Anti-Hero Worship

Earl Fowler

Whenever I get together with a passel of likeminded geniuses to noodle through the problems of the world, we inevitably arrive at the same roundabout (protruding from the wrinkled table terrycloth) about halfway through the second frothy mug of Pioneer Room Guinness. (Picture half of us with dickish liberal arts ponytails protruding from balding pates to complete the visual.)

I’m sure you’ve been there, too: A state of complete and utter incomprehension, mystification and despair over the continuing popularity of Donald J. Trump among that large swath of the American population unwisely described by Hillary Clinton, to her great sorrow and the world’s detriment, as a “basket of deplorables.”

No more gallantly or sagaciously than she, members of my elite and ineffectual cadre inevitably lay the blame for this self-destructive loyalty of much of the American working class to a perpetually aggrieved, devious, dishonest, egotistical, rapacious, autocratic, ignorant, power mad, paranoid, self-pitying, self-aggrandizing, bullying, boorish sociopath at the usual doormats (or rather, stuffed against doorjambs like quickly crumpled flyers from the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society).

There are the roles played by big money and that old-time religion, of course. Trump wouldn’t be where he is without the backing of all the tech billionaires and evangelical types who have twisted Christ’s message into an unrecognizable stew of avarice and barbarism.

There’s the breathtaking ignorance and dull-wittedness of an American electorate with an internal algorithm permanently set to AS (Artificial Stupidity).

The inveterate racism thinly papered over during the Obama and Biden eras.

The ingrained sexism that helped doom the Clinton and Kamala Harris campaigns.

The rise of fascist social media and the way the legitimate press (with some laudable exceptions) has dropped to its knees to take dictation from the Grand Orange Poobah, resembling for all the world those goobers who crowd behind him at his Götterdämmerung spirit rallies with their flies down and buttons missing halfway down their shirts. (Freudians, you’re welcome.)

Ever watch the Fox & Friends lickspittles, jaws flexing in unison as they mewl and whine like mosquitoes and black flies smacking against mesh screens at night? I’ve witnessed more authentic emotion in 7 a.m. lineups for Tim Hortons breakfast sandwiches. More functioning brain cells in cemetery stonework patched only with mustard lichen.

(But enough on Fox. Either I’m too sensitive or else I’m getting soft. Feel free to imagine me kneading a stress ball at this point.)

Another obvious way that Trump keeps his legions of Deplorawaffen on side is by immediately changing the subject to opine on his pet peeve of the moment whenever asked a serious question, and then fatiguing listeners with long-winded, usually meaningless soliloquies and disquisitions.

In his own way, he’s no less a master of obfuscation and manipulation than was Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby in the much-missed British political satire sitcom back in the 1980s.

Sir Humphrey would say things like this to put interlocutors on their back foot: ”In view of the somewhat nebulous and inexplicit nature of your remit, and the arguably marginal and peripheral nature of your influence within the central deliberations and decisions within the political process, there could be a case for restructuring their action priorities in such a way as to eliminate your liquidation from their immediate agenda.”

Trump doesn’t have the vocabulary, the intelligence or the verbal dexterity to pull off bafflegab like that, but he’s an absolute genius at spewing dumbed-down gibberish that would leave even Sir Humphrey speechless. My favourite recent example: “Nothing bad can happen. It can only good happen.”

You can’t delineate a governing philosophy of “common sense, common man” populism gooder than that.

Moral-majority, tough-on-crime, pick-a-scapegoat (Black people, Jews, Muslims, illegal aliens) populism has been a pious front for venal corruption in both Canada and the United States since their inceptions, and Trump is just the latest in a long line of scoundrels and mountebanks to occupy the West Wing. He is, however, the first American president so steeped in vengeance and Machiavellianism that the unvarnished political credo of his second term in office can be lifted straight out of George Orwell’s 1984:

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

It’s not a complicated philosophy. The hard part to get your head around, again, is that tens of millions of people — whose daily existence has become less affordable due to the massive incompetence and bloodthirsty callousness of Trump and his minions — continue to support this plundering gang of thieves and hypocrites.

Which brings us, enfin, to the point of all this. Please take your protein pills and put your helmet on.

It seems to me that there’s one more factor — la pièce de least résistance — that tends to get lost or at least underplayed in all of this routine rending of garments and gnashing of teeth.

Voici today’s thesis: Zeitgeists — the defining spirits or moods of historical periods — swing like a pendulum do. Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.

