Mardi's Link

Bad is the New Good: Why We Love Anti-Heroes

 

   

Lately I've been busy mourning the passing of two bad seeds: Breaking Bad's Walter White and Gone Girl's Amy Dunne.

Walter is a high school chemistry teacher who learns how to manufacture meth, and Amy is the "cool girl" every man dreams of but who actually seethes hot lava on the inside.

So why do I mourn them, you ask? Because I miss them.

I miss Walter's descent into his worst possible self and I miss Amy's attention span for revenge. Having arranged my weekends so that I could watch the AMC television series, and having read the Gillian Flynn mystery novel in one neck-cramping sitting, I can say that I no longer exist in the pre- Walter & Amy world, but must muddle along in the post.

And let me tell you, post- Walter & Amy land is a much more wide-awake kind of place.

Walter took glee in lying to everyone who cared about him, murdered a drug dealer here, a kingpin there, and even poisoned an innocent little kid for god's sake.

As for Amy, she manipulated things. And "manipulated" is probably too passive a verb; she basically manhandled any and all life forms in her path -- and some inantimate objects, too -- with her crafty brain. (I'll leave it at that in deferance to those of you who still live in the pre-Amy world.)

And yet, I rooted for these characters. I was on their team, on their side, cheering on each of Walter's blue batches of meth, fist pumping every one of Amy's verbal end-arounds. People suffered in these fictional worlds. People exploded, people begged for their lives, people messed up in their jobs, people went crazy.

And there I was, the reader and the watcher, just a howling for joy.

For a while, I couldn't shake the feeling that there must be something wrong with me. I mean, why else would I root for the bad guy? Am I bad, too? Am I, horrors, some kind of mommy sociopath next door???

I thought about my reading and television watching preferences and yup, there's lots a bad guys in there. And girls, too. A whole alphabet of them. Artemis Fowl, Batman, Holden Caulfield, the Dude, Edie Sedgewick, Fritz the Cat, Gordon Gekko, etc. Love. Every. One. Of. Them.

Truly, just the mention of their names gives me the warm fuzzies. So, that means I'm doomed, right?

But then something else occurred to me. Something that probably saved me thousands of dollars on therapy: I root for the bad guy because the bad guy feels real. Often, feels a lot more real than the good guy, who, let's be honest, can be a putz.

And real isn't bad at all, it's good.

It's great, even.

Who's your favorite anti-hero?

 

Rhymes With "Bold"

After reading this, then being horrified by this, and finally this too, I feel I must offer a personal response, in the form of five women who have lived long enough to actually have something important to say.

Here, in no particular order, are five "rhymes-with-bold" biddies who kick ass.

1. Helen Mirren, assasin

 

 2. Joan Didion, change artist

"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

(From The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir which won The National Book Award in 2005 when she was 71.)

3. Madeleine L'Engle, explosives tech

“One day while I was happily pretending to myself that I was Madame Curie, I blew up the lab.”

(From her address to the Library of Congress on Nov. 16, 1983. At 15 she was pretending to be Madame Curie; when she addressed the Library of Congress, she was 65. And had won the Newberry Award, the USM Medallion, the Smith College Award, the Sophia Award, the Regina Medal, the ALAN Award the Kerlan Award and was President of the Author's Guild.)

4. Diane Wakoski, truth teller

"You ride a broken motorcycle, You speak a dead language, You are a bad plumber, And you write with an inkless pen."

(From her poem, "Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch," published when she was about 50. Backstory here.)

5. Dora Hain, trailrider, trailblazer, ukulele player, long-distance swimmer, sport fisherwoman, campfire chef, and my maternal grandmother.

"Cryin' about it will get you exactly nowhere, Mard. Now, do you want to swim across the lake or go pike fishing?"

This is my hero, who's yours?

What 50 Looks Like

I got a little nostalgic yesterday and I blame it on two things: The New York Times and my impending milestone birthday.

An article in the newspaper's Style Section introduced a handful of photogenic brainiacs and their recently launched online magazine of literary criticism, The New Inquiry. Bravo, kids.

It's an old story, buffed and polished for the internet. Shunned by the establishment, these younsters started their own literary gig. Marcel Proust did it once, and so did Queen Christina of Sweden, The Bluestockings got their thing going, and these ruffians did, too.

Yours truly has fond memories of following this same bliss. Back in the prehistoric year that was 1998, I helped get this going concern off the ground.

On April Fool's Day that year, Victoria Sutherland, Anne Stanton, and I plotted to launch a book review magazine to give independently published books their due. It still amazes me that I was standing at the top of the escalator at BookExpo America in Chicago just two months later, eager in my new lime green suit to hand out copies of our first issue of ForeWord to the rising throngs. And boy, did they take them! And read them! And visit our booth to subscribe! We had launched!

Then, some spoil sport called security.

Apparently even back in 1998, you couldn't occupy such high dollar real estate for free. No, the book fair had a protocol for guerilla marketing like this and said protocol involved a fee for exhibitors who greeted attendees with swag. And no quarter was given for high brow literary swag, either.

But no matter. Even two of McCormick Place's thuggish rent-a-cops couldn't wipe the triumph off our faces that fine day.

Tomorrow I turn 50. And you know what? I've still got that lime suit.

What's your gig?

Happy Endings = Badass

 



Last month I posted a happy ending lament. Ok, not a lament, a gripe. I griped that happy endings in contemporary literature aren't taken seriously often just because they are happy. Not because they don't work, not because they aren't satisfying, not because they ignore plot, but just because they are happy. And I think that is b.s.

I am tickled to see that I have some high falutin' company in that regard. AbeBooks.com has a list of Feel-Good Reads for those in need of some redemption and author Alexander McCall Smith wonders why literature has to be so gloomy. And novelist J. Robert Lennon not only likes happy endings, he respects them. Because they can be, his word, "badass." He talks about this in his Ward Six post, Gimme some happy.

I was lucky enough to have Lennon as a workshop instructor a few years ago. In the spring of 2004 his novel, Mailman had just been published, Library Journal compared him to Joseph Heller and Ken Kesey, and he was hired on to be an instructor at the Bear River Writer's Conference. I was the woman sitting in the Adirondack chair scribbling away like mad, trying to write down everything he said.

Seven years have passed, I'm still scribbling (and occasionally getting my badass on - see above) and I caught up with Lennon on his blog, Ward Six, just as he decided to shut it down. Ending, yes. Happy, no. To quote Axl Rose: Every rose has it's thorn.