What Is Hollywood Anti Heroism

Hannah Chapman
Mr. Coffee
AP Literature
March 20, 2013 Heroism in Hollywood Cinema and its impact on my life has influenced the world in which I endure in the way that it has molded my perspective on so many diverse objects, places, things, and even ideas. When a person is born they hold deep in their brain a conceptual framework called a schema. This outline is what one uses to provide a basis by which they relate to the events him or her experience (Myers). From the moment I was born Hollywood entered my life in a welcoming light. My mother worked full time and did the entire house work so of course my babysitter became the magical world of Disney. For a few short hours I stared
Anti-heroism became popular through the mobster films such as The Godfather, even though anti-heroism started earlier they weren’t recognized by the Academy until Fredric March won an award in 1931 for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Butler). Robert Thompson, Director of Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, talks about society’s fascination with the ugly representation of human nature called villains, the anti-hero. “We’re seduced by the idea of looking into the heart darkness. There is nothing more compelling or thrilling than messing around with the very limit of what the human animal is capable of.” The reason an audience seemed so attached to the anti-hero during the 1950s is because of the realization that villains actually had recognizable human flaws and attitude. Villains portray anger and depression, normal humanistic feelings, and the traditional, two-dimensional hero expels a hundred percent pure positivity and hope. Not that people are pessimistic, however, they strive to find every flaw inside of them and criticize themselves for it, all natural human behavior. With the traditional hero, audiences gawk at the screen wishing they had either their confidence or their superpowers. With the villain the viewers see flaws perhaps the same flaws they see in themselves, this
“In hindsight, the first decade of the 21st century can be viewed as a singularly male-dominated era in American cinema. In nearly every sector — summer blockbusters, indie dramas, awards-trolling prestige pictures, naughty comedies — stories of men and boys hogged the screens, even as a handful of women found their way into the Hollywood boys’ club of studio executives, A-list producers and big-name directors. Hermione Granger was a wonderful smart-girl role model (and nerd-boy crush object), but it was Harry Potter whose name was on the eight-movie billion-dollar fantasy juggernaut and whose epic coming of age ruled the multiplexes from 2001 to 2011. Keeping him company in the kingdom of the tent poles were Spider-Man, Iron Man, Batman, the X-Men and a lot of other men” (Scott). It wasn’t until recently that women started playing more dominate roles in film. “The rush to celebrate movies about women has a way of feeling both belated and disproportionate. Pieces of entertainment become public causes and punditical talking points, burdened with absurdly heavy expectations and outsize significance. It should not, after all, be a big deal that movies like “Bridesmaids” or “The Hunger Games” exist, perhaps because it should have been a bigger deal when such movies didn’t. In 1985, the comic-strip artist and memoirist Alison Bechdel first formulated what has since become known as the Bechdel test,