The Fall of the Anti-hero

After doing some reading to expand my previous article, I am remembering an article I read a while ago about how all television shows are becoming the same and generally fall into very specific categories for each generation and become the plight of that generation.  when I think about what we have to say about ourselves, it is that we don’t really want to grow up and we all think that we are all doing it wrong.  We, as a culture, feel so abandoned by the system, society, the media, and all the bigger forces in our lives, that we have lost faith in ourselves.  The anti hero didn’t used to fail.  The Man With No Name didn’t get his come upons at the end of the movie because that is how it is supposed to end.  We are the generation that can’t be told anything, has to figure it out the hard way, and we are just waiting for the other shoe to drop and end it all.

I just read about read the finale review for SOA, and the idealistic outlaw finally got put down for following his heart, but on his own terms.  Is there a more nihilistic concept than that?  That you don’t get a say in what happens, and you might as well start working towards your own destruction.  Don Draper is doomed, Dexter can’t have a family, though probably should have died,Walter White was put down, but still went down in a fantasy.

It has equally been said that there is no place for women on modern television because they only serve to burst the bubble and substitute for the establishment, holding them back from man’s outlaw nature.

The one exception to this is Weeds, that shows a woman all but abandon her family over the course of the show so that she can get in ridiculously over her head with unhealthy relationships in the criminal underworld  The entire show could be one large warning to getting involved with partners that are bad for you and only going to seek out their own interests, much like is the case with her well meaning brother in law that is in love with her from the very beginning.  Much like the men in her life, we the audience are suckered in year after year with the promise that the show initially held, only to be tricked by the vixen.

I was listening to Bill Mahr talk in his ill researched documentary religulous about how we need to realize that we are going to be around on this earth for a long time in order to realize that we need to plan for the future.  He is convinced that religion has convinced all the rest of us that because of the looming apocalypse that we don’t really care about the wars or environment because GOD and stuff.  I am not sure that I share such a view, but one thing that I do believe is that we all see our own deaths and we all see a new world of consequence in this country that seems all but obsessed with punishment.  We all seem to becoming more focused on futility of the individual and therefore we don’t really care if there is a world for anyone else.  We don’t believe that we can achieve.

I like to think that I have overcome some of the most challenging circumstances that a person can overcome. I don’t say that to mock others or to try and one up anyone, so please avoid trying to tell me about this one time…, but to say that I am still here.  I have faced death, mental illness, child abuse, and a slew of other problems, and I am still here, and all that I can think back to is that I could have done more and that all of those things are really nothing more than excuses as to why I didn’t do more with my life.

Funny enough, and I promise in good faith that I actually had started writing this well before I got the news, but there is a chance that I might actually be writing a TV series in the near future.  I am getting ready to do a pilot for a company that is looking to show it to a bunch of online service subscription sites (Netflix, Yahoo, Hulu, Amazon, etc..) and while I never really gave thought to it, mostly because I thought that funding two hours of product was hard enough without trying to fund 12, I am not going to pass on my opportunity.  I think that if there is one idea that I want to get across, it is the one where my grandmother rides roller coasters.  I used to love them.  When I was a kid I would ride them all the time.  It was the only real reason that I would go to the parks.  I remember one summer my cousin came up and had me try a new ride.  She promised me that I would like it.  I wasn’t so sure so she told me that if I got sick or didn’t like it she would pay me 10 bucks.  From that moment on I was committed to making myself sick, because I wanted that money more than I wanted to be happy, and so I was.  As I got older, all rides started to make me sick.  I would think that it was just one more trick that your body pulled on you on your way to the grave.  But my grandmother, 91, loves them.  Sometimes life is a mindset.

