Heroes & Villains
June 3, 2018 7:44 PM   Subscribe

We habitually conflate the concepts of “protagonist” and “hero” (and “antagonist” and “villain”).
posted by spaceburglar (37 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
I blame Neal Stephenson.
posted by migurski at 7:53 PM on June 3, 2018 [24 favorites]


The constant application of classical literary dissection to the MCU is one of the widest fallacies of modern times.

Yes, it has the trappings of literature but it isn't literature because literally none of the characters involved have any actual vulnerabilities, and so the basic rules don't apply.

It's cute to try to discuss this genre of generated output this way, but it's not even in the same game. Literature discusses the real choices and consequences that people might make, perhaps in a symbolic fashion but still, it's about real people when you boil it down.

There is nothing about any superhero story that is about what real people might do, even after you boil it down. They simply are not people, they are superheroes.

Can we stop trying to pretend that the current trend in popular entertainment is in any way related to real life? Even on an emotional / allegorical level it doesn't work. It was never intended to be that. It was always intended to be Adventures Of Those Who Are Beyond Your Knowledge, and it will always be that way.
posted by hippybear at 8:24 PM on June 3, 2018 [8 favorites]


I can't hear or see the phrase "heroes and villains" without being infested by this earworm.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:35 PM on June 3, 2018 [4 favorites]


> hippybear:
"Literature discusses the real choices and consequences that people might make, perhaps in a symbolic fashion but still, it's about real people when you boil it down."

The oldest known piece of literature might disagree with you. Unless you take 'literature' to refer to 19th century psychological realism and its offspring, in which case carry on.
posted by signal at 8:36 PM on June 3, 2018 [31 favorites]


Uh... we can argue over whether superhero stuff is good literature, but if your criteria is "characters having vulnerabilities" and "people making real choices," the MCU hopped on a train a while ago. I can't vouch for the others but every Captain America movie has been about making choices in regards to authority. Vulnerability in regards to loyalty is like... his whole thing. And I'm pretty sure one of the Iron Man movies was about Stark dealing with PTSD. I mean, yes, the choices they make and situations they deal with are nothing any real person would deal with; they are, as you say, allegories for the real choices we make. But you can't dismiss those choices as "not related to real life" unless you're going to dismiss all of sci-fi and fantasy... which I know people do, so, I guess if you take that route tend we just fundamentally disagree on what literature is and is meant to do.

Anyway, I'm not sure I agree with this specific literary analysis but I think it's great that we're expanding to examine more stories than just "literary fiction." All stories are built, and can be deconstructed, and I think it's enlightening to examine all kinds of media this way.
posted by brook horse at 8:48 PM on June 3, 2018 [25 favorites]


I am categorically against this sort of prescriptivism. Words are defined by their use, and if enough people use them a particular way that becomes their new definition.

Except for antihero. Antihero has a specific meaning and if you misuse it (say, to mean the bad guy) then you are a horrible person who should be embarrassed they’ve so grossly warped the gift of speech they were given.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:00 PM on June 3, 2018 [9 favorites]


But you can't dismiss those choices as "not related to real life" unless you're going to dismiss all of sci-fi and fantasy..

Like, I literally do dismiss comic book superhero choices as not being related to real life while still considering a giant amount of SFF writing as being more closely related to real life than superhero fiction.

You can find that problematic if you want....
posted by hippybear at 9:02 PM on June 3, 2018


(responding to Tell Me No Lies)

so, one who so misuses the term would then of neccessity be the antihero of prescriptivism?
posted by mwhybark at 9:02 PM on June 3, 2018 [3 favorites]


> hippybear:
"Like, I literally do dismiss comic book superhero choices as not being related to real life while still considering a giant amount of SFF writing as being more closely related to real life than superhero fiction."

Have you actually read any superhero comic books published in the last few decades before dismissing the entire genre, or are you of the 'BANG! POW! ZAP!' school of comic book criticism?
posted by signal at 9:05 PM on June 3, 2018 [11 favorites]


I was deeply invested in Wolverine around the time when he had all the adamantium stripped from his bones and he was wandering feral around Canada in search of his identity. Does that qualify as "in the last few decades" for you?

I dropped reading comics because they were entirely too übermensch/pseudoFascist for my taste after a few years, but that's when I was last invested in the comics.

So does that satisfy your criteria, or is that before or later than the time you intend to reference?
posted by hippybear at 9:10 PM on June 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


I'll back hippybear up with regard to serialized superhero narratives as inherently lacking dramatic tension due to commercially-driven invulnerabilty. I can't say I agree that commercially-driven invulnerability separates them from classical narrative tradtions. I fully dispute that commercially-driven invulnerability disqualifies a work of narrative fiction as literature. Most written things are literature, in that they are both written and read and therfore require literacy.

