"Real" Archetypes

Ennis Del Mar as the Marlboro Man.  Instead of a laconic man of nature and action, he is held in check by a rigid social code and fearful to speak his mind.

I think Alien does a great job of subverting expectations with Dallas and Ripley, especially in the wake of Star Trek and Star Wars. Not only is exploration, as presented here, dangerous and horrifying, but the cowboy captain continually makes bad decisions that leads to the demise of his crew. It's only the by-the-book bitch, who is introduced as getting on everyone's nerves ("That's not our system." "I know that!"), and refuses to let her fellow human beings in the airlock, that survives to the end.

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Originally Posted by Schwartz 

 

Rorschach (Watchmen) as the real Batman. 

Travis Bickle as the real Paul "Death Wish" Kersey.
 

Pierce Brosnan's character from The Tailor Of Panama as the real James Bond, would be one of the easiest and most deliberate ones.

Michael Caine's Harry Palmer as a "real" James Bond also comes to mind.

Elliot Gould's Phillip Marlowe is a hyper-realistic take on the "gum-shoe" archetype.

Max Cohen from Pi as the real Will Hunting. Instead of a good-looking, charming, likably scruffy guy from Southie who neglects his gifts (and engages our sympathies) due to a history of abuse, we have a socially inept, paranoid, obsessive recluse who is incapable of relating to anybody, finds pleasure only in complex math, and seems to be in a constant state of existential crisis. He neglects his gifts by drilling a hole in his head.

HAL 9000 as the real WALL-E. Instead of a cute little anthropomorphic lonely robot who desperately pines for some human (or robot) company through watching old musicals, we have a ruthlessly emotionless computer program, with no capacity for feeling, that can only follow its directives and couldn't ever grasp the concept of sympathy and certainly not love.

Edward Norton in Fight Club as the real Ron Livingston in Office Space. Instead of a guy who slips into a blissful, dream-like "new personality" to escape a gruelingly repetitive corporate environment, and then suddenly seems to experience great success due to his carefree and laid-back nature, we have a schizophrenic psychopath who invents an alter-ego through whom he can subvert the social norm and create anarchy.

Great thread.

The Baxter starts by trying to deconstruct the jilted boyfriend in romantic comedies, but ends up conforming to those conventions by the end.  If anything, I guess that in itself is a subversion of 'the baxter' cliche (by going for unglamorous to glamorous).  So, still valid?

Daredevil tried to do the gritty superhero thing early on during the superhero movie craze, trying to de-glam the 'profession' by showing Matt Murdock bruised, aching, sans a molar, and in need of peace after an average night of crime fighting (as opposed to a climactic fight). 

I agree.  Great idea for a thread.

Norman Bates as a serial killer. Most aren't brilliant and charming(Ted Bundy's are rare), he's just a sad, lonely man who was very very sick.

Randy "The Ram" as The Oldtimer Who Comes Back for One Last Hoorah.  No, he doesn't do it because he loves the game/sport or because he wants to give the fans a parting shot.  It's because he's a sad, lonely fuckup who doesn't know how to have a life outside of whatever tiny little definition he's set aside for himself and he'll turn his back on anyone who cares about him because they're not enough to make him feel real.

"For as long as I could remember, I wanted to be a gangster..."

Deadwood is also great at this. Though the characters are all larger than life, it gives an emotionally believable depth to the various psychologies of the town Boss, the morally upright Sheriff, the tough Saloon girl/prostitute/madam, society woman, barroom henchmen, aging gunfighter, robber baron, as well as your sundry prospecters, drunks and con men.

Put it like this: Calamity Jane herself was the archetype for tough gun-slinging woman of the wild west. How many people, exactly, did her character shoot on that show?

I wanted to be Batman who have lots of money and new gadgets.

And on that fateful May day, Jim neglected to read.

Maybe an obvious one, but Last Temptation of Christ springs to mind pretty easily.

Old Joy has a very realistic, psychologically acute take on the cliche of the married guy whose immature old buddy comes along and disrupts his domestic arrangement, and tries to pull him away from marital responsibility.

