Antiheroes by Jennifer Crusie

Author:Jennifer Crusie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pop Culture
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2011-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Antihero Space

As far as the “psychology of the antihero” goes, there does not appear to be a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for diagnosing someone with the antihero syndrome. Some of our antiheroes are clearly psychopaths (e.g., The Punisher, Marv), while others might only have a mild form of antisocial personality disorder (e.g., Wolverine) or schizoid personality disorder (e.g., Batman), and still others are generally quite sociable (e.g., Magik). Some of them appear to suffer from a form of multiple personality (or dissociative identity) disorder (e.g., Venom, Magik), but most do not. Judge Dredd exhibits some of the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, and the Crow is almost certainly clinically depressed. However, rather than shoe-horning distinct psychiatric labels on them, better progress in understanding our antiheroes might be made by comparing them to heroes, tragic heroes, villains, and sympathetic villains along a few continua that together form a volumetric state space. For example, on a scale from zero to one, how evil are the methods (or means) used by the individual in question? Also, on the same scale, how evil are the consequences (or ends) that tend to result from his actions? Finally, how much self-doubt does the character exhibit? If you estimate these three numbers for a fictional character, you can treat them as coordinates in a three-dimensional space. How close various characters are to one another in that space is thus an indicator of how similar they are to one another.

Figure 1 on the next page shows estimated values for these coordinates for our antiheroes, as well as for several other characters. Superman and Lex Luthor are treated as the quintessential forthright hero and unwavering villain, respectively. This provides a pair of idealized anchors (or basis functions) from which the rest of the layout can more readily make sense. Our antiheroes form a cluster in this space, with most of them near a region with substantially evil means and somewhat good ends—and they run the gamut of low to high self-doubt. Batman is at a far edge of that cluster because he is more like the standard hero. We might call him the “Dark Defender” type of antihero. Judge Dredd is at another edge of the cluster, near the villain region, which we call the “Resolute Destroyer” type. Quantitatively, Magik and Venom are the closest to the Tragic Hero region, so we call them the “Tortured Protector” type of antihero. Finally, Marv is the closest to sympathetic villains, so we call his type the “Muddled Revenger.” At either extreme of destructiveness and/or at either extreme of internal struggle, we can thus imagine two dimensions inside the antihero category that allow us to loosely associate them into subcategories. Our other antiheroes live somewhere in the middle of those four extreme types.

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