The days of Dudley Do-Right rescuing damsels in distress and Mr. Smith going to Washington to fight corruption and idealistic youth asking not what their country could do for them but what they could do for their country are as démodé as bobby sox and heavy petting. Flying monkeys are blotting out the sun.

The Greek and Roman deities are back, baby! Zeus the serial rapist (Trump), vindictive Athena (Laura Loomer), Dionysus the capricious drunk (Pete Hegseth). To be vain, thin-skinned, vengeful, unyieldingly partisan, lustful, resentful, bullying and cruel is the new civics ethos.

The jealous and vindictive Jehovah of Genesis, Exodus and Numbers — who ate and drank with gusto, lost his temper, delighted in mischief, proclaimed his justness while playing favourites, was inscrutable and erratic to the point of near insanity — well, Lulu’s back in town, kids.

I AM YOUR JUSTICE. I AM YOUR RETRIBUTION. Said Trump.

By now, it’s basically a cliché to point out that we (i.e., late/post-modern, screen-addicted, morally flexible Westerners with smartphones and subscription fatigue) prefer our protagonists morally grey, flawed, sexy in a wounded-and-traumatized kind of way, and possessed of that magical mix of cynicism and wit that lets them hover somewhere between charming sociopath and sociopathic charmer.

Jaded, weary, fed up with the dull patina and muffling wax of the everyday, we’re attracted to anti-heroes, just as surely as the hot girls in high school chased after the bad boys who, surprise surprise, turned out to be very bad news indeed. Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones’s Diary, and a long line of thoroughgoing cads and morally bankrupt bounders in literature are simply more fun to hang with than actual heroes, who (if we’re being honest) are often kind of boring in their uprightness, like people who say they “don’t really watch TV.”

But what’s less obvious — maybe — is just how old this fascination is. Like, not “since the 1970s” old or “since Tony Soprano first saw that family of ducks in his pool” old, but Gilgamesh-old. Anti-heroes, despite their seeming modernity and #edgy vibes, have always been with us, lurking at the margins of our myths, fables, novels and Netflix queues, providing a kind of moral counterweight to the capital-H Hero’s self-righteousness. They are our doubts and contradictions made flesh, leaving me, for one, with that “ginger ale in my skull” sensation that the head of TV’s DiMeo crime family once described to psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi as the first signs of a panic attack.

1. A Very Quick and Incomplete Historical Tour

Let’s go back even earlier than the Greek and Hebrew gods. Start with Gilgamesh, the heavyweight champion of Mesopotamian mythology from the second millennium BC who is technically a king and a hero, sure, but also kind of a monster. He oppresses his people, kills monsters for fun and begins to reflect on morality only after his BFF Enkidu dies — sort of like a Bronze Age version of a guy who only gets into therapy after his second divorce.

Then there’s Achilles, who sulks in his tent for half the Iliad because someone bruised his ego (how heroic!), and Odysseus, who lies constantly, cheats, slaughters and gaslights his way home to Ithaca.

Fast forward a few centuries and you get your Miltonic Satan, who (and this is dangerous territory, I know) ends up being way more interesting than boring old God in Paradise Lost. Satan is ambitious, articulate, driven — a startup founder of celestial rebellion — and readers (including William Blake, who famously noted that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”) were into it.

Similarly, Dante’s nine circles of hell are no walk in the park, but at least they sound more interesting than spending eternity next to perfectly boring Beatrice in the Empyrean. Anyone seen the remote?

And then — jump cut — come the Byronic bad boys: Childe Harold, Manfred, Heathcliff. Romanticism ushers in the era of tortured interiority, where the anti-hero is not just acting badly but feeling bad, dramatically and poetically and often in tight pants. This is a crucial development: the anti-hero stops being just a narrative foil or plot device and becomes a vessel for existential angst. He’s not just bad; he’s deeply misunderstood, usually by society, often by women and almost always by himself.

No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man, to be the sad man, behind blue eyes. But all we Chauncey Gardiners like to watch.

II. Why the Anti-Hero Keeps Coming Back

So why this enduring popularity? Why are we drawn to people who do bad things, especially when we (allegedly) want to be good? Why has a rogue’s gallery of bad-ass brands figured out that there’s a dollar to be made by drawing attention to their deficiencies?

Think the Hans Brinker Budget Hostel in Amsterdam (still attracting hordes of curious guests as “the worst hotel in the world”), Ryanair (the low-budget European airline which cheekily uses social media to mock justified complaints about its service), the Liquid Death canned water company, which has released “greatest hate” death metal albums based on lyrics from dissatisfied customers.