Perhaps also we could consider Max in Where the Wild Things Are.  Certainly a realistic departure from Hollywood's usual take on precocious, imaginative youngsters who teach the adults around them a lesson about life.

Facebook movie guy/every lovable, harmless comic relief computer nerd character ever?

Also: The Matador, Grosse Pointe Blank, In Bruges, and any other good comedies that destroy, deconstruct, or otherwise take the piss out of the movie myth of the supercool romanticized hitman archetype. What's still missing from movies though is the complete aesthetic deglamorization of the character (I mean no matter how bad they look, women and some men still wanna fuck Pierce Brosnan, Colin Farrell, John Cusack, etc). Hollywood needs to think about making movies with fat, slovenly hitmen who look like they could knife you while in line at the Carl's Jr, then three weeks later they're a toothless grinning mugshot on America's Most Wanted.

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Originally Posted by Schwartz 

 

Clementine (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) as the real Manic Pixie Dream Girl.  What kind of girl would stumble into a repressed stranger's life, turn it inside out and transform him with the power of love and whimsy?  Probably a demanding, boozy, bi-polar hot mess whose never held on to a job or a relationship for any real length of time in her adult life.  That the film acknowledges all this and she still seems so appealing says something about either Kate Winslet's charms or my own hang-ups.

 

Others?

You could replace Clementine with Holly Golightly in the above quote, and it still fits perfectly. Golightly is the original MPDG. I knew so many terrible girls in college who worshipped that character, and I always got the feeling that they fell asleep during Breakfast at Tiffany's before the 1:40 mark.

Kind of obvious I guess, but The Assassination of Jesse James... plays around with this idea quite nicely, I think.  Notably with Pitt's outlaw being portrayed as tired and paranoid rather than care-free and devil-may-care.  Also, Robert Ford is played not as the heroic law-bringer, but more as a weird insecure fan boy.

It might also be a stretch, but in Children of Men, the savior of the world is essentially a prostitute.

Hitler (Downfall) as the real Hitler. Apparently the reigning champion of being evil was also a human being.

Yes, but was the producer actually Evanassing her?  That would explain a lot.

Aw, you woke me up inside.

I haven't seen it since the theater last year and the details are a little too fuzzy now for me to be able to back it up with any sort of coherence, but I kinda wanna say Portman's character in BLACK SWAN is the "real" version of the young up-and-comer who conquers her stage fright and goes on to give a star-making performance.

Perhaps.  I don't wanna derail, but even though what was on screen wasn't necessarily "real," the psychosis they represented was.

You could technically make a 'crowd-pleasing' and family-friendly Disney Channel version of Black Swan that just deals with a ballerina learning to overcome her lack of confidence as well as the bitchy rival who is also competing for the lead role.  Rainbows and sunshine for all!

(saying that I agree with what Jeremy is saying)

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Originally Posted by Schwartz 
 ...snipped for quoted brevity...

 

But with Black Swan, it's so deliberately operatic that the characterization seems geared more toward making a symbolic point rather than achieving a sense of real psychological acuity.

Touche.  So maybe it isn't the "realistic" version of the archetype, but it IS another angle of it, which fits in with the SPIRIT of the thread, so NYEAH.  (I'm teasing - I totally get what you're saying).

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Originally Posted by Trevor 

You could replace Clementine with Holly Golightly in the above quote, and it still fits perfectly. Golightly is the original MPDG. I knew so many terrible girls in college who worshipped that character, and I always got the feeling that they fell asleep during Breakfast at Tiffany's before the 1:40 mark.

 

Golightly is certainly one of the original precursors, but for me the origin and still one of the most "real" MPDG is Shirley McClaine in The Apartment. And to top it off, Fred McMurray as the "real" scumbag boss. But he's just so charming!

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Originally Posted by Schwartz 

I don't think its fair to suggest that any gifted young star would exhibit such psychosis, though.  The realistic part would be that she didn't have a single friend and a support network that consisted of an overbearing stage mom and a borderline predatory relationship with an older manager/director type, with no sassy black friend or doting elder neighbor in sight.   But that aspect is quickly overwhelmed by the hallucinatory madness, which isn't grounded in any reality that I recognize.

