Fair warning: this episode spoils a lot of (older) media.
Antiheroes make for great television. But why are we obsessed with them? Why are they in nearly all prestige dramas? Is this a result of our cultural beliefs, or is it (re)producing a culture of cynical realism? What impacts might it have for politics and climate change?
This ascendancy of the antihero is a trend I've been watching (and often enjoying) since my teen years. Shows like The Sopranos helped bring television to its lofty artistic status, but it did so by confusing the natural empathy that good storytelling generates. The longer one watches shows like The Sopranos, the more one ends up rooting for bad guys to be successful. In a world that is ever more mediated by media, could a similar trend be happening in politics?
Today's show is an attempt to make sense of the antihero through a number of prestige dramas, and look for some ways of telling stories that don't lead us into the abyss of constant moral ambiguity.
Today we're going to talk about hope, reclaiming moral authority, and why it's cool to believe in things. I hope you'll join me in that ambition.
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Listen to the RCC episode with Lisett Luik from Arbonics
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Resources
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"The judge speaks in the name of justice; the priest speaks in the name of pity, which is nothing but a more lofty justice."
- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
"Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven."
- Matthew 18:21-22, KJV
'Breaking Bad's Vince Gilligan Says We Need More Good Guys on Screen as Bad Guys Have “Taken Over the World” article on MSN
The Sopranos (here's a clip where Anthony Jr. steals sacramental wine from the church and the shot lingers for a few extra seconds on St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes—perfection)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on Wikipedia
Littlefinger Tells Varys That Chaos Is A Ladder | Game of Thrones | HBO
The scene between Michael and Kay in The Godfather
The Act of Killing
The All We Can Save Project
What If We Get It Right? by Dr. Ayana Johnson
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello, this is your host, Ross Kenyon. I’m doing something that I have not done before. I feel like I did a long time ago, but it’s been a while. But in trying to make this show financially sustainable, I was able to pick up a couple of sponsors. It would do me a great favor if you could please listen and learn more about each of them, since they offer something to different parts of our audience that I think you will care about. These two sponsors — and thank you from the bottom of my heart for becoming sponsors — are Offstream and Arbonics.
Arbonics is a project developer. They’re the ones that are actually pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it, and they are doing it through trees. You know, trees have had a difficult time within carbon removal. You should go listen to the show that I did with Lisett Luik from Arbonics. We did a show probably about six weeks or eight weeks ago, and we talked about how the trajectory of trees, afforestation, reforestation within carbon removal has played out, how that impacts whether we are storing biological material in anoxic environments for carbon removal purposes alone.
Arbonics is doing something a little bit differently. Europe has over 14 million hectares of underused land, which, you know, abandoned farmland. It’s low quality pasture. Not a lot is happening there. A lot of it once was forest. It was cleared a long time ago for farming, but the global food supply and better yields elsewhere has meant that a lot of this land is just underutilized and we haven’t quite figured out what to do with it yet. So Arbonics uses technology to help landowners find this land and then restore it back into carbon-removing, biodiverse forest.
And that last point is really important, because a lot of forestry that takes place is a monoculture, which is maybe solving one problem, but it’s not solving the overall polycrisis, ecological crisis. So Arbonics pursues that way of going to market in order to offer corporates high quality, data-backed European carbon removal credits, helping companies reach their sustainability goals with maximum trust. So go listen to that conversation with Lisett. I’ll put a link in the show notes if you want some more.
And if you’re thinking about this in terms of a cycle here, Offstream would be a service provider to Arbonics. Offstream is there to make carbon compliance simple for project developers. If you’re listening, if you work at a carbon removal company or company producing other types of carbon assets, the data portion of this is super challenging. If you’re listening and you haven’t had to read through a methodology or any registry documentation, you’ll probably live longer than the rest of us who have. It’s non-trivial. It’s difficult, and that’s not to say that it shouldn’t be difficult. Much of this should be, so we make sure that quality is actually taking place when carbon is removed or avoided or anything like that.