Now, does commercially-driven invulnerability per se produce boring hackwork? Hell no! The original incarnations of Superman, Iron Man, Capatain America, Batman, Wonder Woman, and so on are accurately described by their initial creative and marketing teams as astonishing! And they are!

Are our current megacorporate indigitizations of these characters astonishing? No, not after the first time the filmmakers get it right. After that instance, they are boring as shit.
posted by mwhybark at 9:13 PM on June 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


That was a good fun read. I'm not convinced, but for my middlebrow preferences it did a nice job mixing movies I've mostly seen with some ancient Greek criticism I haven't thought about since college (and Renaissance French theater I've probably never considered all) and making me feel smart. I would definitely recommend to a high school or college kid.

I just don't buy the limited definition of a protagonist though. He talks about the inciting incident but goes out of his way to ignore the incident part and belabor the decision. Achilles decides to stop sulking because his best friend dies in battle, the Avengers team up in response to an alien invasion, Bond responds to a terrorist plot. (Or are epic poems explicitly outside the classic Greek framework, because Odysseus does nothing but react and Athena is absolutely the "protagonist" under his definition.)

Because McClane isn’t there to stop Gruber; that’s just happenstance. McClane is at the party because he wants to try to repair his relationship with his wife [ . . . ] without that, it could certainly be argued that Gruber is the protagonist and McClane his antagonist.

This bit about Die Hard really doesn't work for me. If the movie is "about" anything it's Gruber's plot. Claiming it's about McClane getting his wife back means the movies violates the unity of action thing, since McClane spends most of his time pursuing other goals. I think the author is jettisoning his own framework and assuming McClane is the protagonist because they gave him a backstory.
posted by mark k at 9:14 PM on June 3, 2018 [3 favorites]


The rape of Lena in the Thomas Covenant series is considered a deal breaker as far as continuing reading goes by much of MetaFilter, but it's the single event that drives the rest of the 10 book series.

Covenant is never peronsally punished for it, but The Land suffers for millennia.

It's not a comic book, but it's literature. (A point I know is debated.)
posted by hippybear at 9:18 PM on June 3, 2018 [3 favorites]


I'm getting back to protagonist/antagonist issues here. What exactly is Covenant? What side is he working, and should we be sympathetic for him in his quests? Are his quests even beneficial?
posted by hippybear at 9:20 PM on June 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


This will tell you everything you need to know about Covenant, hippybear.
posted by evilDoug at 10:06 PM on June 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


so, one who so misuses the term would then of neccessity be the antihero of prescriptivism?
posted by mwhybark at 9:02 PM on June 3 [+] [!]


Brutal :-)

I hope you’re at least ashamed of yourself.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:41 PM on June 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


There is nothing about any superhero story that is about what real people might do, even after you boil it down. They simply are not people, they are superheroes.

I'm not a huge reader of superhero comics but didn't Marvel make a zillion dollars off of the idea that one could write superheroes who have real people problems? I guess the meta-constraints of the format do impose a limitation on how far that can go though - the stakes are never that real.
posted by atoxyl at 10:44 PM on June 3, 2018 [3 favorites]


The rape of Lena in the Thomas Covenant series is considered a deal breaker as far as continuing reading goes by much of MetaFilter,

Yup.

What exactly is Covenant? What side is he working, and should we be sympathetic for him in his quests? Are his quests even beneficial

Covenant is a fictional character in a book whose author thought having his lead character rape someone in the opening pages was a good idea. If you really want to hang around after that I suppose your other questions matter, but any conclusions you reach should probably keep the author in mind.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:52 PM on June 3, 2018 [7 favorites]


I liked this article, and while I didn’t agree with everything - notably Die Hard - it will make me think differently about what I’m watching/reading.
posted by greermahoney at 11:37 PM on June 3, 2018 [3 favorites]


Apart entirely from genre, a current series of historical novels that mines the same terrain are Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall books, which benefit from a fantastic and literarily-sensitive BBC adaptation. Her Cromwell, Henry the VIII's lawyer, roughly, is presented in the books via what can only be described as a self-justifying first-person privileged third-person perspective. He's a terrible villain of English and Anglophone history, by traditional historical accounts. Mantel by no means seeks to pardon him or his culture, but she elegantly centers her narrative on Thomas and his own viewpoint while continually fooling us, her readers, into thinking that her narrative is impartial and just, celebrating her protagonist's careful, justified, moral, and considered actions.
posted by mwhybark at 12:04 AM on June 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


Given that the article uses infinity War for its framing, it doesn't spend much time actually analyzing it. Because I think it's a bit more interesting than "Thanos is the protagonist." I think the movie actually pivots protagonists.

