct based on someone else who was done wrong and then poorly informed them. You get the picture. They all have complicated backstories that lead people to be more sympathetic to the villain and they also tend to have families or another cause they are doing whatever the bad thing is for. Another great example of this is the movie Joker that came out in 2019. In many versions of his story, the Joker is the bad guy who is always trying to get to Batman and thwart his plans, but the audience gets a much more comprehensive view of the situation in this iteration of the story. The Joker has pretty severe mental health issues that make it so he can’t hold down a great job and has to work as a clown to work at parties or the hospital, etc. His mother also has some pretty severe mental health issues that require him to care for her. This all culminates into a mess once the Joker is mugged and beaten up on the subway on the way home. When the cops won’t help him, and when his therapist can’t see him anymore, he takes matters into his own hands to deal with all the injustice that has befallen him and his mom. He’s sympathetic. We can directly chart all the opportunities people had to help him and where they failed that lead to this situation.
Another great example of this idea is Karli Morgenthau in the show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. She is a young refugee who had a very hard life as an orphan up until the snap (a Marvel term from the movies when a bunch of people got poofed from Earth) and there was suddenly enough places for her and her friends to live, enough food to eat, and they could more easily get jobs. Once the people who had been snapped came back, everyone who had been a refugee before got forced back out onto the streets, had to leave their jobs, and so much more. They were forced into ghetto-style camps in old abandoned churches and other buildings humans couldn’t really ever live in. Then when a new law is about to get passed to somehow make it all better (but would actually make it all worse) Karli forms a group that is bent on changing things and getting their lives back. The show constantly debates whether her means justify the ends, but they never debate whether she has a reason to be angry.
More and more we are seeing these kinds of anti-heroes in movies and tv. Gone are the days of the villain who is simply bad and there is no other reason for it. Gone are the characters that you can just easily have killed off and not feel something about it. We live in a world that is mostly a gray area, so it’s honestly a little baffling that it took this long for this to become the trend in media.
In our society, we are always quick to look for the human behind the villain in a lot of ways we shouldn't. We want to blame mass shootings on mental health issues alone and not the fact that mentally ill people can legally buy guns. We focus on the veteran who has severe PTSD and goes off the rails and harms his family and chalks it up to how awful war is, but not how we could have better mental health for people who come back from war. We say black people commit more crimes than other races which is why they are in jail more often and then why they commit more crimes when they get out. We don’t look at the systemic racism that put them in poverty in the first place and the racist cops who arrested them. As a society, we like to look at the problem and say “oh well too bad” instead of examining the cause and the usually fairly obvious solution. Movies and tv are finally doing that in such an important way.
The two examples I have already given, Joker and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, encompass all three examples I gave up top (minus gun laws) because they tackle the big issue that is overarching all of it: what happens when we forget about people in our society? The anti-hero/sympathetic villain works to show the pitfalls within our society and bring them to the forefront of our minds. What else is there to do when they cut off your mental health services and you can’t afford your meds? What do you do when you are treated as sub-human and your family and friends have to squat in abandoned buildings to barely survive? And what do you do when you have severe PTSD, are forced to be the face of the country who gave the PTSD to you, and then do nothing to help you? All of these things are discussed and shown in pretty decent depth in the shows and movies I listed above. They do a great job of explaining what lead them to this position, even if they don’t condone the actions that come from them.
Even if it only tv and movies, I am happy that the media is showing what some of the consequences can be when a government chooses not to take care of its people. Maybe our government could stand to learn a thing or two from Marvel, or the Joker.
Madey
Cover art by Avery Lynch