And Offstream exists to make it easier for project developers to not get stuck on the level of data. Varsha Ramesh Walsh, Offstream CEO, she likens their platform to being a GPS for your carbon credit and your MRV plans. It’s guiding you through the jungle of certifications and compliance. Oh, I love that. That’s such a fun, visual way of putting it. This is a world where you can develop and iterate on your project LCAs in minutes, not weeks, where you can focus on doing the important work of growing your business, scaling carbon removal, generating more credits without having to necessarily hire more employees.
This is really an important time in carbon removal where minimizing headcount may be necessary for a number of companies to stay alive and keep going. And Offstream is here to help you do that. They’re here to help you with your LCA needs. If you’re listening, you’re a project developer, you know one, and they are having persistent migraines from paperwork, like, go over to useoffstream.com. Tell them that Offstream can help them handle the quote unquote boring bits while they can focus on saving the planet. Offstream: because paperwork shouldn’t be a full-time job. Cracks me up.
Thank you, Offstream and Arbonics, for sponsoring Reversing Climate Change. I’m really appreciative that you’re able to help me do this. It means a lot. If you’re listening to this and you’d like to sponsor Reversing Climate Change, feel free to send me an e-mail. I’ll put the e-mail in the show notes too. And let’s talk. And OK, now I’m going into the show proper, the intro. Here it is, and thank you again for listening.
Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon and I’m a longtime climate tech and carbon removal entrepreneur. Today I’d like to share with you some thoughts on why the antihero is such a popular archetype or structure for telling a story in American culture. I don’t think it’s an especially good thing, and I’m going to tell you why. It’s very, very difficult to have a show worthy of critical acclaim without having antiheroic elements to it. By which I mean an antihero is someone often in the slot of the protagonist.
And classically, the protagonist is someone that you are rooting for, that has admirable qualities, that you want to see them supersede their difficulties and grow and win. And an antihero is someone that is, you know, maybe more morally complex. They’re not a villain. It’s not like a straight reversal always. But it is one of those cases where they fall into this fuzzier area in between. Television is just littered with antiheroes. They’re all over the place now. And it is commonly tracked back to Tony Soprano and the, you know, potentially the first great, truly artistic television series, The Sopranos. Maybe you’ve heard of it.
It has a similar moment for the medium in a similar way that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles is considered to be the first art rock album. And people can quibble over whether or not it truly deserves that status or not. But in popular memory, that is the role that this album serves. Before that, rock was much more saccharine, much goofier. Songs weren’t necessarily connected, concept albums were not that common. And Sgt. Pepper’s changed that. Rock became a medium that could be as sublime as any other musical media style, and that was a great coming of age moment.
Television before Sopranos, people associate very strongly with sitcoms and with soap operas, but not high art. And when HBO produced The Sopranos, that was considered to be a transcendent moment where television had arrived. This is a great thing, and while it was a great thing for television, and presumably we’ve all benefited from the birth of a new cultural medium that has been so influential, has enabled so much more storytelling at such greater length — it’s been a terrific thing. There’s so many shows that are worth watching in the post-Sopranos era, whereas there’s very few pre-Sopranos shows that are worth going back and revisiting.
By which I mean, with filmmaking, there are many films that go back essentially what, to the Lumière brothers, as things that you should watch from more than 100 years ago. That’s not really true for television. If you’re a comedy nerd, you want to go back and watch Johnny Carson or Carol Burnett, or you want to experience the popular cultural value of something like All in the Family or The Jeffersons. Like, OK, there’s that. Seinfeld. But Sopranos, for whatever reason, is considered to be the moment, for better, for worse. It may not actually be true. Maybe there are some shows that brought high art to television much earlier. But for the purpose of this narrative, it’s Sopranos. That’s what it is.
I’ve seen Sopranos all the way through I think two or three times, maybe call it two and a half times. It’s a great show. It’s funny, it’s supernatural. It’s so strange in so many ways. A lot of unanswered questions. But one of the things about the show is that as you’re watching it, if you’re someone like me, I had the feeling of being manipulated, and not in a way that felt intentional. Like, I didn’t feel like I was being led astray by the producers of the content. But I did feel that the longer that you watch content like that, the more you empathize with the protagonist.
