(Title courtesy of Taylor Swift. I’m not a Swiftie but I do like her music).
“Antihero” is a word that covers a lot of ground.
For example, we have characters like Conan — a thief, a pirate, a mercenary — who usually winds up fighting evil (such as Thoth-Amon on the John Buscema cover) by sheer coincidence. In “God in the Bowl” and “Tower of the Elephant,” Conan’s thieving pits him against a serpentine monstrosity and an evil sorcerer respectively. In “Beyond the Black River” and “Black Colossus,” his mercenary soldiering pits him against age-old wizards of horrific power. He’s primarily out for himself, it simply happens that he’s on the right side in most stories (the butchered ships from his pirate career with Belit are largely off-stage).
Then we have someone like Han Solo. A smuggler who has no qualms shooting someone he suspects (correctly) is about to shoot him (yes, Mr. Lucas, Han shot first), he helps out Luke and Ben for money … and then proves to have a heroic core, showing up at the climax to save his friends and the Rebellion with them.
Or consider Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan. As one of the Dirty Harry movie posters put it, “you don’t assign him to murder cases — you just turn him loose.” (This poster would be here as an illustration if not for our ongoing can’t-upload-images issue). His goals are nominally nobler than Han or Conan — to protect and serve — but his disregard for any sort of restraint or the rights of the accused has always made him feel like a nastier piece of work. Similarly the Kate Spencer Manhunter of a few years back is a murderous vigilante, supposedly redeemed by her mission: she’s a prosecutor who hunts down and executes evil people she can’t convict.
Daimon Hellstrom, the Son of Satan (depicted here by John Romita), starts out genuinely demonic — it’s just that evil though he is, he hates his father enough to prioritize fighting him over wreaking havoc on ordinary people. Still, in an early appearance, after teaming up with Ghost Rider, he dumps the latter in the middle of the desert — he no longer has any use for him so why help him get somewhere safe?
At the most extreme we have George MacDonald Fraser’s (no relation) Flashman, who truly puts the anti in antihero. Most of these guys have a code of sorts and whatever their flaws, they’re true to their code. Flashman has no code other than “what’s in it for me?” and “how hot a woman will I get to sleep with?” If you have power over him, he’ll lick your boots; if he has power over you, he’ll bully you for kicks. He’s completely awful.
One of the risks of writing an antihero is that the author ends up rubbing your face in how awesome their code is — sure, maybe they do a lot of stuff that looks unethical but that’s because they’re gritty realists who see things so much clearer than the supposed heroes who are too virtuous to kill the obviously guilty sociopathic pedophiles. The worst comic-book vigilantes seem to make this argument all the time. Never mind that obviously guilty people often turn out innocent in the real world (the Central Park Five being an excellent example), the authors will position themselves as sophisticated thinkers rather than selling another form of fantasy.
It’s one thing to have a character like Flashman who’s unambiguously a rat; it’s quite another to write a rat as an unambiguous hero. For example, Nick Fury as Marvel’s Man on the Wall has done horrible things for the greater good ( “I’ve killed… More times than I can count. I’ve burned worlds. Destabilized galaxies. Dethroned gods. And I did it without any of them even knowing my name. That’s what it means to be the man on the wall. To be the invisible monster who keeps the other monsters at bay.”). All of which reminds me of a couple of lines in one translation of Jean Anouih’s Antigone: “It was a dirty job but somebody had to do it.” “Did they?” This kind of antihero never asks that question because the dirty job always needs doing.
What makes a good antihero? While it doesn’t cover all the possibilities, I think there are some things that help:
•They’re’better than their enemies.
In V for Vendetta, for instance, V is a coldblooded killer and terrorist but he’s fighting to overthrow a fascist British state. Their evil justifies him not playing by Marquis of Queensbury rules. In the 1942 movie The Glass Key (and the novel it was based on), Alan Ladd’s protagonist is a crook, the right hand of the local political boss. He uses unscrupulous tactics to get the job done — beating people up, locking up a witness so they can’t testify — but the job is clearing his boss and friend (Brian Donlevy) of a murder rap he’s being framed for. So he’s still the good guy.
Daimon Hellstrom, the same. This is also a common rationale for making villains into antiheroes. The UK’s Spider and Great Thespius are both crooks but they spend most of their time fighting rivals in the underworld.
•They uphold values their society should respect, but doesn’t.
Robin Hood in his earliest stories is purely a brigand: he robs from the rich but does not give to the poor. He is, however, still admirable because he conducts himself in the way the clerics and noblemen he robs do not. He’s openhanded and generous where the nobles are covetous and greedy. He’s devoted to the Blessed Virgin where the clerics are materialists.
Dirty Harry has some of the same quality. In the world of Dirty Harry, cops are ineffective because they’ve been hog-tied by bleeding-heart politicians, rights of the accused and bureaucratic red tape. Det. Callahan is out there doing what the rest of the police no longer do, protecting and serving. He breaks a bunch of stupid rules but he keeps us safe. It’s bullshit (I’m a big believer in the rights of the accused) but it’s plausible bullshit
•They’re fun to watch.
The Most Hated Man on the Internet is a documentary about Hunter Moore, who ran one of the first revenge-porn websites, and about the people who tried to put him out of business. At one point, the hacker collective Anonymous gets involved: they shut down his website, empty his bank accounts, erase his Social Security number and have him declared legally dead for a month. One guy watching this unfold comments that while he totally does not approve of those tactics “it sure is fun watching.”
That’s a huge part of it: if they make us root for them we may be able to forgive their questionable ethics. Though of course whether the fun outweighs the unethical actions is an individual judgment call.
•The author stands by them.
A couple of years back I read Doug Engstrom’s novel Corporate Gunslinger. It’s set in a corporate controlled near future where an individual crushed by debt can arbitrate it out with a corporate duelist to get out from under. As gunslingers like Engstrom’s antihero, Kira, are professionals, this is a desperation move — the odds against the private citizen are slim. I really liked this book but it fell apart at the end, when Engstrom suddenly drives home that Kira supporting herself this way is bad and we shouldn’t be rooting for her. After taking her side up to that point, unethical though she is, the last-minute moral message was more annoying than anything. It’s like Conan getting caught thieving and going to prison for a decade because stealing is wrong, boys and girls.
