The 10 "Best" Anti-Heroes, part 3

Boy, that was some Superbowl, eh? A game so good my brother vomited all day Monday, though it probably had more to do with undercooked buffalo hot dogs than the game.

Anyhow, back to the matter at hand: anti-heroes. Specifically, these two anti-heroes.

I have sort of paused here at my keyboard a minute wondering whether I really have to repeat my definition of what an anti-hero is. As this is my third entry, I've already written it twice. And since I have four more to go, that would probably get even more tiring for me than it would be for you.

So can I trust you to go back and look at what I wrote before/remember it? Good.

I'm glad we're friends.

Anti-Hero #6: Travis Bickle, from Taxi Driver

Yes, I'm talking to you. Now stop looking at me like that.

I hemmed and hawed and thought and wondered more about including Travis Bickle on this list than anyone who made it or didn't. I put him on, I took him off. I stared at the wall. I punched myself in the head. At the end of the day, I decided my indecision reflected a virtue in the movie itself. More on this below.

ANTI: I sort of have to laugh at the start of a paragraph about why Travis Bickle is unlikable, since he is, in my view, one of the least likable characters in the history of cinema.

We get no real sense of Bickle's uprbringing as the movie begins. He tells people he was in Vietnam, but nothing about what happened. Now he's a taxi driver. We don't know for how long (too long, apparently). He is alone. He tells us he's been alone most of his life. What he doesn't tell us -- but we sense anyway -- is that something is very wrong with him.

Has Bickle separated himself from society or it from him? It's almost certainly both. When he's not out patrolling the streets as a taxi driver -- a job completely unsuited for the sociopath he is -- he stays in his room. He exercises. He schemes. Now and then he goes to the movies... always muttering about the scum on the streets.

Bickle: I think someone should just take this city and just... just flush it down the fuckin' toilet.

Bickle has retreated so far into himself he's lost all sense of society and it's rules. At one point Bickle meets a blonde in white (Cybil Shepard) who works for a politician. He comes in and makes bold conversation. When she agrees to a date, he takes her to a theater showing a porno. Why does he do this? Her objections totally confuse him. He tries to call her, but she's through with him. Later, he attempts to kill her boss.

When his mind finally snaps, it retreats into the rules of the movies: bad people deserve to die, and good people are justified in taking the law into their own hands to kill them. Bickle thinks of himself as a good person. An avenger. But is he?

Either way, he's better than these two assholes.

HERO: Now here's where the interesting part begins, and why actually watching the movie is so important, because on paper, Travis Bickle is without a doubt absolutely the hero of the movie.

I mean, he meets a 12-year-old girl who's working as a prostitute (Jodie Foster).

A 12-year-old. As a prostitute.

Even Bickle is appalled. She jumps into his cab for a moment, saying she wants to be taken away. But she just as quickly jumps out, and when he tracks her down she brushes it off as just having been strung out. Bickle wants to take her away, take her back to her parents. No, she says. She's happy with her life, though how could she be? Bickle persists. He goes to meet her pimp, a freak named Sport played by Harvey Keitel.

Bickle asks about Foster's character, who's also Sport's "steady" girl, and Sport replies with, for my money, one of the most shocking speeches in the movies.

Sport: Well, take it or leave it. If you want to save yourself some money, don't fuck her. Cause you'll be back here every night for some more. Man, she's twelve and a half years old. You never had no pussy like that. You can do anything you want with her. You can cum on her, fuck her in the mouth, fuck her in the ass, cum on her face, man. She'll get your cock so hard she'll make it explode. But no rough stuff, all right?

Jesus.

Later, after his mind has broken completely, Bickle buys what seems like 10 guns and storms Sport's place High Noon-style, killing Sport, Foster's client and another man in an attempt to set Foster free. In the process, Bickle is (seemingly) mortally wounded himself, leading to the famous shot of him sticking a bloody finger to his temple and pretending to blow his brains out.

We then cut to the the movie's intriguing last scene, where Bickle has survived his injuries and been declared a hero, receiving the commendation of the city and the return of Foster to her parents.

Is this real, or just a fantasy of Bickle's... his last thoughts before death? I'm inclined to think the latter, even though the movie doesn't say. Presumably it wants us to think about it.

When you get down to it, the question of Taxi Driver is really one of context. In objective terms, is it morally justified to kill three men in order to free a 12-year-old from the bonds of prostitution?

Killing three men for pie is harder to justify, unless, of course, it is really good pie.