Because if you don’t have empathy for the protagonist, it’s really hard to keep watching a show. You need someone that you’re at the very least curious what’s going to happen with them. But ideally you are emotionally invested in what is happening to them. And if you become emotionally invested in someone like Tony Soprano, you start thinking thoughts like, I really hope Tony outsmarts the FBI, or I really hope Tony doesn’t get caught with his goomah and Carmela, his wife, divorces him. And as you’re watching, you’re like, why am I thinking that? This is a terrible thought.
He probably should be divorced. He’s, you know, a philandering, unfaithful husband. And Carmela’s pretty miserable for the duration of the show, and he is doing very bad things to the people of North Jersey and should not be out on the streets able to do more of them. It’s weird if you watch what’s happening inside of yourself as this show is almost generating empathy against your will. And this is why it’s considered to be great, in part because it was humanizing. It’s really hard to sustain viewership or interest in a work of art if there is not empathy being generated, ideally for multiple characters.
Like, a good example of this is that recently I’ve been reading Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. The movie version, or the more recent one, doesn’t do a great job, and in fact I don’t know that the musical does a great job of exploring why Javert is an interesting character that’s worth support. In the book, it’s a really rich story and character. So I’m just going to run you through this if you’ve never seen or read Les Misérables.
Jean Valjean is convicted of stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. He’s sentenced to five years in just horrible conditions in the French prison system in the early 1800s. He’s overseen by a policeman, a warden named Javert, and he tries to escape several times so that his sentence ends up something like 19 years. And he is marked by having a yellow passport document so that people know he’s a dangerous convict, or believe that he’s a dangerous convict. No one will take him in. He’s just a pariah. And he goes to a bishop’s house almost by accident.
And the bishop welcomes him in as a godly act. And rather than appreciating that for his own sake, he falls back into his ways — the book is about how the prison system essentially inculcated this sense of criminality into him, and he can’t break out of it at that moment. And he steals the silver of the bishop and is caught for doing so. And then it’s taken back to the bishop. And the bishop tells the police that captured Jean Valjean that actually he had given him the silverware as a gift, and tells him that he bought his soul for God and that his job is now go be a changed and redeemed man.
And even still he can’t quite do it, and has one more incident where he essentially steals from a small child, and then leaves, and from that point on is invisible to the authorities and is not tracked down essentially. And he becomes a factory owner through some innovation and becomes a very charitable person and has changed his ways, until someone is caught for crimes and is charged with the crimes of Jean Valjean. And he has to decide whether or not he wants to go and confess that he is Jean Valjean and save this man’s life, or if he would rather live a lie and do more good on his own.
And he chooses to go and confess and save this man from unjust imprisonment, because as a reoffender, this person faces lifetime back in the prison hulks, which is just terrible, horrible conditions. It’s a beautiful story of how his soul changes. And what’s really powerful about it is that Javert, the man of authority here, the police officer, the inspector who is tracking Jean Valjean, and his officers, like, always hunting him — he’s not just like a jerk. He actually has an ethos here that is really beautiful. He also comes from very impoverished circumstances. And rather than becoming a criminal, he ends up working on the side of the law and he cares about the rule of law.
So the book is a very powerful illustration of justice versus mercy. And justice versus mercy is an idea that I come back to a lot. In fact, when I was reading Les Mis, I was like, oh, I’m so glad that I am not the first person to contrast this. I obviously was not, but it was nice to just have it spelled out so beautifully. In fact, I wrote down a quote here. The narrator has a line that I loved, which is, the judge speaks in the name of justice, the priest speaks in the name of pity, which is nothing but a more lofty justice. Pity being a synonym for mercy here.
And Javert believes very strongly in the rule of law sentiment. Doesn’t matter why something happened. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that it did happen, and that the consequences for society if we were to start making exceptions in this way would be catastrophic. And the book illustrates this very well. Russell Crowe is not well respected for his portrayal of Javert in the more recent film, but in the book he’s a very thoughtful character. You can disagree with him, but I don’t think that Victor Hugo is unfair to him. That is sort of the best of the law and order mentality. There is a logic to it. It’s not just being mean spirited.