The inciting incident at the beginning of the movie is Thanos boarding Thor's ship, killing a bunch of people, beating up Thor and Loki, and taking the infinity stone. At that point, protagonist and his goals are clear. Thor and friends want to secure the infinity stones and kick Thanos's butt.

The beginning of the movie is structured like that. When the Guardians of the Galaxy go to Knowhere, Thanos is very clearly the antagonist, stopping them from their goal of retrieving the infinity stone.

But then when Thanos captures Gamora and takes her to Vormir, we end up with a bunch of flashbacks, revealing the inciting incident for his mass murdering craziness, and then the story kind of changes its focus to him and his quest to get the rest of the infinity stones and murder half of everybody, where the Avengers get relegated to the role of antagonist trying just to stop things.

Typing this out it seems all rather silly, but I think that structure is interesting and kind of helps make the ending seem more looming and dreadful. By changing the center of the story from Thor and the Avengers to Thanos, the movie foreshadows what the outcome is going to be...
posted by Zalzidrax at 12:25 AM on June 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


I don't know from Infinity War since I haven't seen it, but the article is fun and interesting for trying to bring some structural focus to how people think about stories. As it is focused on structure, the idea that somehow there's a fallacy involved because its examples are superhero movies is just odd. Literary theory is about how stories are told, their forms, and how we can better understand them, it isn't a measure of merit as such and doesn't rely on "liking" the story.

It's also weird to suggest almost any story or, really, artwork of any sort, doesn't relate somehow to the real world since that's the essence of art, it acts as a mediator between ourselves and the real, which is how and why we have feelings about it. That doesn't mean it has to be "realistic" in all aspects, but that some part of it has to connect between our understanding of our personal understanding and the experience the work provides. The spark between the two, even if its just about how we understand other artworks, gives stories and other art its force.

The author isn't being a prescriptivist in trying to draw out the difference between hero and protagonist, lay use will be what it is, but the literary purpose of the two terms does carry different meanings, so trying to elide for common usage doesn't really work. Common use, for example, could see Corporals called "Sarge" due to the similarity of their responsibilities, but it won't actually make them Sergeants in the military where the term has a specialized meaning. (That isn't an exact analogy of course, but I hope you get the idea.)

The Die Hard example, for me, is a good one because one of the most common structural devices Hollywood relies on is to use the action sequences to act as metaphors for the emotional dilemma that is causing difficulty for the protagonist. The usual method of showing this is to have the movies bracketed by that dilemma, in Die Hard's case, a failing marriage, which is them resolved or understood through the course of seemingly unconnected action that makes up the bulk of the film. The action is what makes the movie visually interesting, but the emotional dilemma is what connects the film to the audience and keeps it from being just spectacle alone, at least that's the hope. It's what is hoped to make the audience care about the characters and provide an emotional structure to the story. It doesn't necessarily have to bracket the main events of the film, it can be developed as the story progresses as characters reveal themselves through the action, but the bracketing device is exceptionally common, so much so that movies that shun it, like The Raid, stand out for its absence.

None of that is to say the article can't be questioned as it does, perhaps push too strongly on a narrow concept of protagonist in some instances. With the spate of comic book movies and Star Wars stuff, for example, there is the question over whether one need think of each film as separate from a larger serialized whole, where the idea of what is animating the conflicts can be understood in a broader frame. In Marvel's movies, for example, starting with Iron Man, there is a dilemma over what actions are acceptable, necessary, or counter-productive for someone who wants to change things to engage in. If one sees the films as a unending serial, then we can accept that issue drives the characters even if it isn't dealt with in equal depth in all the films, something even more to the point perhaps for a movie like Infinity War which is written as a two parter, where only half the story has been revealed.