Weeds

Weeds is one of those shows that has a special place in my heart, at least for the first three seasons.  They were almost perfect and then things started to change.  I didn’t even pay that close of attention at first, and I could find things that I like here and there, but then it just got to a place where I was watching more because I had been watching for some time and had invested a lot of time in these characters and I wanted to know how they all ended up only to feel more cheated by knowing than if I had assumed.  Like so many great shows that ended “too soon” that we remember for their amazing openings, this show took that and beat all the life out of it, replacing a stellar supporting cast with guest stars, celebrity appearances, and people that aren’t any good.  There are so many actors that I wish they had been able to bring back for the final season to really wrap things up, but the show wasn’t about the group of people.  It was about Nancy, and that, if for no other reason makes me hate her.  It is as if the entire point of the show was that you were supposed to fall in love with a girl that is bad for you and doesn’t really care about you.  She gets rid of all of your friends and then just up and leaves you, long after you cared anything about the relationship.  Sure, you can think back to when it was amazing, because beginnings always are, but in retrospect it is mostly just a shame.

Dexter

I’m often asked, I think it stems mostly from stupid college entrance exam questions, what fictional character most represents me.  My answer has always been Dexter, from the TV show Dexter.  This seems to scare people, and I kind of get that.  I mean the whole purpose of the show is that you have a likable character that is moving to the dark side, which is kind of the modern television story arch that has been seen on many other popular television shows like Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy.  The supposed tragic path of the fallen hero.  These shows are designed so that the audience basically roots for the bad guy in a kind of wish fulfillment, though at the end of the day we all know that they are going to have to pay the piper for all of the bad deeds they have done.  We all wish that we could kill the annoying people in our lives at some people.  I think this kind of story thread is most evident in the first season, when Dexter’s girlfriend’s ex husband shows up and makes things difficult for everyone.  I get why it would be just so much easier to kill him than deal with him.  There are people in my life that I wish would just go away, but that isn’t what I am talking about.  I haven’t killed or planned to kill any of the such people in my life in a serious way.  The reason I identify with Dexter to the extent in which I do, is that he doesn’t fit into society.

There are lots of other characters that don’t fit in society in literature and film.  Salinger was ripe with such characters and while I do love Salinger, and think that he is a far better writer in many ways than the show runners of Dexter, especially in the latter seasons, Dexter is unique is that he doesn’t really have any desire to be a part or to be separate from society.  Dexter is an amalgamation of personal impulses and personal rules to govern them.  Because he is so different from society, he has to fake so much of his life so that he doesn’t freak people out.  I, as mentioned previously, have Asperger.  I also was horribly abused as a child, and have had a rather rough life since then.  I don’t say any of this to complain.  It is the only life that I know, and I’m sure that there are people in the third world that would laugh at my struggles.  I have also had a pretty amazing life, but when I talk about the dark parts of myself, there has only ever been one person that has ever listened to what I had to say and related to it.  Most people are instantly revolted or shocked.  Some are sympathetic and want to be a shoulder for you to cry on, but most just look dumbfounded, as if this new information does not compute within the framework of their existence.

There has been a rather strong division in me to do what is morally right for people that I care nothing about.  It takes a lot for me to find value in a person.  I generally don’t like people.  There are individuals that I care immensely for, but you have to earn that in my book.  Unlike Dexter in the initial seasons, I do long for the kind of lifelong romantic connection that he has with Hannah in the latter seasons.  While there was much more about big bads and getting away with things in the early seasons, it was really his trying to find himself in the latter seasons that I found to be the most interesting.  Season 5, for its flaws, was the first time that he found someone that he could relate to, after the most he had really hoped to achieve for himself was to be able to propperly fake it with a family, mirroring the Trinity killer from Season 4.  While I don’t love season 6, I really did enjoy the religious angle and how Dexter could relate to such things, and wish that many of those themes had carried over into the final seasons.  I think one of my favorite moments of the series was Batista talking to Dexter about faith and God.  The last seasons seemed to be in too much of a hurry, cutting out those little moments of awkwardness that let you know just who Dexter was, and that he was never really going to be normal, so he had to focus on the things that he could be in control of.