And I think that makes the story much more robust, because in the movie, Javert feels a little bit more like a cartoon. And again, that could be Russell Crowe, but — or just in the play in general — like, understanding why someone would so prioritize the rule of law rather than exonerating circumstances. Did society, or did Jean Valjean’s prison time, make him or confirm him in his worst impulses? That doesn’t matter to him. And in fact, us giving ourselves over to mercy in this way would violate justice and make society both less just and less merciful as a result, because people would take advantage of those forgiving tendencies.
That’s one of the reasons why Christianity feels to me irrational in such a powerful, interesting way. Like, what does it mean to forgive someone seventy times seven times? I don’t know. If you are pessimistic about that, you are enabling very toxic behavior with how permissive and freely one is forgiving. But I like that it is not irrational. Faith should ask you to do some irrational things, in that way that makes me laugh. And so it’s — I find that to be inspiring or beautiful in a way that is out of step with a very practical life. I’ll be talking more about this soon. I’m doing a podcast I’m really excited about that’ll be coming out soon where I’m going to talk much more about these ideas.
So that’s a case where a story has a protagonist and an antagonist who are really well-rounded out, that have independent rationale for why they do things, why they believe things. And it’s believable. But we’ve gone past that now. Somewhere in between that book and Sopranos, I’m thinking of just like bad TV westerns and John Wayne making several westerns a year. And it’s the good guys versus the bad guys. The Indians are bad, the pilgrims are good. There’s not a lot of brain power spent on, like, more revisionist western takes of maybe the pioneers aren’t so good. Maybe they have their own moral complexity. Maybe there are Native Americans who have their own reasons for doing things. Maybe there are settlers who are worse than the quote unquote savages.
If you watch westerns that are more contemporary, you will notice that that is present, most famously in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. I think that is the sort of quintessential inverted western where the pioneers come from a corrupt settler colonial civilization and the Native Americans actually are the good guys. And then there’s a bunch of things that fall somewhere in between where they’re just trying to make well-rounded humans on both sides. But in any case, Sopranos, you’re meant to identify with Tony. You’re meant to be supportive of Tony. If you are not supportive of Tony, it’s really hard to watch, you know, dozens of hours of this thing.
And the same thing happened with Breaking Bad. And then someone who watched Breaking Bad and came away from it with the conclusion that, you know, Walter White did everything that he did for his family — which was always a really bizarre thing to say to me, because there’s a scene very late in the show where Walt admits that he did it for himself. He wanted an empire. He wanted to be good at something. He wanted to be more than a chemistry teacher. And it wasn’t just about providing for his family after he died of cancer.
His criminal lifestyle was driven by cancer, but that might be more of a proximate cause. The ultimate cause of Walter White was something more like spiritual fulfillment, being important, being powerful, being respected. It wasn’t just about the money, or not only about the money. And after the money ceased to be relevant, it became about so much more than that. I don’t know if people here remember, but when the show was active, people would get really mad at Skyler, his wife, you know, a long-suffering woman. You know, being married to Walt was not a good experience in so many ways. Maybe it once was, but he put his family in great jeopardy, both legal and physical.
I remember people commenting about how horrible she was on social media and on Reddit and places, and I’m like, are we watching the same show? Skyler is concerned for her family’s safety and Walt is not. Skyler’s on the side of right here. But the way that media works is that you end up identifying with the protagonist. You want their goals to be achieved. And you can end up feeling manipulated by it.
And I think that’s increasingly prominent now. Like, one of the reasons why Ted Lasso was such a popular show, I think it’s because it just went back to a protagonist that is an unalloyed good, very obviously good. No one is — I mean, can you imagine if Ted Lasso had some sort of weird dark side? He has some complexity with his own personal family, and I know there’s some of that going on, but no one’s going to argue that he’s a morally compromised or difficult character.
I’m hard pressed to think of too many shows, especially the really big important shows that everyone is watching at the time, that don’t fit this. I mean, Game of Thrones was potentially the most immoral or nihilistic show that ever existed in this way. The Littlefinger speech of, you know, all there is is the ladder. All there is is the climb to the top and stepping on people to get there. Even the characters that we thought of as good — I didn’t watch all the way through, so forgive me if I’m getting some of the details a little bit wrong here. I was not a Game of Thrones obsessive.
