Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Spoiler warning for a 20-year-old TV show: when I first watched Tony Soprano brutally murder Ralph Cifaretto in the kitchen of his New Jersey home, I gasped – then I cheered. Surely in a showdown between two such objectively awful people the ideal outcome would be mutual destruction.
But Tony was my guy. He was a violent, misogynistic crime boss, but by the fourth season of The Sopranos , I, like so many other people, was profoundly invested in his journey. This is the power of the anti-hero – they bid you leave your usual moral standards at the door.
The upcoming “Anti-Hero Takeover” at ACMI includes screenings, pop culture panel discussions and “anti-hero inspired artworks”. A look at the line-up reveals an eclectic array of six decades’ worth of anti-hero antics, but also makes plain the elasticity of the mantle. There are gangsters, bank robbers, drag queens, vampires and super-anti-heroes aplenty – so without cracking open a screenwriting manual, how exactly does one define the anti-hero in 2024? And how can we explain its ever-increasing popularity? James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano, the violent, misogynistic crime boss who won our hearts.
Credit: HBO To answer the second question first: we’ve evolved as audiences. The first stories humans ever told were myths about deities, simple parables with binary values and predictable outcomes. But just as visual effects have .
