Rooney Mara's turn as Swedish author Stieg Larsson's pierced, tattoo-clad, anti-social Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher's American film adaptation of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" this past December proved to be thoroughly enthralling-enough even to land her a nomination for Best Actress at the 2012 Academy Awards later this month. While Swedish actress Noomi Rapace got the first crack at the character in the Danish film adaptations of Larsson's Millennium trilogy, Mara managed to do the character better justice in her portrayal by imbuing the ass-kicking, name-taking Salander with the undertone of vulnerability that was missing from Rapace's pure bad ass. Although this thread of humanity that Mara brings to the role certainly complicates the character of Lisbeth Salander, there is no doubt that she qualifies as the archetypal anti-hero, a trope that is becoming more and more common in our culture.
The last decade has undoubtedly belonged to the anti-hero. Back in 1999, before director David Fincher presented the world with his morally complex portraits of Lisabeth Salander in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" and Mark Zuckerberg in "The Social Network," the director introduced what would become one of the most iconic cult characters of the approaching decade with Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden, the philosophical nihilist and soap aficionado of Chuck Palahniuk's seminal novel "Fight Club." Tyler Durden connected with audiences, spouting eloquent treatises on forsaking traditional values of consumerism and societal expectations, and subverting everything they had been force-fed by Hollywood entertainment culture and yet knew to be artificial.
What makes Tyler Durden so engaging is a bit of what makes all anti-heroes so intriguing to us today. We have been indoctrinated to the tropes and clichés of traditional Hollywood morality to such an extent that any hero who follows such code becomes instantly predictable.
When we watch a movie that we recognize as following this classic Hollywood narrative of ‘angelic good guys versus nasty bad guys,' we instantly discern the rules of the game as well. We know the limits of what the protagonists can do to achieve their ends, and we also know that no matter what those ends will be achieved. After several decades this formula has become rather played out.
We have outgrown the simple idealism enshrined by Hollywood since the days of the Hays moral code. We crave complex, nuanced protagonists that better reflect reality's shades of gray rather than the starkly black and white morality of yesteryear. We don't want a predictable superhero who will always triumph over evil on society's terms, we want kick-ass anti-heroes that get things done on their own terms-whether it be tattooing an embarrassing indelible condemnation on a loathsome rapist, stealing liposuctioned fat only to sell it back to upper class consumers as luxury soap, or swindling everyone you know out of a multi-billion-dollar company.
Anti-heroes entice us to live vicariously through them because they have the gumption to do those things we so often wish we could do but cannot. They are a self-gratifying fantasy that with one hand indulges in secretly appealing, socially unacceptable behavior and with the other hand soothes our nagging conscience by ultimately moralizing, or at least justifying the actions. But most often, these characters still possess at least an iota of the traditional values that Hollywood likes to promote-they are still Hollywood products after all, even if Hollywood has gotten better at concealing that fact behind a layer of slick, subversive cool. Fincher's Mark Zuckerberg represents the entrepreneurial American spirit of self-reliance, just as Tyler Durden symbolizes idealized forms of freedom and equality and Lisbeth Salander stands for the pursuit of justice. Obscured by their 21st-century complexity, these modern anti-heroes are still heroic protagonists promoting social values, even if you have to dig through some blood and guts to find them.
Have a favorite Hollywood bad ass David forgot to mention? Let him know what character gets you riled at dcottrell@wisc.edu.