But even Daenerys Targaryen — everyone thought that she was going to be the young breaker of chains. She was going to free all the slaves and lead this sort of like just left wing kind of revolt against the world in Game of Thrones. And even she ended up becoming a terrifying leader by the end that you couldn’t necessarily just root for, even though I think a lot of people did end up rooting for her and even named their kids after her before they knew what she was going to do. Oops. I guess that happens sometimes.
Right now, the show that is doing this is The Last of Us. So in the game and in the first season of The Last of Us, they live in this horrible post-apocalyptic world where a fungus has spread that essentially turns people into zombies. They attack living humans, and then those humans reanimate into being undead in some mycological way. That’s pretty disgusting. And in the first season, Joel, who’s a smuggler, is tasked with delivering Ellie across a continent to bring her to a medical base of a group called the Fireflies. Just sort of a rebel group, a faction within this world where they have a hospital.
He doesn’t find this out until later, but the point of it is that since Ellie is immune from this fungus, they’re going to be able to develop a vaccine from her blood or some sort of tissue. And as he delivers her there, he’s told that the only way to extract a theoretical vaccine or cure from Ellie is to take it out of her brain, because that’s apparently what the fungus attaches to. And this would require killing her. And rather than Joel accepting this as a sacrifice that may save the human race, Joel sides with Ellie and kills all the doctors and just goes on a rampage and pulls Ellie out of there.
And Ellie survives, and then he doesn’t tell her the truth of what happened. And so the second season is about the repercussions of that failure to disclose. And there’s a lot of open questions here about, should the one be sacrificed to save the many? What is the duty of a caretaker like Joel to someone like Ellie, both in telling her the truth and what would she have wanted? Would she have given her life freely to save humankind, or theoretically save humankind, or not? There’s much ambiguity here.
Joel has a Han Solo-ish quality, both in terms of his profession but also in his attitude. He’s gruff, sort of jaded, seen it all. And he’s mercenary. Like, he even calls Ellie cargo to her face, like she’s not a person. He’s interested in the money. And if this sounds like Han Solo, it’s because they’re very much of a similar ilk. That is who they are. I’m going to get into this later. This is a topic that I care a lot about and I’m going to talk more about this type of archetype. I’m not even sure what you call it. I think I’m going to call it the redeemed rogue.
Because it’s something that you can see in places like Rick from Casablanca, Han Solo from Star Wars, Clive Owen’s character from Children of Men. Even in places — this is a weaker connection, but I think it also works — it’s also true of Miles in Sideways. These are characters who used to be hopeful, used to believe in things, and then stopped. They’re no longer trying, they’re no longer morally ambitious. They’re interested in themselves and advancing their own interest in a world gone bad. And the arc of the story is built around them recommitting themselves to believing in literally anything again.
But those examples I gave are all examples where the protagonist learns and grows and realizes that their self-interest is an insufficient envelope for their lives. They in fact need to change. That belief system is not giving them what they want, and that they need to make themselves vulnerable and to believe in things again in order to do anything noteworthy at all. And Joel gets like halfway there, but so much of his quote unquote protection of Ellie is about his own trauma of losing his daughter in the first episode, in the very beginning. And Ellie is being a surrogate daughter and wanting to replay it and protect her.
So we’re not even left with a sense of Joel’s moral transformation, because in fact, it’s unclear if he even did the right thing. Did he do it for traumatized and maybe selfish reasons? It’s hard to know. It’s not straightforwardly, Joel did something good. But so much of antihero content doesn’t even make an attempt to show moral transformation. Tony dances around it for the entire series because he’s going to therapy and he’s talking to Dr. Melfi about how hard it is for him to do this job, and how hard it is to be a gangster, and the sad hard things that are necessary to get it done.
But there’s never a sense of, and therefore I might give it up. In fact, people who give up the lifestyle in Sopranos are hunted down, and there’s no leaving it, especially once you’re a made man in the show and you’re, like, truly a member of the organization. You don’t get to retire. That’s a big part of the show. [unclear] Tony actually never has much of a chance for moral transformation. Most of that action inside of the narrative takes place in his family members.
