Our Anti-Hero Moment
America willingly embraces flaws in our TV heroes. Why don’t we accept flawed heroes in real life?
There’s an interesting trend emerging in American culture. We expect perfection out of people we deem to be heroes in real life, but in fiction, we like our heroes to be flawed individuals who struggle during their journey. Sometimes these heroes actually delve into villainy, and we love them for it, even rooting for them to succeed over innocent characters.
Some of the biggest examples on TV are Breaking Bad’s Walter White and Son of Anarchy’s Jax Teller. In Breaking Bad, we root for Walter White, who becomes a meth chef in order to provide a nest egg for his family after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Son of Anarchy’s Jax Teller is a man whose initial goal is to find a legal means of income for the outlaw motorcycle club and away from running guns in their sleepy West Coast town.
In both series’ we see a major transformation for the men as they start off as sympathetic heroes and turn into cold-blooded criminals before they make a last minute turn back to heroes in the end. Throughout it all, we overwhelmingly root for these men to succeed.
Even our traditional heroes are being remade with a more human complexity. Most recently, the current film depiction of DC Comics’ Superman has been given an overhaul to make him more relatable to modern audiences. His character has been grounded in the very human emotions of self-doubt and angst, characterized by Clark Kent’s struggle with fitting in in a world where no one is like him, balancing his unique alien abilities with his human spirit.
It’s a very complicated re-imagining of a character most commonly portrayed as the physical embodiment of our ideals, and while many purists were disappointed with the depiction of Superman as being less than the perfect man, it has a very human quality to it and it gives us insight into the ever growing complexity of what it means to be a human in the world today.
Superman is often written as a Christ-like figure which places his actions just outside the realm of possibility for us mere mortals. But what if we had a better understanding of the daily struggles our “perfect” heroes had to endure? What would be the implications for ourselves?
I have found it interesting that while we expect such complexity from our fictional heroes, we struggle with such complexity in our real life counterparts. A scandal or two, however minor, is enough to destroy someone’s legacy in the public eye and they never seem to recover.
Why is it that we can accept such flaws in fiction when rooting for the hero, while being much less tolerant of those who exist in the real world?
Have a conversation about the achievements of MLK and someone will bring up his adultery. Malcolm X? Oh, he was just a racist. Think about anyone else who has done something extraordinary with their life, and then think about the hit their reputation took when the truth of their imperfections came to light.
So why desire complexity in fiction but shun it in real life? I think what we see depicted in film is more palatable because, at the end of the day, it is still a work of fiction. We place ourselves into the hero’s shoes and we relate to their struggle, imagining ourselves — flaws and all — to be the hero of that story. That is why we can root for the Walter Whites and Jax Tellers: because we see so much of ourselves in them.
But when it comes to the people we can touch, we need them to somehow be above us. If they’re perfect, we can continue to keep our expectations for them high and the expectations we set for ourselves low. We know we can’t be perfect, so therefore we cannot be heroes ourselves.
But when someone we look up to stumbles, it reveals something very troubling — they’re really no better than we are. Maybe they just believed in themselves more, or they reached a little higher than us. When a real life hero falls, it puts the onus on us, and we cannot accept it. If they fall, then we can be like them and rise as well. But to do that places a lot of pressure on ourselves as we are filled with self-doubt and insecurity and our criticism of ourselves is greater than any criticism anyone else can levy.
If we accept the flaws of our heroes, provided they too accept and attempt to overcome them, then we begin to see our potential as greater than we thought before, which runs counter to the way we are conditioned.
I think this has a damaging effect on people who have significant contributions to make as leaders in the public eye, especially in a world where everything is gathered for surveillance. The next great leader — capable of advancing mankind — may feel pressured to stay anonymous based on indiscretions in their past, or just their own natural insecurities. We have become extremely critical of anyone who doesn’t meet our need for perfection. Something is perfect until we find another object more perfect, and so on.
The world is only perfect when we are children. It is not until we are much older that we begin to see the world for what it is, when we see our parents and idols for the flawed individuals they are.
A friend of mine told me recently, “There’s no such thing as flaws.” It’s much like the debate of good and evil. Good nor evil cannot exist without the other. In order for a person to be flawed, there must exist perfect beings as a counter balance. There are no perfect individuals walking this Earth, so logically there is no such thing as flawed people (and no, Jesus doesn’t count). Once we begin to admit this to ourselves we can begin to accept the reality about the world, and we can begin to truly change it for the better.
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