When Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts arrived on the big screen this spring, five antiheroes had moviegoers rooting for them as they banded together to take down a threat plaguing New York. The group of morally complex characters included Yelena Belova, a trained Black Widow assassin; Bucky Barnes, a skilled assassin seeking redemption; Red Guardian, a former Soviet Armed Forces officer and super soldier; U.S. Agent John Walker, the man who was chosen to succeed Steve Rogers as Captain America but was stripped of his mantle after murdering someone; and Ava Starr, who once stole Hank Pym’s lab under the belief that it would help cure a mutation that was slowly killing her.
The antihero, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, is a “central character in a dramatic or narrative work who lacks the qualities of nobility and magnanimity expected of traditional heroes and heroines in romances and epics.” The antihero is not the villain; he’s the one whose actions, however immoral, drive the plot.
Antiheroes tend to be relatable because they are flawed, internally conflicted, morally ambiguous, full of righteous anger, or maybe just a little lost. In other words, says History, Literature, and the Arts Professor Tom Roach, Ph.D., they are human, and sometimes, like all of us, they do terrible things for all the right reasons.
According to Roach, the most interesting antiheros are the ones whose actions defy or question the dominant norms and power structures of their time.
“Oftentimes, antiheroes are victims of injustice who seek revenge or freedom in morally questionable ways. We root for them, uncomfortably, because we can relate to their struggle while condemning their actions,” he says.
The antihero origin
The antihero has been on the scene since Antiquity, appearing in the sagas, epics, and mythologies of most cultures around the globe.
Some of the most complex and fascinating ones, according to Roach, are the stories of antiheroines, which he has taught in several of his courses. Medusa, for example, turns men to stone because she was punished by the gods for being raped (yes, she, not the male perpetrator, was punished). Medea, the protagonist of Euripides’ eponymous play, kills her own children to spite a husband who abandoned her. And then there’s Procne and Philomela, whose most horrific act of revenge Roach interprets as an ancient form of “feminist sisterhood” in which “women bond together to resist male power.”
As told in Metamorphoses, Procne and Philomela are two sisters who are extremely close. When Procne marries the king of Thrace, Tereus, and moves in with him, she asks her husband if Philomela can come to live with them as well. He agrees to talk to her dad and bring Philomela back. When Tereus sees Philomela, he lusts for her and, on their way to Procne, rapes her and cuts off her tongue so she can't tell anyone about his crime. When they arrive in Thrace, he imprisons her and gives her a loom for weaving clothes. Instead, Philomela creates a tapestry recounting what happened to her and sends it to her sister.
Procne proceeds to rescue her sister and plots the ultimate act of revenge. She kills her firstborn son, the heir to Tereus’s throne, boils him and feeds him to her husband. When Tereus realizes he is eating his beloved son, he attempts to kill both women. While fleeing, the sisters beg the gods to get them out of this terrible situation. The gods, for once, listen: Procne is turned into a swallow, Philomela is turned into a nightingale, and both fly away.
“Philomela gets the last laugh here because, as a nightingale, she sings all the time,” notes Roach. “Denied a voice in her human form, literally made tongueless by her rapist, she regains her voice for eternity. It's a completely twisted, yet disturbingly satisfying, story. These sisters commit an awful, immoral crime, the worst thing anyone can imagine, but they do it specifically because the world they live in, one in which men rape and silence women with impunity, is awful. Their act of revenge is a rebellion against patriarchal power and norms.”
Comfort through individual action
Roach notes that antiheroes tend to find individual solutions to social problems and that “that’s one reason why antiheroes are so popular in American culture.”
“As opposed to working in solidarity with others or working collectively within governmental systems to seek justice or better lives, American antiheros tend to take matters into their own hands. So many contemporary antihero stories are about lone individuals rebelling against a society that has failed them, a society whose institutions are corrupt or morally bankrupt (think Joaquim Phoenix’s version of the Joker here, or, even better, the character of Omar Little in ‘The Wire’”).
"The Wire," one of Roach’s favorites, is about – among other things – the failure of the public education system and the criminal justice system in Baltimore, Maryland. In the show, Little is a poor Black, gay man living in the slums and is the most feared mercenary in Baltimore’s drug-dealing underworld. Played by Michael K. Williams, Little was an audience favorite when the show ran. Although he was supposed to be killed off at the end of the first season, he was kept on for the second due to audience demand.
“I think Omar elicits audience sympathy because he is morally complex and his struggle is so relatable,” Roach says. “We see him trying to survive in a homophobic, racist society in which every social system has failed him. His story is quintessentially American in that it’s about one individual overcoming difficult circumstances and rising above the pack to become the boss. In a sense, Omar’s story exemplifies American entrepreneurialism. Granted, his business is illegal, if not completely immoral, but we identify with him as Americans struggling to succeed in a cutthroat society.”
Why we connect with antiheroes
Stories involving personal trauma or a psychological backstory can elicit sympathy from audiences, notes Roach. For instance, in “Dexter,” the titular protagonist exhibits sociopathic tendencies as a kid, and his father, a cop, teaches him to use his aggression for good. Dexter’s adult passion becomes locating and murdering criminals who have fallen through the cracks of the criminal justice system. Another example of this type of “traumatized antihero,” adds Roach, is Batman – a vigilante avenging his parents' deaths by ridding Gotham City of criminals.
“You see the circumstances that made these characters who they are, and that gets us to empathize with them. We understand their motivation, but we don’t necessarily condone their actions,” Roach says.
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Oftentimes, an antihero’s actions call into question social systems and structures that have become corrupt or morally bankrupt, whether it be the criminal justice system (Batman or Dexter), the healthcare system (Walter White from “Breaking Bad”), or the government as a whole (V in V is for Vendetta).
In contemporary society, Roach says, the loss of faith in social and religious institutions has contributed to people’s siding with antiheroes.
“The antihero becomes a popular protagonist when there is a crisis in leadership and a crisis in morality: who's good? who's bad? who’s trustworthy? who’s not? and how do we discern that?” Roach says. “In the past, monarchic and religious institutions answered these questions for us. But in a democratic society, it’s up to ‘we the people’ to figure it all out. And when folks begin to lose faith in the moral authority of political leadership and social institutions, a generalized anxiety suffuses society. Enter the antihero, who just might save us from ourselves.”