Carmela, his wife, who acts the absolute hell out of that role — if you ever watch it — she’s faced with several moral decisions about whether to leave Tony and to do something else, and she ultimately waffles and stays with him. Anthony Jr., Tony’s son, faces questions about whether or not he can supersede fate. He has so much momentum that’s pushing him towards this mafia lifestyle, and the question for him is, can he escape the center of gravity that’s just sucking him into this way of being?
And the same thing happened to Tony, too. It’s unclear if he was going to go into the same line of work as his father. But there is this sort of fate or caste system dynamic where it’s like, once you’re caught in this family cycle, like, you have to try really hard or be really smart to come out of it. Meadow, Tony and Carmela’s daughter, she does escape and goes to school in New York and lives a normal life and escapes the falling into marrying someone from this field and becoming her mother — but only just barely, because she has a very deep romance with someone who’s very — with a Jackie Jr. — very involved in this criminal lifestyle.
He’s also someone that was starting to pull away and he was going to Rutgers, and also just sort of fell back into this sort of like criminal pattern of his parents and his family. And he ends up dying, and there’s a big question of what would have happened to Meadow had he not died? Would Meadow have married him and just become Carmela? There’s so many questions like this that are really interesting, but most of the characters fail at it. Like, even Meadow, she ends up making peace with the fact that her dad is in the mob and that that’s a normal career choice that someone can make.
Almost in the same way that if you watch the original Godfather, Michael Corleone, Al Pacino, has a very famous conversation with Diane Keaton where Diane Keaton is saying, you know, senators don’t have men killed, Michael. And he says, well, of course they do. And Michael and his father are no different from other powerful men. And Meadow coming to that same conclusion, that her dad is no different from other powerful men.
This link is not made explicitly so much as I’m reading into this, and I’m sort of surprised Sopranos doesn’t reference that scene around that, because this is such a — Sopranos is famously postmodern and self-referential [unclear]. Everyone within the show are big fans of mobster movies, and so the references here are deep and they come often. Maybe there is, I just don’t remember. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if they do reference the original Godfather scene for this.
But the entire family has these moments of moral testing, of can they escape the pull of this lifestyle. And most of them fail it. The only person that we could consider that got out, which is Meadow, still ends up blessing her dad’s behavior and career choice by virtue of continued association. And she’s like — there’s a blessing there. There’s a coming to peace, because she struggles with it for a long time of, what do I do with this? And ends up just sort of at some point accepting that this is the way that it is, and that she cares about her family and is no longer at ideological odds or at war with her own family.
So essentially everyone that I can think of, at least within the Soprano family core unit, there is a moral failure, but only Tony seemingly has very little chance to break out of the lifestyle as a whole and seemingly barely entertains it at all. I think content like this is bad for us culturally. I think the prominence of the antihero relates to climate action in several ways. One of the things that I think made Trump a popular political candidate is that he sort of embraced an antihero status.
One of the things that I associate quite strongly with him is this sense that America is not exceptional. American rhetoric, especially presidential rhetoric, is very powerfully rooted in American exceptionalism. And there’s plenty of ways we can poke at it, and it’s fine if you’re listening and you think it’s all a load of horse crap. But America is an idea. The mythology and the idea of America is that anyone can come here, start over. Your last name no longer matters. In the old country, your name mattered a lot. Were you part of the aristocracy? Literally doesn’t matter here. Or theoretically it should not.
We started from first principles about what kind of government and society we would like to have. We stated explicitly, and it’s something that you can join, not by blood, you know, not by descent. It is by adopting those ideas one can become an American. And we’ve been grappling with a failure to live up to those ideals ever since, of democracy and liberty and justice, things that are always incomplete and always a work in progress. But we very much have the idea, the striving, that America is meant to be a place the rest of the world can look to, that breaks us out of the old world and the old way of doing things.
And that rhetoric — can you just see, like, I’m looking at literally out of the window. I’m at 9Zero in Seattle right now. I’m looking out the window and I can see an American flag on a building flapping. I just imagine that behind me right now there’s a, you know, hand on my heart, American flag flapping, and it probably sounds cheesy. I imagine many people listening, whether left of center or right of center listening, might hear that and say those are either bad ideas, they’re incomplete, they’re fatally flawed, we’ve never even come close to this, or it’s no longer relevant to current reality.
