A Year of Antiheroes and Finding Light in the Darkness

StarGazer

        People too often confuse cynicism for moral complexity. Challenging an audience’s capacity for empathy or their flexibility where ethics are concerned can produce some fantastic, intellectually and emotionally stimulating art, but declaring that human beings are horrible and life sucks isn’t inherently interesting, especially if everyone else is screaming the same thing. Great TV – or rather the shows that typically attract that label – still tends to be bleak and troubled; the apocalyptic HBO drama The Leftovers, which premiered June 29 with one of the most promising but soul-crushing pilots I’ve ever seen, should fit right in. However, I’d argue that what separates not only the good prestige TV from the bad, but also the new from the old is its ability to craft distinct yet nuanced and thoughtful worldviews, ones that complicate typical good/bad, optimistic/pessimistic binaries. Shows like True Detective and Fargo in particular felt like responses to the Machiavellian brutality of Breaking Bad and The Shield. They indulged in the same tropes even as they critiqued them and, by adding this layer of introspection and self-awareness, pushed TV as a whole in a different, exciting direction.

“The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.”

-          Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), True Detective

        That was possibly the second most quoted line by True Detective’s idiosyncratic, existentially fraught protagonist, just behind the one about time being a flat circle, but it could easily be put in the mouths of any of the corrupt cops and destructive antiheroes who populated the past decade of TV. More than anything else, these stories revolved around the idea that evil can only be defeated if people are willing to lose – or at least temporarily discard – their humanity in the process.

        It’s not hard to understand the appeal of these disillusionment narratives. They contain ample amounts of both external and internal conflict and are pretty much obligated to focus on a complicated, unpredictable protagonist, even if too many writers mistake glowering machismo for charisma. Imbued with a sense of paranoia that forebodes an inevitably tragic conclusion, these stories reflect and speak to a world that feels constantly on the verge of exploding, a reality defined by economic crises, global conflicts and power struggles, and environmental disasters. They tell us that the institutions we rely on are broken and corrupt, that the idealized heroes we’re forever waiting on will never show up, that human beings are heartbreakingly, almost irredeemably flawed. As depressing as that sounds, there’s something comforting about art that confirms our doubts and fears, just as it can be cathartic – or, at least, beguiling – to follow characters who don’t feel bound to the same legal and ethical codes as the rest of us. It’s no coincidence that antiheroes are almost exclusively white men, not just because that demographic is by far the most represented in media in general, but because they have traditionally been accorded more power in Western societies and, therefore, are allowed more freedom to flaunt the rules. The best shows, like Mad Men with its Great Gatsby-esque deconstruction of the American Dream, interrogate the notions of strength, dominance and entitlement associated with whiteness and masculinity, instead of merely glorifying or reveling in it.

        This difference of intention is what, in my opinion, separates the new crop of antiheroes from their now-iconic counterparts. Where shows such as Breaking Bad and Justified were alluring in part because they offered thrilling experiences, gleefully encouraging viewers to root for Walter White and Raylan Givens to get away with their violent antics, new antihero shows seem alarmed by and eager to distance themselves from the element of escapism that sometimes comes with watching bad people do bad things. There are no doubt many fans who like Fargo’s Lorne Malvo, for example, for the wrong reasons, since it’s impossible for any creator to wholly control how an audience interprets and responds to their work. Yet, TV has become less interested in humanizing immorality and making it attractive or understandable than in analyzing the society in which it’s produced and how these characters’ philosophies and actions affect the people around them. Here, villains lurk in the shadows, haunting every frame with their presence even when they’re nowhere to be seen, appearing to be almost God-like in their inscrutability.

  

  Beware the devil, for he is human

        What makes these villains so terrifying and especially resonant within a contemporary context is that their ethereal mysteriousness, their ambiguity, turns them into mirrors onto which we can project innumerable horrors. Driven by vague or unknown motivations, they exist to disrupt and mess with the protagonists’ usually already-fragile psyches, wreaking homicidal chaos upon the surrounding community and forcing the other characters to discover and reckon with their true selves. Lorne Malvo and Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal manipulate people, especially men, into committing violent crimes and unleashing their inner psychopaths, while the rapists and murderers on True Detective pushed Rust and Marty to the brink of sanity, exposing their hypocrisy and capacity for cruelty in the process. It was hardly an accident that the actual identity of that show’s infamous Yellow King ended up being a bit of a letdown, because the mystery was never the main point, even if many fans chose to fixate on it. As horrifying as some of Errol’s actions were, the real enemies were the institutions and unequal power structures that allowed them to take place, perpetuating what Rust would call a “cycle of violence and degradation”, and try as they might to deny it, our protagonists were as guilty as anyone of participating in that toxic system. We used to fear evil because it took the face of a belligerent Other, an ever-encroaching, outside menace we needed to desperately, continually prepare for. Now, we fear evil, because it comes from within us; it is our doing.