At the end of the essay, the author raises the question about the way we might think of protagonists from the perspective of a superpower. It's an angle that I think is important to consider as in many of the action/superhero stories it might be said that the default state tends towards chaos, and the heroes are those acting in the face of that normalcy. This may not always have been the case for Bond, for example, but the recent Craig versions go towards that a bit with trouble coming from all around him, inside the SIS and out. If that is the case,then it suggests a world view that is itself more troubling. Either way, the point of the essay, as I see it, is in helping to provide some better structure for thinking about the stories we see since conflating terms like hero and protagonist can make it easier to accept troubling worldviews or can obscure what a movie might be showing us as people focus on enjoying the familiar tropes without considering the purposes they are put to.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:16 AM on June 4, 2018 [8 favorites]


I mean in serial terms, at least the first six Star Wars movies could be said to have Anakin/Darth as the protagonist, while the author of the essay puts Luke in that role for IV, V, and VI.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:43 AM on June 4, 2018


I’m rather fond of Robin Law’s distinction between Dramactic characters in Dramatic stories and Iconic heroes in Procedural stories. The first focus on the change in the main character(s), while the second focuses on order being restored to society by the main character(s) deploying their iconic abilities (Sherlock Holmes’ deduction, Spider-Man’s various powers, etc). A lot of super hero films are a little unsatisfying because the writers want to force dramatic change into a story that is essentially reactionary. Similarly, it also undercuts some of Aristotle’s ideas because the goal is almost always preservation, not change. It’s a fundamentally different (and, perhaps, inherently conservative) form of storytelling.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:30 AM on June 4, 2018 [4 favorites]


Or alternately, MCU is often unsatisfying because they're a series of marketing events thinly glued together by improbable plot developments. Probably not the best vehicle for talking about this kind of distinction as opposed to, say, True Grit to reference a story where the protagonist is naive and opinionated, and the hero is a monster in just about every other relationship other than the events of the novel/movie.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 4:34 AM on June 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


Now, here’s a similar question: In the new Avengers: Infinity War, who is the protagonist?

If you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t worry; there won’t be any significant spoilers here. It’s safe to discuss the protagonist of the story, if all you know is the marketing and the general premise. You know that Thanos is the main villain, taking center stage after having made a handful of cameo appearances in prior Marvel movies. You also know the movie features a panoply of good guys, all sprinkled throughout the story as they oppose various aspects of Thanos’s plan. You may even have heard discussed, in filmmaker interviews or from people who have seen the movie, that Infinity War is basically Thanos’s story.

So let’s just say it straight out: Thanos is the protagonist.


By this reasoning, the protagonist of Inglorious Basterds is Adolf Hitler.
posted by sukeban at 4:46 AM on June 4, 2018


Avengers flashback- no, I didn't see the movie[s], but I worked for Oracle for a few years, and this poster was put up all over the office.
I was not pleased with this because, a) an Avengers poster without Diana Rigg in it???, and b) what kind of serious business associates itself with cartoon characters? When we used to describe something as 'Mickey Mouse', it was not a complement.
Anyway, I cut out a picture of Larry Ellison and pasted it on Iron Man's body. It looked pretty good.
(no, that's not why I'm no longer there)
posted by MtDewd at 5:18 AM on June 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Has Plinkett ruined the pronunciation of "protagonist" for anyone else?
posted by whuppy at 5:20 AM on June 4, 2018


hippybear: “Literature discusses the real choices and consequences that people might make, perhaps in a symbolic fashion but still, it's about real people when you boil it down.”

I am not a scholar of literature, but that assertion seems challenging to support, hippybear.

Literature — made up stories about invented people, inspired from life or otherwise — is about the interactions of characters. The author may model their characters on aspects of real life humans, but characters — no matter how faithfully rendered — are not humans. They are puppets. They are constructs serving the purposes of their creator, both conscious and subconscious, in order to drive a story. They are little machines made of ideas, lacking entirely in agency, enslaved to the author’s plot.

I have always found it baffling when people attempt to deconstruct literature according to the psychology of its puppets, because their psychology is simulated. More meaningful results come from deconstructing their functions as devices, because those are the products of the author’s psychology which is actual, and not virtual. Isn’t reifying simulated psychologies pretty much like having fun with a fantasy football league? It’s not analysis, it’s just adding another layer of pretend.

Am I wrong? I’m probably wrong. Somebody set me straight. Hippybear?
posted by Construction Concern at 5:38 AM on June 4, 2018 [11 favorites]


Interesting piece, but I think it gets too hung up on the question of who/what is driving the events of the story rather than the more interesting question of who/what is changing or being changed through the story.
[Luke Skywalker] doesn’t say, or even know, what he wants until past the forty-minute mark (“I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father”), and the focal point of the film’s final conflict — the idea that Luke will self-actualize as a hero by destroying the Death Star — doesn’t come into view until he sits through the technical briefing at the beginning of the third act, and brags about bulls-eyeing womp rats back home.
No! There are (at least) two parallel struggles going on in Star Wars. The Death Star is the rebels' antagonist; Luke's is Darth Vader, who (he thinks) betrayed and murdered his father, and the Death Star is just the background for their struggle (even though it's not clear that Luke had any idea what was special about the strange curvy-winged tie fighter, the audience knows, and the audience got to see the antagonist right from the start). The story's main drive is Luke's transformation from orphaned moisture farmer to a warrior strong enough to "avenge" his father in quasi-Oedipal combat, and every part of the story, including the changes that the other characters undergo, is part of that process.

