Over in the avatar thread, I mentioned that I liked movies with an anti-hero. My Avatar - Lucas Jackson (Cool Hand Luke), Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver), Eddie Felton (The Hustler), like that. So I decided to make a thread about them. I did a search, looks like the last thread was just shy of 20 years ago, so maybe it’s time to regurgitate the topic.
I’ve read that Bickle was one of the first anti-hero protagonists. Not sure if that’s true but if it is, I’m sure that only applied to movies. American movies, probably.
Anyway, what are your favorite anti-hero (protagonists)? Movies, books, graphic novels, whatever.
Might need a definition of anti-hero for the purpose of this thread…? I would consider an anti-hero to be a likeable rogue, or a flawed protagonist with some good qualities. Under that definition I would say Lucas Jackson from Cool Hand Luke and Eddie Felton from The Hustler would apply, but not Travis Bickle.
Been awhile since I saw Taxi Driver, but as I recall, Bickle was a sad, extremely maladjusted, mentally ill character who nearly assassinated a politician. He became a ‘hero’ through dumb luck. The movie was an indictment of society’s lack of good judgement when it came to who they considered heroes. I would not consider him even an anti-hero.
Some might say Walter White on Breaking Bad was an anti-hero, but I would consider him to be a straight-up bad guy. Though he may have evolved from good guy → anti-hero → bad guy.
I was addressing the remark that Travis Bickle (1970’s movie) was “among the first anti-hero protagonists”.
On the other hand, is Robin Hood even an anti-hero? True, he fights against legal authorities, but they are uniformly evil and corrupt. He does only good deeds, as far as I know.
There is a controversy over what exactly defines an antihero. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines an antihero as “someone who lacks heroic qualities”, yet scholars typically have differing ideas on what constitutes as an antihero. Some scholars refer to the “Racinian” antihero, who is defined by several factors. The first is that the antihero is doomed to fail before their adventure begins. The second constitutes the blame of that failure on everyone but themselves. Thirdly, they offer a critique of social morals and reality.[8] To other scholars, an antihero is inherently a hero from a specific point of view, and a villain from another.[
I had the same thought, but isn’t Robin Hood the archetype for all noble (in the moral sense) outlaws who steal from the rich and give to the poor that followed? Some outlaws from the American West were given the same fictional treatment.
ETA: I had Bob Dylan’s song “John Wesley Harding” in mind, for me a similar, though rougher character than Robin Hood:
Yes, and that’s precisely what’s disqualifying for antihero status. Robin displays all the heroic traits - ingenuity, courage, morality. The authorities he opposes are depicted as illegitimate and evil.
To be an antihero, he’d have to have at least one moral failing.Taking from the rich to feed the poor isn’t that. Neither is staying loyal to the true King.
Now this guy is definitely a candidate for an anti-hero (fi something of a psychopath as well). As I recall, he was reputed to have shot a man in the head because he wanted to see if his bullet would bounce off of his shiny bald head.
