Who's a Good Little Anti-Hero Then?

Who’s a Good Little Anti-hero Then?

What’s a hero? What’s an anti-hero? Why should I worry about these terms?
The words hero and anti-hero describe paradigms of virtue, the morals and actions we expect people to show in extreme circumstances. But their definitions change as we change. Hero in the Western context, now can mean a woman (the word heroine now being defunct), or a person of any race or culture. Back in the 1940’s a hero was white, male and westernized. Because we live in such extraordinary times, we need to be aware of shifts in our definition of ‘hero’ and of our expectations of people who might fill this role. We may even be called upon to be heroes ourselves, or perhaps anti-heroes if we don’t measure up.
Definitions.


Hero is a term that gets defined in most Dictionaries like this:
• The protagonist of a novel or play
• The protagonist of a legend
• A person who is brave and good
The first definition is a problem – the main character in a novel or play might not be a hero. Think of Death of a Salesman or Breath, the protagonists of these texts are not heroes in the socially accepted sense. Her o as a synonym for protagonist is out of use.
The second definition might hold if we focused on Greek heroes like Hercules and Jason. But are Orestes and Antigone heroes? Do we still believe in tragic heroes, one with flaws that lead them to destruction? Or are people like this considered to be just fools?
Once again the word ‘hero’ seems to be a synonym for the main character, rather than a defining term.
The third definition comes closer to the one we all think of, but is still not a clear definition. Anyone can be brave and good? So what are we expecting of a hero?
Celluloid Heroes


We can all think of heroes on television (ignore the series of the same name), or in the movies.
Flash Gordon, Superman, Iron Man and Batman - Cartoon heroes save the world, especially when they mutate to the big screen. White, Green or Black, they are here to rescue humanity from itself or alien threats.
John Connor, Luke Skywalker and Ripley are human, dirty and fallible. But they do have weapons at their disposal that no ordinary human has, to save humanity from external threats rather than from other human beings.
Xena, Buffy, Angel and Hercules fight mythical, religious dangers using extraordinary skills. They are a development of the Cartoon hero mixed with the human.
Mad Max saves us from ourselves, fighting for the children and the survival of humanity. Armed and able to improvise, Max is closest to normal human beings.
Television heroes are quite distant from real human beings, set in what we could consider mythical worlds rather than real ones. Even when we see real human beings on television being heroes it is in surreal situations, particularly wars, and often disasters. In real life we award medals such as the Victoria Cross to real heroes, and they are nearly always dead when the award is given. To understand heroism we need to see it stripped of the mundane, set in a situations where it is necessary and can be explained. It has to take on a spiritual quality.
Showing someone running across the road to save people in a burning car will work once or twice, but the scenario won’t grab us hard enough to lay down ideas we will later act on ourselves.
What about the villains?


In the real world heroes fight against fire or cold or exposure at sea, and we see these situations on film and accept that people who defeat them are heroes. But at the mythic level a hero needs to have an opposition, a villain or villainess such as Lex Luthor, Ming, Darth Vader, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Servalan. Sometimes an element such as fire or ice is personified in film to create a villain – Mr. Freeze for instance, but these don’t work as well as human villains. We like to see incarnations of our own worst impulses, and see them defeated.
But are villains all bad? Recently Ming the Merciless mutated into a leader concerned for his people. His true nature didn’t appear until he was exposed by Flash Gordon and his friends. Villains are as complex as heroes, if not more so:


Hero : Good looking, rugged; physically strong, trained; assertive, quiet authority, draw loyalty; unselfish;

usually young, immature, inexperienced, need a mentor; not always smart but intuitive; work in groups;

prepared to sacrifice themselves to save everyone; kind, compassionate; brave to the point of stupidity;

tolerant, inclusive; loyal to country, home, friends, family; virtuous, dependable, reliable; represent good,

Democracy, Faith.

Villain: Clever, use other people’s intelligence for their own ends; physically strong or cunning; usually older,

worldly wise, mature; cynical, unforgiving; work alone or with subject minions; selfish; assertive, vain, pompous;

intolerant, prejudiced; cowardly, anything looking brave is deceitful; prepared to sacrifice everyone else for their

own ends; vicious, wantonly cruel, use mass murder and genocide; disloyal to everyone but self; immoral,

unreliable; represent evil, tyranny, disbelief. These characteristics can shift. You do get villains like the Lex

Luthor who could be said to be stupid in some of his incarnations, and heroes like Dylan Hunt in Andromeda

who are very smart, but not as physically strong as some of his enemies, or even his allies.

How Has Our Understanding of Heroism Changed?



This version of hero’s and villains is modern, formed mainly in the 20th century in comics, film and television. In ancient times heroes were sung about in epics and later written up. David, Moses, Gideon and Abraham in the Bible were social and spiritual leaders of their people, working in difficult times. The villains they opposed were leaders of other countries determined to enslave them. Odysseus and Jason were leaders in Greek mythology, and their villains were creatures who wanted to entrap them. Today’s hero is not likely to be a leader (although he may be fabulously wealthy like Batman), but villains often are. We have been so affected by the events of the 20th Century we have redefined hero and villain. We have made heroes ordinary and villains dictators or wannabe dictators. Heroism now underpins democracy where in the past it ensured survival of the community.