Like, whatever. There’s plenty of ways to pick out what I just said. You don’t have to just take it. But ideally, you can probably recognize what I’m saying as part of our civic mythology of being an American. And Trump had a tendency to not play into that rhetoric very much. In fact, rather than America as a beautiful and bountiful place of opportunity for all and a place of ever increasing moral virtue, Trump tends to focus on rhetoric of, that’s all baloney. The world is taking advantage of us and we’re actually just looking out for our own interests. Every other country in the world looks after their own interests. Why don’t we? Why are we taking bad deals with people when we could be looking out for our own selves? Because it puts us at a game theoretic disadvantage by not doing this.
And I think a lot of people know that the rhetoric is a little bit hokey, a little bit goofy, and we never quite get there. I think someone just taking that down a peg and saying, like, that’s, you know, that’s for the hoi polloi, but you’re smarter than that. Like, you know that we’re actually just as geopolitically realist in orientation as any other country, right? He uses different words for saying it, but I think there’s something like that that has an antiheroic feel to it.
I think one of the reasons why the antihero became such a popular archetype for a protagonist in media is that we got sick of those John Wayne shows where the good was good and the bad was bad. We knew who was on which side and who you wanted to get killed and who you wanted to win the day. And that’s what media taught us to root for, is very simple. And when we had shows that had antiheroes that had moral complexity to them, that was a revelation. That was a moment that we realized that you could tell complex stories.
In the same way that in the novel, like I mentioned with Javert and Jean Valjean from Les Mis, those are characters that are oppositional. They are antagonistic to one another and yet they are flesh and blood. Their internal logic holds. It’s not just like one is the bad guy because he’s mean and stupid. Not so — like, those are rounded out characters, and that’s really great. I’ve referenced this before in other shows too, but I think Tolstoy is a master of this as well.
Reading something like Anna Karenina was a revelation for me when I first read it years and years ago, because I would have the sort of kaleidoscopic empathy where I could identify with each of the characters whenever the chapter would change and we would change into their perspective and be learning about their inner life. Like, oh yeah, this is like a real person. I get this. I’ve had some of these same feelings, same thoughts. And that’s a really beautiful thing, and television doesn’t have that as much. It’s hard to share all of those things with a purely visual medium like television or cinema.
But with the long form nature of TV, we are able to explore some of these antiheroic elements where we had just more time to sit with Tony and understand what made him tick, what made him feel sorrow, some of his conflict. Even if he failed to achieve moral transformation in the way that we might hope from a protagonist in a show, there was enough there that gave us something to hold on to, even if it was maybe more plot driven than necessarily moral driven or inner-state driven.
Since the inauguration and Trump became president a second time, there have been a number of these more cynical changes where I understand why companies are doing this. I’m not necessarily judging anyone for doing so, but focusing on regional economic development, focusing on American supply chains. And I get it. They’re trying to pursue climate and other goals under rhetoric that often does have those benefits too. It’s not an insincere way of framing their work, but of changing these things. And I haven’t always liked this. And I don’t know that I’ve always felt morally courageous enough to like this publicly.
But I think projects like All We Can Save, and What If We Get It Right? from Dr. Ayana Johnson — parts of me at points I felt more cynical and, like, unable to appreciate that work. I think being hopeful in this way is an act of supreme vulnerability. It’s way easier to look at a situation like this as a quote unquote realist and accept that you may have to compromise your values a little bit, or change your rhetoric to tack to the wind and be more politically palatable.
There’s something beautiful about someone just believing in the good of humanity and wondering about what if we created a beautiful world and we actually did commit ourselves to, you know, high flying rhetoric that a cynic might look at and say, you know what? America was never exceptional. It was always a little bit of a lie, a little bit of a mythology. I like when someone says, actually, we’re constantly reinventing ourselves, and even if we fall short of that rhetoric, it’s still a beautiful idea that we should believe in and continue working towards. And I think climate activism and carbon removal are very much in that same category too.
To quote the famous X-Files image, I want to believe. I think you want to believe too. It’s not as beautiful of a place if we can’t actually feel that hope in our hearts. And when our media is so focused on antiheroes and moral complexity, we start to lose moral authority. Watching shows like that, it’s hard to know who to root for. And then when you look outside of media, back to the real world, when you turn your gaze back, are you making excuses for moral complexity in our leaders?
