Contents
Antiheroes and the fatal attraction that makes us adore them
Psychology
Although they are characters with gray, ambiguous or even amoral personalities, we manage to empathize with them
The best definition of antihero archetype is the gray color. Gray, because they are fictional characters who are not good, but not evil; they veer between black and white without taking a decided position. They are governed by moral values that differ from ours, they make more than questionable decisions and many times their actions are closer to those of the villain in the film than those of the hero. But above all they are complex characters, and it is that labyrinthine behavior that makes us unable to get them out of our heads.
Antiheroes have populated our screens for a decade. While those grayish characters have always existed, it was in the so-called “golden decade” of television that they exploded: Tony Soprano, Walter White or Don Draper arrived and people became obsessed with them. How is it possible that characters with so questionable moral values occupy the public conversation and be the subject of a thousand articles and analyzes not questioning their actions, but praising the fascination they generated?
“These types of characters, although they are different from each other, have something in common: they are attractive people who are not afraid,” says Laura Merino, a psychologist at the TAP Center. Also, the professional speaks that this traction lives in empathy, because although they are characters that at first glance seem distant, they are also suffer and live situations that can happen to us. The difference is that they often take drastic measures against these problems, something that we would never do but that they, victims of despair, sometimes perpetuate. “That can also make them brave in our eyes,” says the psychologist.
The character and its complexity
This attraction we feel towards the archetype of the antihero can be justified by the complexity of the construction of the characters. This is how Jordi Sánchez Navarro, professor and director of the Information and Communication Sciences studies at the Open University of Catalonia, explains: «Unlike a villain, antiheroes have a layer of complexity. At first they can cause us rejection but, little by little we are entering their world. They are complex characters with questionable morals but with whom we can identify.
The expert continues narrating that, although a priori antiheroes are figures with whom we have nothing in common, we do empathize with them. This is why we take pleasure in suffering with them and seeing them in a situation in which we have never been. Have active the empathy mechanism they allow us to experience something that we would never do. “We live something alien without having to transfer it to our real life, and that makes them very attractive, the identification mechanisms work very well with these characters,” says the professor.
And what does it say about us that we are fascinated by characters like this? Rafael San Román, ifeel psychologist, assures that our taste for what is “Morally questionable” it doesn’t necessarily say anything about whether we are ethical or not. “What happens is not that we like the evil of a character, although it may fascinate us, but that we like the character despite his evil,” he says professionally, adding that normally we are able to understand that what we see he is a character and not a real person and who “can fascinate us as fiction, as narrative, but which is not applicable or justifiable in real life, which must necessarily be governed by other codes.”
Also, although paradoxical, the point of beauty comes into play, since many times we find in these characters, such as the Joker from the film recently directed by Todd Phillips, a attractive aspect within ugliness. “Unlike what happens in real life, in the field of the artistic there is the paradox that the ugly, the detestable, the evil or the disagreeable are beautiful, if they are aesthetically achieved and correctly constructed in their depth”, says the psychologist.
The hated antiheroine
It is inevitable to analyze this phenomenon without taking into account the unequal feeling generated by the antihero archetype when it is a man or a woman who gives it life. The viewer idolized Walter Whiterbut he vilified his wife Skyler. It was the same with Don Draper. While the public drank the winds for the protagonist of Mad Men, he despised his wife Bette, judging all his decisions and actions, objectively equal, even less, reprehensible than those of her husband.
The antiheroes are celebrated while the antiheroines on many occasions are branded as unpleasant. “The ambiguous, gray, female character has traditionally been hated,” says Jordi Sánchez Navarro, who argues for this, using the case of the fatal woman: «They are fascinating characters, characterized by being very ambiguous and powerful, but their role in the story has always been lead man to perdition. Over the decades a discourse is built and therefore the viewer tends to hate the antiheroines. The public manages to understand the antihero, they feel sorry for it, while the antiheroine is considered a provocateur of all kinds of evils.
For her part, the psychologist Laura Merino explains that many times we attribute a different value to the same quality according to the bearing of a man or a woman: “When a person is firm and determined, if he is a man he is usually considered strong, while if he is a woman we think he is cold.”
Finally, this fascination that we feel towards the analyzed archetype is also founded on the attraction that many people feel towards danger, not only in fiction. Although he anticipates that human behaviors are very complex and cannot be reduced to a simple explanation, the psychologist Rafael San Román affirms that, if danger draws our attention, often what attracts us is not so much the dangerous part but what wraps it up. We are attracted to the mystery, the unknown. This is also why we like these characters. Because we empathize with the antiheroes with their gray color, and we can even project a bit of ourselves onto them. But, deep down they will always have something incomprehensible, that which attracts us like a magnet.