You Gotta Love 'Em By Debralee Mede

Well you'll either love them or hate them but, for my money, few stories are good without them.  Virginia Woolf said that Dostoevsky's novels were: "…composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul."  She was referring his typical central characters that he called "the beautiful soul," the soul that was faced with moral dilemmas, the anti-hero. This character has elements of a tragic hero, usually a protagonist with clear human frailties and a villain. In fact he can also be a villain with frailties: a villain with a heart, a weakness, that makes you question whether he is a hero.  He is a villain with some loveable trait that has me like him.  (Yes, and her but for my purposes here I'm calling the anti-hero "him").

This is the guy that you don't know whether to love or hate.  He's the one who seems ordinary and is accessible: the one who may exude a quite strength, a kind of masculine grit and has a kind of gentle hunk factor.  He has an overall masculine presence. Sometimes he is the character that you might not notice immediately or you find to have a positive or unassuming influence in the story, that is, to start out.  He is very ordinary so he seems very accessible.  Usually he tends to be disillusioned with society, with his family or his lot in life and tries to seek either redemption or revenge for his own satisfaction, for the greater good, or for what he thinks is the greater good.  The anti-hero might be a vigilante like the character played by Jim Caviezel's character John Reese, a former Green Beret and CIA field officer, in A Person of Interest who sees his actions as noble because they are "the end that justifies the means."

I enjoy reading books or seeing movies with these characters featured in them because they tend to have present complex moral dilemmas; they tend to be more individualistic, quirky, and tend to stand out more. I enjoy the way they tend to be realists in their views: no Pollyanna's rose- colored glasses for these guys.  Most of the time the hero, naturally unambivalent, succeeds at his goal but the very human anti-hero, who is the picture of real-life ambivalence and is complex by nature, might fail in tragedy and then again he might be redeemed by events or remain unchanged.  It is because of this, because of his actions and ways of thinking through problems or not, makes me think more about issues and difficult questions.

One of my favorite anti-hero characters is Michael Corleone in "The Godfather" trilogy.  Gosh, his path is a warped one.  He is a war hero with the desire for traditional love, marriage and family: qualities and desires that separate him so dramatically from the criminal mobster family of his birth.  But he is pulled even closer into the very family he thinks he wants to disassociate himself from when he decides to take some very aggressive and risky moves against his family's enemies in order to protect his father's life.  Michael is not the traditional war hero any longer; now he is the hero of the crime family he struggled to distance.  He sets aside his personal safety, reputation, his future goals, and the safety of his wife and children to get retribution for his father from his father's enemies so he can safeguard the family, he thinks.

Michael then has to flee to a faraway homeland, lose his wife who is killed because of the vengeance of his father's enemies, now his own enemies. He returns to his home and has to take charge of "the family" after his father and brother is slain.  He then takes his place as rightful heir to the mobster throne.  Any redeemable qualities are lost with each step he makes and each of his steps become more and more criminal until he loses any appearance of a traditional hero. His villainy is covered and hidden in deceit, fictions heroism and artificial respectability.  Michael acts out of pain and betrayal and he attempts to seek justice, but there isn't any.    He loses his soul while he gains power and control.

Another decidedly complex character and anti-hero is Leon played by Jean Reno in "Leon Leon: The Professional."  Leon is a professional assassin who takes care of a 12-year-old girl orphaned by a corrupt DEA agent who kills her dysfunctional family.  This girl is so confused and dysfunctional herself that she asks Leon to be her lover.  He does refuse but don't let this go to your head because while he refuses this offer, thankfully, this is not a protective kind of adoptive father-daughter relationship. Why?  Because he decides to train his young student in his trade: the art of the kill.  He is by no means a warm character and even in his heroic suicide he is still a murderer without remorse.

A genre that I gravitate to that has a mainstay of anti-hero characters is the film noir or detective noir fiction.  The characters in this genre tend to have few or no cut-and-dry good or evil qualities.  "The Maltese Falcon" is a good example of this.  It's a story about four people all with selfish motives who are willing to lie, steal and murder for their obsession.  The hero, Sam Spade, is the typical anti-hero and world-weary detective.

Other popular and renowned anti-hero of fiction and film include characters like Jack Sparrow in "The Pirates" movies and who doesn't have a soft spot for Jack?  (Or is it Depp that everyone has a soft spot for).  Then there is the "LA Confidential" movie where everyone has an anti-hero quality of some kind.  How about Paul Newman in "Cool Hand Luke"?  Then there's the Bruce Willis character John McClane in "Die Hard".

Anti-heroes make good mirrors for social commentary.  These guys are multidimensional characters that occupy the gray area between the good and the bad guy. They add spice and even a little heat to the plot.  They are the proverbial funnel cloud in the twister that sucks you right up into the whirlwind and twisting guts of the story.  They don't let you go until they are ready and then after you are sucked in, you land wondering what just hit you.

Filed under: Antihero, Debralee Mede, romance