Part of it is catharsis, certainly. But part of it might be that anti-heroes expose the hypocrisy in our own ideals. They scratch at the contradictions we carry — between wanting to be virtuous and wanting to win, between craving justice and revenge, between believing in truth and needing a good lie to get through the day. The anti-hero doesn’t resolve these tensions. He is the tension.

Also, let’s be honest: they’re just more fun. No one watches Breaking Bad for the chemistry. You watch to see how deep into the moral abyss Walt will descend while still insisting he’s doing it “for his family.”

Ditto Mad Men, The Sopranos, Dexter, Barry, Nurse Jackie, Fleabag, House of Cards, Succession, etc. These are characters who act out our most selfish, dark, impulsive urges and still get all the best lines. They’re like avatars for our shadow selves, if our shadow selves were more stylish and articulate and played by people with great jawlines.

III. The Anti-Hero as Cultural Mirror

And this, I think, is the key to Trumpism. The anti-hero tends to flourish in periods of deep social or moral ambiguity — when the old codes seem broken and the new ones haven’t fully solidified. Think post-Vietnam ’70s America (Taxi Driver, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dog Day Afternoon), or post-9/11 cynicism (see basically every HBO drama between 2001–2010).

The terror attacks that brought down the Twin Towers birthed the very zeitgeist that served up the first season as Trump as the omniscient, omnipotent and mercilessly unsparing host of “reality” show The Apprentice in 2004, a chair he was to occupy for the next 14 seasons as his launching pad to victory in the presidential election campaign of 2016.

Those over-the-top, Bollywood blockbuster, Mexican telenova, World Wrestling Federation-style Mussolini Balcony smirks and Snidely Whiplash grimaces that Trump evinces are straight out of the Book of Vulgar Anti-Hero Noises from the Back of the Classroom. And every time he puts one on for the cameras, the manosphere climaxes, clutching at its tiny, ah, convictions with short, milty fingers.

A working class anti-hero is something to be.

What the anti-hero allows us to do is confront the ambiguity without resolving it. He (or increasingly she, though female anti-heroes are still often shoehorned into sexy-villainess tropes) doesn’t necessarily teach us a lesson. He embodies the lesson: that the world is complicated, messy, sometimes rigged and occasionally redeemable. That heroism might still exist, but it’s covered in layers of irony, self-doubt and bad decisions.

See also: BoJack Horseman, who is both a joke and a tragedy and whose most human moments happen when he fails to be either.

IV. The Problem with Loving the Anti-Hero

Of course, there’s a danger here too. Anti-heroes can be mistaken for ideals rather than warnings. (See: the frat-boy misreadings of Fight Club, or the legion of crypto bros who think The Wolf of Wall Street was aspirational.) (See also: the evening news, any given day of the week.) There’s a fine line between critique and fetishization, and anti-heroes tend to dance on it in increasingly expensive shoes.

And there’s fatigue, too. After decades of so-called prestige TV and postmodern fiction giving us nothing but morally compromised protagonists, at some point there will have to be a kind of anti-hero burnout —a craving, maybe, for sincerity again, for a character who tries to do the right thing not out of irony or guilt or self-interest but simply because it’s right.

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its Loomer eyes to you.

V. Maybe This Is About Us After All

So maybe the anti-hero is less a genre convention than a psychological weather report. When we’re disillusioned, angry, confused or just plain exhausted, we turn to characters who reflect that back at us, but with better dialogue. They say the things we can’t. They do the things we won’t. And we watch them fall, again and again, secretly relieved that we don’t have to.

But it’s worth remembering that even the best anti-heroes aren’t free. They’re trapped — in their own flaws, their own scripts, their own loops of self-justification. And maybe that’s the real lesson, if there is one: that freedom isn’t doing whatever you want. It’s knowing what you want and why — and maybe choosing differently anyway.

Or maybe not. Depends on the show. And I’m not crazy about the ending of the reality show that we’re so ominously building toward.

Footnote 1: Yes, “he” is used throughout, partly because the anti-hero has historically been gendered male, and partly because writing “he/she/they” every time makes for choppy prose. Please mentally insert whatever pronouns apply to your favourite tormented, complicated protagonist.

Footnote 2: There is a whole other essay to be written about the rise of the female anti-hero in the last decade — see Killing Eve, Fleabag, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I May Destroy You, Yellowjackets — but that would require another 2,000 words and a third glass of Guinness. The table cloth here in the Bessborough is already soaked.