        Take, for instance, the world of Westeros. Although the characters of Game of Thrones live alongside dragons, sorcerers, direwolves and zombie-like White Walkers, none of these creatures come close to rivaling the sadism and ruthlessness of humanity, which has transformed the land into a war-torn hellscape from which no child or family can emerge unscathed. In the second season of The Americans, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, the married undercover Soviet spies at the show’s center, realized the most pressing threats to their well-being came not from the United States or capitalism, but from the government to which they’d devoted their entire lives, from their alleged allies and from each other. As Elizabeth clashed with their increasingly rebellious and curious daughter Paige, and Philip wrestled with his soul, a Navy SEAL being blackmailed by their murdered colleagues resurfaced as a vengeful vigilante in a twisty, propulsive arc that culminated with the revelation that the KGB had started recruiting the children of its sleeper agents, selecting Paige as a possible candidate. The season emphasized the couple’s struggle to maintain a semblance of normalcy and virtuousness while staying committed to a job that required them to frequently dispense with both in order to supposedly serve a greater cause. Although Keri Russell’s and Matthew Rhys’s restrained but intense, occasionally terrifying performances made it impossible to not empathize with their characters, the message was clear: how many monstrous acts does a person have to commit before they actually become a monster? At what point do the ends stop justifying the means?

        Even on Masters of Sex, which delightfully eschews the testosterone-fueled grimness so favored by modern cable dramas, characters become crippled by their flaws, unable to anticipate how their actions may hurt those around them. William Masters’s relentless pursuit of his controversial study on human sexuality not only further distanced him from his wife Libby, with whom he already had a strained relationship, but also jeopardized the careers of anyone who assisted him, including his eager assistant Virginia Johnson, played by the winning Lizzy Caplan. In perhaps the first season’s most heartbreaking storyline, Masters’s boss (Beau Bridges) struggled with his closeted homosexuality, a dilemma that was understandable, especially given the ‘50s setting, but also meant his wife (Allison Janney, as captivating as ever) had spent nearly all of her adult life stuck in a lie of a marriage, one that could never fully satisfy her or him. These characters weren’t caught up in life-or-death situations, but that didn’t make their choices any easier or the consequences any less challenging to handle.

Rust: It’s just one story: the oldest, light versus dark.
Marty: I know we ain’t in Alaska, but it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.
Rust: You’re looking at it wrong. Once, there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.

-          True Detective

        This year, television dealt with widespread anxieties about humanity’s flaws and the destruction they can cause, yet as depressing as some shows often were, they were neither nihilistic nor despairing. Many detractors of True Detective’s finale used that above exchange between Rust and Marty to conclude that the show had really just been a simplistic good vs. evil story all along, case closed, nothing more to see here. Others felt that the show was dishearteningly cynical, since our (anti)heroes had to settle for catching a lone criminal, while those in power escaped and the insidious system that let them thrive remained unchanged. Though I wouldn’t call these arguments necessarily invalid, I do think they’re frustratingly reductive interpretations of a show that clearly had a lot on its mind and that, for the most part, conveyed them well, or at least in a manner that begged deeper, more critical thought.

        Ultimately, as creator Nic Pizzolatto himself has said, True Detective was fascinated by storytelling above all else: by the stories people tell themselves to justify their actions, the ones they use to make sense of a world that defies easy logic, the ones they rely on for comfort, purpose and survival. It argued that everything is a narrative, from organized religion and Rust’s nihilistic death wishes to a corrupt sheriff’s insistence that he was only following orders when he altered a missing person report, and although none of them point to a singular, concrete truth, the ones we choose to accept and believe matter. If we use stories to dictate and explain our behavior, then those stories will inevitably have a real-world impact, regardless of how silly or fantastical they seem. Rust tried to withdraw from a society he found abhorrent and doomed, but that world still went on without him; criminals still terrorized communities, authority figures still abused their positions of power, factories still poisoned the environment, the oppressed and marginalized still suffered. Likewise, Marty saw himself as an upright, down-to-earth family man, but when his actual behavior didn’t reflect that self-concept, his delusion became seriously harmful, especially to his wife and daughters. Rather than being a moment of outright triumph or redemption, their encounter with – and escape from – death in the finale merely pushed both men to embrace the possibility of redemption, not just for themselves, but for society as a whole. Cohle’s assertion that the light is winning is still a constructed narrative, but it’s a healthier, more productive one, representative of a more optimistic worldview that the finale hints will result in him and Marty becoming better, more honest human beings. The statement’s present progressive tense is also crucial, indicating that the struggle to improve the world is an ongoing process – one that might never end, but that’s worth fighting nonetheless. Rust’s and Marty’s contribution may be small in the greater scheme of things, but it still made a difference. As overwhelming as the dark can be at times, every good deed, no matter how seemingly insignificant, counts, adding just a little bit more light to someone’s life.

