by Brendan James
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muu3-vVqo64
Laura Bennett declares her antihero fatigue, arguing the word has lost all meaning in the recent surge of bad boy TV dramas:
Somehow “antihero” has come to represent an impossibly broad characterological range: from psychopathic drug lords to well-meaning serial killers to wayward Dominican kids who sometimes mistreat women because of culturally-ingrained misogyny. …
In Hollywood, the concept has been around at least since films of the ’40s and ’50s began exploring the new post-war cynicism, and an action film actually titled “Anti-hero” appeared in 1999. [Encyclopedia] Britannica cites as some early antiheroes Satan in Paradise Lost, Heathcliffe in Wuthering Heights, and Don Quijote, none of whom are particularly useful analogues for the wretched, morally bankrupt leading men of cable drama. And the men of HBO and AMC are not as similar in their sinfulness as they have been made out to be. Walter White is by now less an antihero than a straightforward villain, a macho foil for Hank. “Antihero” implies that a character encourages a conflicted sympathy; Walt forfeited our sympathy long ago.
Walter White can only claim antihero status for a precious few seasons until the series becomes the confessions of a thug. The show’s genius, as Heather Havrilesky recently pointed out, is how effectively it alienates the audience from its protagonist without losing any dramatic momentum. Conscious of how cheap the American bad boy trope has become, the show’s writers keep pushing their main character further into villainy until we’re all forced to drop concern for Walter and redirect our sympathy and compassion toward basically everybody else. That’s when you know it’s no longer an antihero’s story, but a subversion of the trend.
Bennett goes on to strip Tony Soprano and Carrie Bradshaw of their antihero credentials as well:
Even Emily Nussbaum—who it should be said, is singularly skilled at inventing her own critical archetypes, a la the “Hummingbird theory”—wrote a piece on “Sex and the City” that identified Carrie as the “first female antihero,” the one frustrating bit of an otherwise lovely essay. Carrie could be irksome as a character, but “Sex and the City” was defensive of its protagonist in a way that “Breaking Bad” and “The Sopranos” never were, permitting Carrie to be abrasive and vain only to rein her in at the last minute with a pat, chastened ending; the other shows pushed us to see just what it would take to sever our emotional attachment to their protagonists, while Carrie’s reprehensibility was always a learning experience.
This might be overkill. If Carrie was too innocent, and Tony too depraved, one wonders what recent drama got it just right.
To me, the above scene from The Sopranos is a great example of the genuine antihero Bennett is after: disgusted with his (usually maniacal) sister’s progress in anger management, Tony methodically dismantles her gains from therapy and drags her back down to his level of misery and self-loathing. With a grin. Like Walter, Tony’s infection of everyone around him becomes a horrible spectacle, be it through physical brutality or sick emotional manipulation. He knows he’s a “toxic person,” as he laments later on in the series, and his attempt to correct himself forms the tragic arc of the show’s final season.
Still, contra Bennett, we never abandon him like we do Walter – in fact, we follow Tony into therapy, into purgatory, into death (that’s right) and, in the above clip, out of his sister’s house and into the street. Because there’s no way we’re staying behind with Janice. He’s not simply an antihero because he cares for his family or wields personal charm, but because in the moral universe he inhabits, Tony is capable of more insight and growth than the rest of his family, friends and enemies. And unlike Walter’s evolution into Dark Lord in Breaking Bad, Tony never replaces the true villain of the piece – his mother Livia, who carries on poisoning everyone’s lives long after her own has sputtered out.
So while it’s true The Sopranos spawned a wave of second-rate libertine heroes, of all shapes and sizes, if it gave us the perfect modern antihero in Tony and paved the way for the anti-antihero in Walter, that seems like a price worth paying.
The Dish 