Posted on 10/15/2009 11:05:23 AM PDT by AreaMan
I was in High School in the 70s. I remember taking a humanities class, (yep, the hippies had infected the schools by then), and watching “Cool Hand Luke”. We went over the hero versus anti-hero thing. I think it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s when Hollywood first started rejecting heros for anti-heros.
They have it down to an art form now, (pun intended). But they’ve lost their audience.
Anyway, it's hard to think of a Gary Cooper or Robert Mitchum who is acting today. A man's man is not popular anymore, and heroes are rarely portrayed, and God has been kicked out of the schools ...
... and we find ourselves in our current mess. Our whole culture has been debased.
There’s a great documentary about the history of the spaghetti western called “The Spaghetti West” that explains how the “anti-hero” was conceived by the Communist film makers who took over Italian cinema in the 60s and created the entire genre of anti-government, revolutionary propaganda thru movies.
ping
Very interesting article.
Some of the best Hollywood characters are in kids’ shows.
I can’t believe, though, that screenwriters live such sheltered lives that they never have an “all hands on deck” moment — a storm coming; the cows are out on the road at midnight; Dad and Mom are both sick and the kids have to do the chores; or even making the play of the game to clinch a win.
What kind of lives do such people live that they have absolutely nothing to write about?
I agree that sadly, the anti-hero seems to be the norm.
I think John Wayne summed it up very well in his last movie, “The Shootist”:
“I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to others, and I expect the same from them.”
John Wayne, George Patton, William F. Halsey, Chesty Puller, George Washington, and Robert E. Lee: My heroes.
What he doesn’t want is to watch The Dark Knight and see Batman struggling with whether he truly wants to help people.
I didn't see Batman as conflicted at all.
Now, in the film adaptation of LOTR, Aragorn was portrayed as rather conflicted and unsure of himself, which I thought was completely wrong. In the book, he does not question his role at all -- although he does at least once kick himself for not always making the right decision.
The people in control of the main conduits of storytelling today are, like the people in control of pedagogy and the people in control of “journalism” and the people in control of the three branches of government scared to death of the individual. A person who reveres traits of the traditional hero cannot be controlled beyond a certain point. Such a person also necessarily accepts and takes responsibility for his actions and for the condition of his world. (Sorta' like the Founding Fathers.) The only driving "truth" accepted by H'wood today is that there are no real truths.
I suspect that most if not all of the screenwriters are like the characters seen in Robert Altman's The Player or like the people detailed in Joe Eszterhas' book Hollywood Animal.
I have no demographic data to back this up but I assume most are single or "living together" most likely childless or if they have children they are being raised by "the help" ...again maybe not accurate but my "hunch"
Thanks for posting this. Very insightful.
An excellent read.
Ugh...d-bag dialectic materialists are like a cancer.
Well, Hollywood has also stopped producing heroines. Can you think of an actress who has the presence of studio stars such as Betty Davis or Katherine Hepburn? Meryl Steep comes close, but no cigar.
There was a short time after 9/11 when the hero ideal returned and the nation saw the merit of the strong and manly type of man.
My tippiung point was when the Mission Impossible I movie made Jim Phelphs the bad guy. It all seemed pretty pointless after that.
I had forgotten about that...I hated that.
I attended the Kanaab Western Legends Round Up last year (2008) in Kanaab Utah. There were a number of my heroes attending, but my wife and I went mainly to met Clint Walker aka ‘Cheyenne Bodie’ and a hero of both of us and good Christian Gentleman. We also met Ty Harden aka Bronco Lane and Hugh O’Brian aka Wyatt Earp, both of who are strong Christian Gentlemen as well.
One thing they all had in common was how they despised what Hollywood has become. I had a hope a couple years ago when AMC did the movie ‘Broken Trail’ and it did super ratings as well as great reviews with the critics that maybe we would see a turn-around, but no AMC just came back with more tales of ‘broken’ heroes as in ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Breaking Bad’ neither of which I have the least interest in watching.
Bruce Willis in Die Hard--good vs evil, regular guy rising up against the bad guys
Bruce Willis and company again in Armegeddon. Various characters in Independence Day. In both of the above, good guys rise up and take on a problem in space. And as an added bonus, it is the U S of freaking A, that comes to save the day. It isn't the French, or some African nation, it is US technology and guts that win the day.
Con Air with Nicholas Cage. He is a little bit of an anti-hero--in jail with a bit of a violent streak. But in the end, his Army Ranger skills are rewarded, and all he is trying to do is get home to his wife and daughter. And he has to fight every type of sociopath along the way. The viewer knows the murderers/molestors are the bad guys
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