I Don’t Want to Be a Hero!



Modern heroes may be what is termed a ‘reluctant hero’, one forced into the situation by circumstance or their friends and dependent on their fundamental morality to guide them through in spite of his protests to the contrary.

For instance Han Solo begins life in Star Wars as an outlaw, talking up his technological capacity, dependent on his Wookie. His friendships with Leia and Luke are based on deceit, and he exposes his moral weakness when he asks for money for his work. But he does rise to the occasion, making decisions which lead him to heroism. He is fundamentally a good man prepared to die for the greater good, he just had to be encouraged to find this in himself. Not everyone is born a hero. Jason Nesmuth in Galaxy Quest has pretended to be a hero all his working life in his television series, but finally becomes a hero when he sees aliens placed in danger because of his actions. Crichton in Farscape becomes a hero when he lives in a group of sentient beings whose help he needs to find his way home, and who also need him. Each character takes their turn at heroism showing their real strengths from very different bases.

In fact, from this point of view, heroism starts to look like a process more than a product. An ordinary human being who overcomes their short comings in order to serve the greater good , is a hero just as much as the superhero with their special powers. And villains aren’t born villains, they become evil. Look at the moral complexity of Lex Luthor in Smallville. He behaves remarkably like a hero in his youth, but is driven to evil by his father and partly by Clark, the hero. Ming in the current Flash Gordon series, believes he is doing his best by his people, but the ends justifies the means and he finally succumbs to his worst impulses.

So What does an Anti-Hero Do?

An anti-hero may begin life looking like a villain, with the same attractive good looks, and lack of morals. He or she is seductive, but dangerous because they look after themselves first and others second if at all.
Avon in Blake 7 was the quintessential anti-hero. Dedicated to surviving through the use of his own great intelligence, he showed moral ambiguity by being prepared to sacrifice his friends if necessary. But Avon was brought to heel when everyone else left the ship, Liberator. He could simply have flown away, found another team and lived happily. But he put his own life in danger to save the team, protesting that he would be lonely without them. Perhaps that was the truth, and the riddle of the anti-hero. He or she saves others, at great personal risk, to save something they need for themselves. Selfish self- sacrifice.

Captain Jack Harkness in Torchwood and Doctor Who shows another side of the anti-hero. Jack starts out as a reluctant hero, given immortality by the Tardis, then dragooned by Torchwood. He falls into the save-the world routine, saving his friends and others happily, often quite snappily when we don’t expect it. But does it mean the same when he can’t die? Can you be a hero if putting yourself in danger is not going to be fatal? It’s not really self-sacrifice, even if it does hurt to be shot and then return to life. So Jack is a different kind of anti-hero, one who saves the world, but without having to risk his life. He loves his friends, and he learns to love Earth, he would sacrifice himself if he could but he can’t. Instead he waits for the Doctor to return, leaves with him, then returns to what he has realized he can’t live without. His motivation becomes selfish because he protects the people he loves.
The other members of his team, Gwen, Owen, Ianto and Tosh are genuinely heroic in their efforts to save the world, because their lives really are put in danger.

The same riddle applies to the Doctor in Doctor Who. He really can’t die, although he can be killed and forced to regenerate which is a painful process. But when he puts himself in the line of fire to save the world, he is not offering up his own life. He loves humanity, he saves humanity, but the only cost he ever pays is the death of his friends, which happens very rarely. We are inclined to call the Doctor a hero, but in reality he is another anti-hero, filling up his own life working for the benefit of other sentient creatures. Like Avon, his motives are fundamentally selfish.

The Practical and the Spiritual


We need heroes to save us personally in times of crisis, and to save democracy (which is always under threat). We need heroes on screen to inspire us to greater things. We may need heroes to save the planet. But often we end up with anti-heroes, people who save us for their own ends. It may not matter in the short term. Saved is saved.
But the legends we create for ourselves to follow show heroes being selfless. We value the final decision some people make to sacrifice themselves for the community and democracy. In literature at the moment we seem to need to know about those Jews and Germans who died to save people from the gas chambers because we need to be convinced we could do the same thing. Some people will say this idea comes from Christianity, but more likely it’s the other way around. In a normal situation you can’t teach people to sacrifice themselves because they will feel good about it (exclude promises of heaven here). None of us is immortal, so it’s unlikely we can save the Earth or democracy or even our local area and be able to brag about it. You have to teach people that sacrifice is the highest, noblest, greatest thing they can do, that it has spiritual value somehow. These days we do that teaching via television. As technology complicates our lines of communication we may have to rethink this process, bring it down to more face-to-face teaching with mythical heroes again. Television may not be the failsafe method it has been in the past.