The Appeal Of Antiheroes

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A new trailer for this October's Venom was released today, claiming that the world has enough superheroes, with the obvious implied conclusion being that antiheroes like Venom are called for in a cinematic landscape dominated by hero characters with somewhat predictable tendencies.  An antihero is a morally complicated person, one who may commit evil acts with benevolent motivations, commit good acts with illicit motivations, or alternate between serving righteousness and evil.  They are only increasing in onscreen popularity.

The fundamental nature of an antihero takes elements that are traditionally separated in entertainment and overtly mixes them together.  Antiheroes should not be imitated in their moral ambiguity, but they do magnify an important truth from the mundane scale of everyday behaviors, amplifying this truth to the scale of the more blatant acts that lend themselves to film narratives, which thereby allows viewers to perceive an exaggeration of basic human complexity.

What is the moral nature of human beings?  Describing many people as simply "good" or "evil" is far too simplistic.  Human nature, in terms of how it is expressed over time by many individuals, is far more complex than any reductionistic position that characterizes all humans as mostly or entirely good or mostly or entirely depraved can allow for--because many people are not mostly good or mostly bad.  Instead, various dimensions of their actions and motivations are good, amoral, or evil.  The two moral poles at either end of the spectrum can never occupy the exact same space in someone's life, but they can coexist together in rather serpentine ways that can be difficult for them to articulate.

Human free will, varying degrees of reliance on reason, and individual personalities ensure that human behaviors, motivations, and beliefs are not uniform.  As a result, the moral standings of different people are not generally shared, given the numerous variables that contribute to them.  People are their own individuals.  A commitment to good that is found in the life of one person might drastically differ from the way another person lives his or her life, and there are thousands of ways that goodness and evil can intertwine in someone's lifestyle, always excluding and yet appearing alongside each other.  Introspection can reveal to a person just where he or she is on this spectrum.

Antiheroes reflect the morally ambiguous status that a great many people can seem to relate to.  It is not that many people are morally ambiguous to the extent of Venom, Jaime Lannister, or Deadpool, but that many people make everyday decisions that cannot always be outright classified as mostly good or evil.  There is always a choice to align with one moral status or the other, and no one has to engage in any wrongdoing at all.  But one can do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and vice versa.  Characters like Venom simply highlight the complex moral tendencies that many people already have within themselves.