        Amidst all the antiheroes who paraded across the small screen this year, a true hero did eventually emerge. Played by Allison Tolman with the kind of quiet, determined warmth that renews my faith in humanity, Molly Solverson became the beating heart at the center of Fargo, a show that was otherwise as stark and cold as the Minnesotan landscape it used as a backdrop. “Morton’s Fork”, the finale of the ten-episode miniseries, saw Colin Hanks’s Gus Grimley dispatch a wounded, practically feral Lorne Malvo with a cold-bloodedness that was unsettling and surprising, both because, prior to that moment, Gus didn’t seem capable of such an act and because it apparently reinforced the idea that evil can only be defeated if the so-called good guys abandon their moral principles first. While I could probably write a whole other essay unpacking that climax, which I imagine was unsatisfying by design, there were two earlier scenes in the same episode that I thought were more illustrative of the show’s philosophy and more straight-up cathartic. The first occurred about halfway through when Molly finally got the chance to confront Martin Freeman’s weaselly, despicable everyman-turned-sociopath Lester Nygaard. Although Lester is allowed to return home under the supervision of FBI agents Pepper and Budge (get them a spinoff, stat!), before he leaves, he essentially asks his adversary why she cares so much, why she became so committed to seeing him get caught. She responds with a prototypical Coen brothers-esque, elliptical parable about a man who loses one glove at a train station and then drops his other glove so that anyone who finds them can have both, instead of just half a pair. When asked what it means, Molly simply replies that it’s not about a man who loses his gloves, but a man who gives his gloves away. While there are no doubt many possible ways to interpret her anecdote, the most obvious and simple reading is as a testament to the power of basic decency. Like the man in the story, Molly is the sort of person who’ll make personal sacrifices without blinking if it means helping someone else; she relishes police work because it gives her the chance to look out for and protect others, not because she’s interested in prestige or the authority granted by a badge. As with Rust and Marty and their Yellow King, catching Lester won’t change the world, and her hard work on the case is barely acknowledged by anyone else, but it just might make that world a slightly safer, more tolerable place.

        The second key scene from the finale encapsulated another reason why Molly is pop culture’s best depiction of a conventional hero in years. As the Bemidji police force prepared for their manhunt for Malvo, Molly’s boss, police chief Bill Oswalt, invited her into his office and told her that he was retiring, saying he lacked the “stomach” for the job and that she should replace him. Bill reveals that he wasn’t blocking her attempts to investigate Lester out of spite, sexism or even incompetence, but rather, because he didn’t want to believe someone like Lester, someone he thought of as an ordinary person and an old high school friend, was capable of such atrocious crimes. It’s an eye-opening moment that puts an occasionally slippery character into perfect focus, further elevated by an unexpectedly tender performance by Bob Odenkirk that could not be more different from his sleazy lawyer role in Breaking Bad. In many ways, Bill was an old-fashioned character, thinking that evil only comes from strange places and can be instantly identified, but he also genuinely wanted to think the best of humanity. When he wonders aloud what happened to “saying good morning to your neighbors and shoveling their walk”, Molly tells him, “That still goes on.” It’s a short line, almost treated as a throwaway, but it highlights the difference between the two characters. While they’re both fundamentally decent people, only Molly is able to face the worst that humankind has to offer and come out the other side knowing that we, as a species, are still worth saving, defending, trusting. She can acknowledge both light and dark, whereas Bill can’t see a rotten apple without fearing it spoiled the whole crop.

“Chin up, Chief.”

-          Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman), Fargo

        That would be Molly’s catchphrase if she had one, and I think it could sum up the general outlook of this year’s TV. Whether it was Sansa Stark summoning all of her mental resources to survive in a treacherous, misogynistic world bent on destroying her, or the people of Mad Men watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in wonder, momentarily forgetting just how uncertain their own futures were, characters managed to persevere, no matter how bleak things got, some even finding a measure of happiness or success. Throughout the 2013-2014 season, TV danced along the edge of a cliff, but instead of staring down into the abyss and weeping, it glanced heavenward toward the stars and dared to hope.

                            

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