Word: antiheroes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Magna catches the antihero in the act of talking himself out of the love of his life. "She's too good for me. She's too beautiful, too intelligent, too perceptive, too creative, too everything," begins an interior monologue that could be a manual of masochism. In that story the woman walks out kindly. Not so the 20-year-old in For a Man Your Age, whose explanation of why her lover is too old for her is cruel beyond the call of love or duty. She knows all a man's vulnerabilities and has deadly...
...there is more. Greenfeld's antihero, Larry Lazar, is not a conventionally Philistine tycoon, trampling on the souls of artists. He is an artist, an acclaimed creator of humanistic films who just happens to be, personally, a creep. He would rather betray a friend than lose a deal. When Lazar feels a charitable impulse and gives money to the less fortunate, he connives to get the studio to pay him back. And he is not merely greedy. He is, as a colleague remarks, "an aesthetic hustler" who looks upon every intimate-even his unlamented mother-as movie "material...
...young child," writes Stamaty of his hapless antihero, Congressman Bob Forehead, "young Bobby had one ambition; to host a TV quiz show." Instead, the wayward actor--who bears a less-than-coincidental resemblance to Rep. Jack Kemp (R.N.Y.)--becomes the political pawn of Gerard V. Oxboggle, president of Glominoid Corporation. And as a conservative representative. Forehead is the tool of every right-wing cause, from maniacal weapons manufacturers to preachy Southern Senator Clancy Fumes (a.k.a. Jesse Helms). Fumes lives in righteous fear of "secular humanist liberals" and plots to replace the Supreme Court with a panel of the four...
...walkin', friggin' combat zone," Harry's boss tells him. "Your ideas don't fit any more." Alas, they do. Dirty Harry is the raging vigilante voice inside every put-upon urbanite. In the past, Eastwood has carried this contradiction within his own antihero character; now Harry has found a comely avatar. Joseph C. Stinson's script says it is O.K. to kill half a dozen people if you have soft blond hair and a righteous grudge. Agree who will. The rest of the audience will enjoy Director Eastwood's knowing cinematic jolts, the outsize...
...combined three basic elements: Chekhovian sensibility, with that playwright's rueful portrait of the hero as antihero; the Freudian irrational unconscious, with the wayward id buffeting the will-less ego; and the romantic temperament, which Classicist Gilbert Murray called "the glorification of passion - any passion-just because it is violent, overwhelming, unreasonable...