Anti-Hero-Worship

First of all, big thanks go to GutterBall and and Joely Sue Burkhart for the recommendation about Pitch Black. We watched it last night and I really, really enjoyed it. Best of all - I was all tensed for it to be utterly terrifying, and surprisingly it wasn't that bad (which is a very good thing, IMO, since I hate being scared to death). We also rented Chronicles of Riddick for the second night of a Vin Diesel marathon. I need to go get A Man Apart as well. All of this...more research!

Actually, all joking aside, there was one part of PB that really intrigued (and kinda bothered) me. Warning - a bit of a SPOILER here. At one point in the movie, Riddick (Vin Diesel), who is the bad-guy-turned-unlikely-hero of the story, tells the people he's leading across the desert to hide in a cave. He then plows on ahead to the spaceship which was their final destination, ostensibly to unload the burden of power cells he's carrying and obtain more light before returning to retrieve his companions. At least, that's what I expected. But soon it becomes clear that Riddick has no intentions of returning to fetch his friends. He's just going to take off in the spaceship all by his lonesome, leaving the three other humans to die a gruesome death.

I couldn't believe it. What happend to evil-murderer-with-a-heart-of-gold? It was all there. The complete set up. He'd fought another survivor to the death when the guy suggested they sacrifice one of the group to the human-eating creatures in order so they could make a run for it. He agreed to lead the ragtag group across the desert when he could have set off all by himself. Up until the moment when he abandoned them, he'd been acting like a hero.

What's really weird is that despite this, I still like Riddick. I was so disappointed when he demonstrated that maybe - just maybe - he wasn't the nice guy I'd figured him to be. He still had a streak of nastiness that ran pretty deep. Maybe, just maybe, he isn't redeemable.

Thus leads to my intrigue. How far can you push a character until they are no longer redeemable?

Clearly certain acts are unacceptable on so many levels they don't merit the effort. For example, a child molestor - don't bother trying to redeem him/her because you never will be able to IMO. Jeffrey Dahmer-type antics. Nope. Same with a Charles Manson mass murder psychotic freak.

But what about a guy (or girl) with a criminal past? A real one, not one that was a mistake or misunderstanding where some poor innocent man spent years in prison before some govertnmental knucklehead figured out the problem. What about a guy who generally treats women badly, using them for his own pleasure then ignoring their emotional needs and pain when he blows them off the next morning? It's been done before, in books, that these guys make a comeback and have us rooting for them by the end.

I love a good anti-hero. In fact, I almost prefer them. Nothing more fun than rooting for the "bad" guy, especially if the good guys aren't painted to be as good as you might expect. Actually, that seems to be the key. In order to love the bad guy, to want him to win in the end, the good guys actually have to be badder. Kind of loving the least of two evils. In the movie Pitch Black, there are three potential bad guys. There's Riddick, the creepy murder-convict. There's Johns, a bounty hunter slash drug addict. And there are the evil creatures on the planet that are out to eat everything that moves. Of the three, I was very glad to see that Riddick made it out alive.

Because you have to root for someone. If everyone is irredeemable, there's no one to identify with. No sense of victory when you and the anti-hero cross the finish line together.

How much fun, too, to get to write a bad guy who isn't a cartoon. Actors always claim that playing the villain is a lot more fun than playing the good guy. So to write a antagonist who is an anti-hero? Might have to give that some thought...