In High Noon, to use an example, Sheriff Will Kane (Gary Cooper) systematically tracks and kills three men. In the movie named after him, Nevada Smith (Steve McQueen) hunts down the three men who killed his father and raped, skinned and murdered his mother. And war movies... sheesh. Bodies pile up by the thousands. The guy who wipes out an enemy platoon by himself gets a picture with the president.

The trick, of course, is in the above examples we're never unsure who the good and bad guys are. The point is clear and in bold. Will Kane tries to get help from everyone to face down the gang, but he's ignored. Killing those men is an act of sheer courage. Nevada Smith learns to act like a bad guy and even causes the death of a woman, but his need to avenge the death of his parents is as old as literature. And besides, he even spares one of them (to ride off to the swell of heroic music).

The fact that Bickle is a crazy, racist sociopath short circuits our perception of the moral force of his actions. In effect, the movie asks us to consider what's really important -- the deed, or the man? Bickle believes completely that his actions are morally justified. His failure is that he doesn't see himself as we see him. Otherwise, he would doubt as we do.

At the end of the day, I didn't put Bickle on the list because I'm sure he's a hero. I don't really think the question can be answered, or is intended to be (though if you put me on the spot, I'd probably say no). Bickle goes on the list because I respect the ability of director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader to ask the question in a way that is endlessly and brilliantly fascinating.

Anti-Hero #5: Sam Spade, from The Maltese Falcon

Adam Savage from Mythbusters loves that falcon prop so much he made his own. Clink that link, by the way. Savage is batshit crazy.

When I first started thinking about the possibilities for this list, one actor jumped immediately into my mind -- Humphrey Bogart. But the longer I thought about Bogart's career, the more I realized he tended to play either certified assholes (The Petrified Forest, The Caine Mutiny, Treasure of the Sierra Madre), or, if not genuinely good guys, then certainly not bad guys (The African Queen, To Have and Have Not).

Only a few movies seemed to break the mold. Casablanca, where his words speak a callousness his actions betray. In a Lonely Place, where his abusive, alcoholic character is proven not to have committed a murder, but he's such a dick that whatever, he might as well have. And then this one -- The Maltese Falcon -- for my money, Bogart's greatest role (with a nod to his turn as Captain Queeg in the aformentioned The Caine Mutiny).

ANTI: In his review of The Maltese Falcon for his "Great Movies" Roger Ebert put the dark character of Spade as well as it can be put:

"Spade is cold and hard, like his name. When he gets the news that his partner has been murdered, he doesn't blink an eye. Didn't like the guy. Kisses his widow the moment they're alone together. Beats up Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), not just because he has to, but because he carries a perfumed handkerchief, and you know what that meant in a 1941 movie. Turns the rough stuff on and off. Loses patience with Greenstreet, throws his cigar into the fire, smashes his glass, barks out a threat, slams the door and then grins to himself in the hallway, amused by his own act."

The movie's plot centers on a long lost falcon (from Malta), covered in jewels, being pursued by a number of lowlifes and criminals. Once Spade is involved, he dives in like Kirstie Alley into a doughnut ocean, playing the angles and dividing the criminals against each other.

Meanwhile, the police are still investigating his partner's murder. They wonder if Spade did it. We don't blame them. When Spade gets control of the falcon, we wonder if he'll decide to keep it and screw over the others.

HERO: But he doesn't. And moreover, he finds out who killed his partner, in a last act that shows Spade's charade for what it is: a means to an end.

The Sam Spade character is perhaps the ultimate example of the film noir anti-hero: cutthroat, intelligent, sometimes cruel, sometimes murderous, but ultimately redeemed in the eyes of the audience by a code of conduct he holds to that the "villains" don't.

In Rififi, Tony le Stephanois was a thief who cruelly beat his ex-girlfriend for taking up with a rival. But he believed in honor among thieves and was willing to both kill and die for that honor.

Sam Spade doesn't have to kill or die for honor. But he believes, as he says to his secretary, that "when a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it." And he does, wading neck deep into a band of criminals willing to do anything to find the invaluable falcon and using their desperation against them, even though this puts him at grave risk.

At the end of the movie, when he finds out the killer is one of the criminals after the falcon -- a woman he's sort of fallen in love with -- he turns her over to the police anyway.

"I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck," he says. "The chances are you'll get off with life. That means if you're a good girl, you'll be out in 20 years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you."

Cold, sure. But Spade makes sure his partner gets justice for his murder. He even turns over the money he was paid by the criminals as evidence. He may be untrusting and manipulative, willing to screw another man's wife even after he's been murdered, but he has a code, and that's enough. In the dark world in which he travels, it's even heroic.