We are all familiar with anti-heroes on television.
We have Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean. Tyler Durden from Fight Club. Severus Snape from Harry Potter and the psychopathic lead character from Dexter. We feel conflicted about these characters – we love them and hate them at the same time. We take them out and practice them. We both hate and appreciate these characters because they are the real characters we have seen on TV.
But no one wants to be them.
We hate anti-heroes in part because we fear we are exactly like them – Flaws. They don’t behave badly. It is lost. We don’t want to see parts of ourselves like these weird characters because we choose to be the heroes themselves. They are innocent. Strong ones. People who always say the right thing and make the right choice and go on in their lives in the blaze of honorable glory.
We want to be heroes but we are quick to ignore the lack of that desire. There are no one-dimensional characters in real life. And you certainly won’t always be your own hero.
The truth is, you’re going to mess something up at some point. Maybe something big. Something that makes you hate yourself – knocks down a peg or ten. And that’s when it will be very easy to take the role of the victim. If you’re not going to be a hero, you’d better be helpless. Unanswerable. The one who has been thrown by life and needs a hero to come and save them.
We hate the anti-hero because we prefer moral excess. You are either batman or a joker. You are good or bad. He’s someone we all want to get rid of or he’s someone we hope will crash and burn. And we want to put ourselves in these extreme situations again. Either we conquer our lives – riding on the blaze of glory, or we hide from it – waiting until we are fit for better circumstances. We don’t want to play the hero because we don’t want to live in gray areas. We don’t want to take root for ourselves.
But here’s the truth about heroes: None of the real ones are full of character or courage. None of them did everything right. There is not a single hero in the world that cannot be seen on television who has done the right thing with every opportunity he got. They’ve all been anti-heroes at one point or another. All of them have had to accept the darkest parts of themselves.
We are not the stock characters we would like to be. Those don’t exist in real life. In real life, we all fall somewhere in between. We are all brave, sad, strong, desperate, determined, standing up to the evil hero we hate watching on TV. We exist in shades of gray. We are all insecure people.
And maybe that’s something we should be more comfortable doing – feeding ourselves. Part loves what we do with our lives and part works on it. To develop the ability to separate the parts of ourselves that we are proud of and the parts that are ongoing. When we put it all together, we get a black or white version of ourselves. And the amount of energy required to move from one stage to another seems insurmountable. We forget that we are in the middle of nowhere. We forget that not everything is bad.
There are times when you just need to be the anti-hero of your life. You need to see yourself as you are – not as you were or as you hope to be – and understand that you are not completely one way or the other. You are not a knight on a white horse to save the day. You are not a criminal, you trample others on your way to the top. You are, in every way, a bit of both. You are a person with good intentions but sometimes crooked ways. He is a person who has made bad decisions but wants to answer for himself.
Because here’s the thing about anti-heroes: They’re always changing things. By the end of the film, every character who started out as a chaotic, self-loathing person turns into someone we are chasing. It is the only archetype – transformation. To grow without them. Picking up the pieces and moving on from who they were. These are the characters we hate but should be the ones we love. Because they are more real than any hero out there and more honorable than any victim.
Being a warrior against our lives is something we all need to fight for when we are down. He’s not the weakest character to play – he’s the strongest you can imagine. He is the one who knows that where he has been, he does not need to go anywhere. That their dark parts do not have to overcome those who are brave. That since there is a mistake and they are afraid of the hopeless situation they are in, they are waiting for someone else to come and save the day. They will pick them up in person.
Because that’s the thing about heroes – they’re not born in real life. They are done. They are losers who keep fighting. The villains turned. The disasters that nailed it back up from the bottom of the rocks. And the anti-heroes he defeated.