 

Not that strict realism is required for a film or character to function in this way.  Eternal Sunshine is obviously much more fantastical than Garden State, but Winslet's character in the former is nonetheless more believable than Portman's in the latter.   Nolan's Gotham is more immediately recognizable than the world Rorschach lives in, but his portrayal strikes me as more psychologically honest than Bale's Batman.  And Deadwood is certainly going for a level of deliberate staginess, but there's a degree of nuance in the depiction of all these Old West types (particularly Olyphant's Bullock) as having hats that are neither all white nor black; that for both the traditionally heroic or villainous types there are, in one character's words, "entries on both sides of the fucking ledger." 

 

But with Black Swan, it's so deliberately operatic that the characterization seems geared more toward making a symbolic point rather than achieving a sense of real psychological acuity.

Having posted my suggestion of Deadwood late last night, I didn't relaly elaborate, but this is certainly what I was trying to convey. More so than even Bullock though, I think Swearingen is a brilliant deconstruction of a "type". Yes, he's almost superhumanly intelligent and cool, and yeah, no one ever talked like that, but when you watch Westerns where the villain is an old town "Boss", you're always left wondering how they got in that position. Certainly brutality plays a part in it, but with that character you can see why people would not only fear him, but also follow and support him. And you also get a good idea of why someone who's puts wealth and personal interest as his driving motivation would elect to take up a position of such heavy responsibility.

Just thinking about this thread today...

I was wondering if there was an instance of movies doing the opposite of what Schwartz posited: where movies take something (type or whatever) that has been thoroughly deconstructed to begin with and simplifying it for the sake of simplifying it.

Now, this is what drama/narrative tends to do as a default, I realize.  It's also what popular entertainment does constantly.  And I guess what I'm asking for is kind of impossible.  It would really just be about "going back to basics" or something.  "We're tired of all this thought!  Let's get back to enjoying ourselves, NYEAH!"

The example that comes to mind is people wanting Craig to do a more 'fun' Bond movie.  A sentiment I can go along with which feels like, "Let's get back to what we love about Bond now that we've gotten the serious stuff out of the way."

Anyway... that was what was going on in my head with no clear direction.

Even before Eastwood's UNFORGIVEN, Sergio Leone (and even Eastwood himself in HANG EM HIGH) injected so much realism and moral ambiguity into the Western. The white hats and black hats took on a much more gray color. "Heroes" driven by greed. "Heroes" that backstab and double cross. Revenge that doesn't just get even, it rapes townswomen too.

There's a definite shift in the genre right around the time of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. Reluctant heroes. Some seek redemption. Others not. I also think of the difference between villains in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and THE RETURN OF THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. In the first, Eli Wallach plays the leader of a horde of banditos who wants to milk the town for all their worth. Bad guy through and through. In the sequel, the villain is much more nuanced. His motivations aren't just simply evil. He enslaves local farmers to build a church which will stand as a monument for those (including his sons) who lost their lives in the war. Using the sweat of those who refused to fight to honor those who gave their blood. Watching this flick, I was struck with just how complex this character was, considering how simple the genre usually approaches archetypes in previous decades.

Now, character complexity isn't exactly what Schwartz is getting at per se (character complexity does not equal deconstruction), but making characters more balanced, more human, more gray.... exhibits a much more realistic version (of standard stock archetypal characters) than Hollywood is often credited for, especially in certain film genres.

Not all good guys make the right decisions... or for the right reasons. And although we don't often see it, villains are driven by motivations too.

Patton Oswalt in Big Fan, a pretty dead accurate take on obsessive "fandom". Superbowl ads may try to paint the most die-hard of football fans as roguish, unshaven guys who lovably cheer for their favorite team while their way-too-hot girlfriends/wives roll their eyes in good-natured exasperation from the next room. The reality of those guys who paint their homes in their team colors, have a dedicated football room, by tickets to the NFL draft, and refer to their team as "we" is a lot closer to Oswalt's take than it is anything Budweiser sells.

You can pretty much apply that to any "fandom", too, not just sports.