There are probably some cases where moral complexity is the right frame to understand human behavior and causality. There are many cases though, where having a strong moral bright line is much more important. And our media, insofar as it is focused on antiheroes and moral complexity, is training us out of simple good versus evil stories and into moral complexity. But it’s not the good kind of moral complexity, like there is in Les Mis. It’s the bad kind of complexity where there’s no good. All there is is the ladder. And all you can do is make sure your own family is taken care of and your political status is going well and upwardly ascendant.
I’m going on record right now that, as someone who can be occasionally a little bit contrarian, can be a little bit closed off emotionally, can be a little bit tight on what I think the opportunities are for human flourishing in the world — I don’t want to be that person. I want to be someone who hopes. If we’re not doing that, then I thought, what are we doing here? That’s all to say, I’m declaring myself a sap. I’m OK with that. I want content that helps me proclaim moral authority, that teaches me what I believe. But not in a pedantic way either.
One coda I will add to this beautiful symphony I’ve just composed. Not really. But this one little note I will give you though on this topic though, is I also don’t like it when documentaries — they’re especially bad at this — but when they are heavily editorial and they tell you essentially how to think. At the end of it, they make a case that you’re supposed to accept or reject, and ideally accept. And I’ve always felt pandered to by that, rather than letting me make my own conclusions a little bit more. Maybe the difference here is just skill.
And a film that I just thought of that I really love — if you haven’t seen it, it might be the most interesting documentary I’ve ever seen in my entire life — The Act of Killing, which is about the anti-communist efforts in Indonesia in the ’60s. The filmmaker tracks down several men who were involved in the mass killings of alleged communists during the Cold War in Indonesia, and he convinces them to reenact how these killings would go and allow him to film the reenactments, presumably for some sort of anniversary of celebrating their activities — and I keep saying quote unquote, quote unquote — saving the Indonesian nation.
And as they are reenacting these killings that these men did themselves years and years ago, they’ll say things like, well, we can’t do it this way. It is how it happened, but this makes us look like the bad guys. And in the process of reliving and showing someone else what happened, there ends up having a moral confrontation inside the subjects of the documentary. You could also just make a documentary that shows all the bad things that happened in Indonesia and tells us how to think about it. But somehow watching these men come to terms with the actions that they did and justifying it decades later — I didn’t feel pandered to at all.
It had sublime moral authority without any of the, you know, the end of Food, Inc. or whatever, where it’s like, and write your congressperson and, like, take these actions, and this is exactly what you should do and feel with regard to the subject matter of this film. Something about the way The Act of Killing did it was the best of both of those things. It was morally indisputable and it did not pander. It did not spoon feed or editorialize in a way that I felt was manipulative or pedantic. In some ways it was didactic, but in the best kind of open my mind. I’m still thinking about that film a very long time after I saw it.
So I’m not saying that we should return to the old John Wayne cowboys and Indians kind of films. We have our own dang media culture to blame for it. Delightful as those programs may be — I’ve certainly enjoyed, I don’t even know how many, loads of them that feature antiheroes. But the world, such as it is, has room for heroes too. It can be cooler to be an antihero, but as I’ll discuss in a future episode, it’s much cooler to be an antihero who becomes a hero, like all of the characters that I named, like Theo from Children of Men, Han Solo.
Rick from Casablanca is perhaps the best known example of this. By the end of Casablanca, he decides to rejoin the resistance movement against the Nazis, something that he once did until he was heartbroken and was no longer able to do so. So if you find yourself with a broken heart in this way but want to believe again, I’m giving you permission to believe again. It’s OK to do that. Our culture doesn’t want you to do that. Go ahead and do it. Believe again. It’s cool to believe again. I’ll leave you with that.
Thanks so much for listening. That was a very fun, mostly freestyled monologue based upon an article where Vince Gilligan is quoted talking about antiheroes, and it very much echoes my own thoughts. I hope you enjoyed this. If so, share it out, send it to a friend. Thanks so much for listening and I hope you have a wonderful day.
