Stephen Garrett, “Why We Love TV’s Anti-Heroes” (318)
One. What is a hero?
He or she is a larger than life figure, someone who radically changes the way we see things, and someone who radically elevates our possibilities.
Michael Jordan changed what we believed someone could do on the basketball court. Bo Jackson redefined the combination of speed and strength on the football field.
Two. How do today’s TV heroes radically differ from previous eras?
Today’s heroes have colossal psychological flaws: They’re self-serving narcissistic liars. They’re overcome with self-pity, lust, sloth, and other forms of venality. They are self-deceiving and they are morally blind. They can be brash, obnoxious, and unfaithful. Yet we love them. Why?
We live in the post World War II era, according to Garrett. Back then, morality was black and white, Us vs. the Nazis. We were the good guys; they were the bad guys. But in today’s war on terror, the conflict is more ambiguous, including the use of “torture,” however you define it, in this conflict.
In other words, some would argue that we now have to use morally ambiguous means to fight terrorists and this moral ambiguity is embodied in the new anti-hero.
To add to our new heavily-flawed hero, there are forces in the government, bureaucracy, police, prison system, big business, and the power structure that seem so corrupt that to conform to those forces would not be “good”; rather to rebel against them, even if employing dishonesty and trickery, could be seen as more heroic.
There is even a “crisis of confidence” in the democratic processes and democratic leaders that create an atmosphere of the disaffected, cynical, nihilistic hero.
The turning point in the Morally Deformed Hero Era happened with The Sopranos and Tony Soprano, the killer millions fell in love with.
The ruthless businessman and the sociopath become so close to one another that the moral line became blurred in our age of hyper-competitive Darwinism.
In The Wire both the “good buy” and the “bad guy,” morally ambiguous terms, fail to effect change in their power structure. They are both feeble, helpless characters lost inside the power structure and since we, the TV viewers, also feel helpless inside the power structure, we connect with these morally flawed characters.
Television, in short, is a reflection of nihilism, hopelessness and despair and we crave characters that reflect our feelings of helplessness. TV is more than happy to feed our nihilistic, self-pitying appetites, so they have flooded us with these moral miscreants and now as a society we suffer from, to borrow from a Newsweek headline, “Too Much of a Bad Thing.” We now have “anti-hero overload,” which extends beyond drama to comedies like Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The age of the classic hero is permanently over, according to Garrett. We’ve lost our innocence; we’ve been expelled from Eden and must slog through life with this new anti-hero paradigm chained around our necks.
Natasha Simons, “Mad Men and the Paradox of the Past” (322)
One. What does it mean when Simons says the show Mad Men takes place on the “cusp of dissolution”?
In the 1960, the USA was transitioning from mass conformity to big authority and big business to counterculture, a time of big drugs, marital infidelity, and escalating divorce. Americans threw away their old, conventional roles, but not knowing “which new suit” to wear created an identity crisis and a moral crisis as well. This crisis morphed in the 1980s into self-reliant capitalist predator who lives for nothing but Darwinian advantage over other humans and as such America, suffering from moral dissolution in the 1960s, is now slogging toward being a dystopia with a dying middle class, an expanding service class, an expanding prison population, and an education system geared for the rich, to make sure their privilege stays intact for perpetuity. This latter state of affairs is evidenced by the growing wealth of our country’s One Percent while the rest of us suffer lower and lower living wages.
To review, moral dissolution means moral disintegration to the point of being so numbed to moral rot that one can no longer even feel guilt; rather, one suffers a greater hell: numbness, enervation, and hopelessness. We call this condition both moral dissolution and nihilism.
Two. What is the show’s creator Mathew Weiner’s “conflicted relationship” with the 1960s?
On one hand, he’s fascinated by it because it is the generation of his parents. On the other hand, he sees the 60s as a “hypocritical façade” and he longs for a safe passage to true liberation. The “happy ending” is “Deliverance from this sexism and repression and cigarette smoke . . .”
The Mad Men in the show represent the old generation or the Old Guard, the business elite who remain sexist and racist and who will either change with the times or die off like dinosaurs.
Don Draper is most comfortable when he’s the 1950s Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, “a stoic firmly in the past.” But as he shifts in the 1960s, his stoic veneer crumbles and his emotional wreckage becomes more and more prominent. This is his “journey.” Or to use modern parlance, this is his meltdown.
The above would happen except that Natasha Simons observes, “Weiner’s flaw is that he loves Don Draper too much to make him that relic.” Therefore, Draper will be sympathetic and adaptable to the new Age of Aquarius, the 1960s, and in doing so Weiner will compromise Draper’s psychological realism and verisimilitude. To put it this way, Draper, who is a moral hypocrite in earlier seasons (lecturing his wife about being a good mother while picking up drunk prostitutes at midnight), becomes more sympathetic in later seasons.
Conservatives see America as a flawed country in the 1960s, which for them embodies hedonism (pleasure seeking as the highest ideal) and the selfish Me Generation. Liberals see sexist, racist pigs ruling the nest in the 1950s only to be taken over by conscientious liberals in the 1960s.
You want to hear something crazy? Both camps are partly right.
The author seems to be saying pick your poison: Be a mindless follow-the-leader consumer in the style of the 1950s or be a gluttonous consumption monster merely for your own selfish purposes like “self-expression” as stylized in the 1960s and beyond. Both groups are moral miscreants and frauds. In the end, I conclude that Simons’ essay is misanthropic, being hateful of EVERYONE.
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