I’m rather fond of Robin Law’s distinction between Dramactic characters in Dramatic stories and Iconic heroes in Procedural stories. The first focus on the change in the main character(s), while the second focuses on order being restored to society by the main character(s) deploying their iconic abilities (Sherlock Holmes’ deduction, Spider-Man’s various powers, etc).

That's a good way to put it. It's why Palpatine can't be the protagonist of the Star Wars prequels - he may be driving the events of the story, but he doesn't undergo any kind of transformation himself, other than the stupid face-bulgy thing. The only real transformation we have is Anakin's, and because nothing about that makes sense the movies don't work (not that that's the only reason).

Personally, I find the "iconic" hero thing much less interesting than the dramatic character thing. Maybe that's why I've never liked either superhero comics or episodic TV series.

I dropped reading comics because they were entirely too übermensch/pseudoFascist for my taste after a few years,

If we're going to get Nietzschean about it: the thing I like least about superhero stuff is the knowledge that nothing that happens really matters; there'll always be a reboot or a "crisis" that resets everything, or the writer will change and the new one will start to forget everything about the characters except the empty signifiers of superheroism. Nothing has any weight; there's no fate to love.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 5:41 AM on June 4, 2018 [5 favorites]


Like when she was announced as the new face of Ms.Marvel she was used in anti-Islamic advertising in real life that equated Islam with Nazism.

Wait, are you talking about this? It was sort of the opposite: She was used by anti-racist activist street artists to paint over anti-Muslim ads on public transit (paid for by the SPLC-recognized hate group American Freedom Defense Initiative) in San Francisco.
posted by Strange Interlude at 5:43 AM on June 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Back in the early naughties there was the notion of "stop energy" in the zietgeist. This was the concept that forward progress could really only happen when nobody was paying attention; if you got other people involved in the process then there'd be all of these derails and corner cases that needed to be dealt with and the goal would get lost.

I wish I could remember who then observed that superheroes were a great example of "stop energy". They had some great examples, and now I'm stuck in a Google hole trying to make the Internet be as good as it was back in 2002.
posted by straw at 7:37 AM on June 4, 2018


hippybear: “Literature discusses the real choices and consequences that people might make, perhaps in a symbolic fashion but still, it's about real people when you boil it down.”

I'm not going to try to change your mind, you seem determined. But this entire analysis is based on Aristotle's Poetics, which was created to analyze Greek tragedies, which almost always involved dieties. So if this isn't the right tool for the job of analyzing modern Superhero film, I'm not sure what is.
posted by eisenkrote at 8:15 AM on June 4, 2018 [5 favorites]


> Construction Concern:
"I have always found it baffling when people attempt to deconstruct literature according to the psychology of its puppets, because their psychology is simulated. More meaningful results come from deconstructing their functions as devices, because those are the products of the author’s psychology which is actual, and not virtual. Isn’t reifying simulated psychologies pretty much like having fun with a fantasy football league? It’s not analysis, it’s just adding another layer of pretend."

A) this
B) I'm stealing it.
posted by signal at 9:14 AM on June 4, 2018 [6 favorites]


Stories are often more fulfilling if they offer some conflict into human condition a bit more than just "Luke vs. Darth Vader" or "Frodo and Samwise vs. The One Ring." Luke, the rural kid who thought he was a war orphan, discovers his father is a notorious war criminal, and comes to terms with loving his father in spite of it all is more interesting than Luke who blunders from swashbuckling to dogfighting and back again. Frodo and Samwise struggle to keep faith through a horrifying and traumatic journey into war and miraculously survive, except Frodo is changed so much he can't settle down with the beautiful bride and the happy responsibilities of leadership that could be his. That conflict of faith vs. despair is what ties the barrows, wraiths, orcs, swamps, giant spiders, blasted lava plains, and even Tom Bombadil and the Willow into a single story.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 10:34 AM on June 4, 2018 [3 favorites]


"literary" doesn't mean "novelistic" and never has, what is happening is this the end of the world
posted by queenofbithynia at 1:36 PM on June 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Um. Holy shit. I'm the editor in chief of Lewton Bus. I never imagined we'd end up on MetaFilter! Huzzah!
posted by brundlefly at 8:51 AM on June 5, 2018 [3 favorites]


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