Irredeemably Broken: Male Lead Characters on TV and in Film

 

Several years ago, I began to notice a trend in the lead male characters in American television shows. In 2014 HBO’s The Leftovers’ Chief of Police, Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) and AMC’s The Walking Dead’s ex deputy Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) were both deeply flawed heroes, struggling in post-Apocalyptic worlds to face the darkness without it filling the already-prevalent cracks in their psyches and souls. This had been done a decade earlier with a man on the other side of the law, in a different kind of dying world: Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini). Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) on CW’s long-running Supernatural is another example of what I found to be a challenging new take on the lead male character—one that was clearly in step with society’s probing and pervasive questions about what it means to be male in the twenty-first century. 

As a writer who has been asking this question all my life—especially since my college years, when I attended a liberal arts college that had a ratio of 7 females for every male and whose English and Theatre departments (where I double majored) were heavily slanted toward a Women’s Studies read of every novel, story, and play we encountered.

Post-college I found Robert Bly’s Iron John and The Sibling Society as I tried to figure out just what it meant to be a man. Many of the young men that I have taught and mentored through my theatre company and creative arts classes, who are now in their early to mid 30s, are asking themselves the same question, especially in this age of Toxic Masculinity and the trials of Harvey Weinstein and Danny Masterson and the most recent accusations against Garth Brooks and Neil Gaiman.

TV, for many years, was giving us—albeit exaggerated—examples that we could use, at least on some level, to figure it out. We certainly were not—and still don’t—get any modeling from our politicians and especially for my students, whose fathers are all my age (in their early to mid-50s), they are watching US try to figure it out—and in many ways failing.

Rick Grimes and Kevin Garvey were both single fathers. Dean Winchester was self-appointed father to his brother from the time they were young and he may also have a son, whom he protects by staying away (that old trope). Even Tony Soprano, for all his flaws, made efforts to do right by his children. Some of the best episodes of the show’s seven seasons were about these relationships.

Those connections and responsibilities to our children are the rope that keeps a father tethered, no matter how tough things might get. To hold us in a somewhat safe zone so we didn’t wind up going too deeply into our own versions of the darkness. For every zombie, fanatic, and other monster-of-the-week we watch in the darkness of Plato’s cave on the 60-inch flat-screens in our subterranean man caves (a poor replacement for a shrinking space above-ground), there are equally dangerous shadows lurking in many of the corners of our lives. 

Looking at the trends over the past two decades, I think the shift began with another AMC show, Mad Men, and Don Draper (Jon Hamm). Don’s world was fairly stable, yet he was a deeply flawed man prone to infidelity. He also didn’t do right by his children. He never even tried. By making Don an imposter, show creator Matt Weiner began us on a path of looking at the psychic schism, the Shadow, we all have. In shows like The Leftovers, Walking Dead, and Supernatural, the cause of the psychic schism was paranormal; apocalyptic. But twenty-first-century pressures can do it just as well.

I won’t say that Don Draper got us to where we are today completely on his own. Cynicism (Don is the product of a deep, lingering cynicism planted in Season 3 of Mad Men with the death of Kennedy—talk about a flawed father and husband struggling to keep the darkness down) has infected storytelling on TV, and in a few examples in film that I’d also like to mention.

Cynicism is poison. I have written about it before (https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/1027346460735612910/5940563091127976572). 

It is engaging with story with a closed mind, which makes the experience even more dangerously passive than the medium of television already is. The power of story is overlaying ourselves onto characters in struggle. If all of the characters with whom we identify are irredeemably broken, story is no longer there for us.

An argument could be made that The Sopranos was also a show that moved the needle to the cynicism that I now see in arcs for leading male characters, but show creator David Chase, through his infamous blackout ending, left it up to the viewer. I chose to believe that Tony wasn’t killed—that he adapted. Cynics would say he died in the diner that day, in front of his family.

They might also say that justice was served. 

In looking at the characters I have mentioned, it is striking that they are all White, heterosexual men in America. White privilege and the damage it has done to society is a key ingredient of this shift, so I do not think it is coincidental that all of the leading male roles I focus on here are in this demographic. It is also obvious in the present Trump/Musk reality.

I want to mention a few films (one of which spurred this blog) before going back to TV: Logan (Hugh Jackman) and the two John Wick films (Keanu Reeves), all three of which I watched (again) in recent weeks. These films say: “There is no getting out. There is no redemption. You are doomed.” In Logan, he is given a daughter, linking him closely with the lead males I have already discussed. Although John Wick has no child, a murdered puppy spurs his return to an ultra-violent life. It is close enough for our purposes here. As he breaks open the sealed vault where he keeps his weapons and specific set of clothing, we watch the Shadow unleashed. We can add Professor Xavier to the list of White privileged males who have an irredeemably broken end through his role in Logan.

Two more TV shows I want to focus on now are the return of Twin Peaks on Showtime and NBC’s The Blacklist. The return of Twin Peaks after 20 years several years ago was polarizing, as David Lynch (boy, will he be missed) was at his most artistic and obscure, as he was with Inland Empire. Stylistic choices aside, both in the series and the two companion books by series co-creator Mark Frost, cynicism is the coin of the realm. Twin Peaks centers around families squarely situated in White privilege and the news is tragic—returning characters and their offspring are terrible people on clear paths to destruction. Family patriarchs are especially doomed. There was a total lack of Hope in the return of the series, reflective of the trend that I am seeing. This is ironic because the “twin peaks,” the black and white lodges, stood for the light and darkness in us all. It was all about the battle with the Shadow. Darkness won in the return.

I saw the same cynicism at work in the Deadwood film. No happy endings amongst the straight, White, middle-aged males.

The Blacklist is by far the worst written of the shows I am looking at in this essay. Full of plot holes, over-use of coincidence, and at times bordering on absurdism, the show is important to these trends because of the father–daughter relationship of master criminal Raymond Reddington (James Spader) and his daughter, FBI profiler gone dark side Elizabeth (Megan Boone). While the psychological effects of getting in the minds of serial killers and other sociopaths have been well-documented, The Blacklist, which I stopped watching in its fifth season (the fifth season is often the high-water mark for network television), is far less about her role as a profiler than it is about how her father’s criminality is “genetic” and now within her. What Elizabeth has done to this point in the season shows no indication that she will come to anything but bad ends. The father poisons the child over and over and the audience is left to wonder what will become of Elizabeth’s child—who is left with her equally flawed and criminal grandmother while Elizabeth gets methodical revenge on the men who killed her (also criminal) husband.

Ironically, a Blacklist spinoff, subtitled “Redemption,” was cancelled after just a few episodes. Perhaps society is no longer interested in the redemption of White male characters. The trend in TV (and in film), to die bloody and broken, is almost certainly reflective of such a mindset. It is on some level a revenge fantasy.

I should mention that one of TV’s most flawed male characters over the past few decades, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny, The X-Files), has not become irredeemably broken, although Chris Carter flirted with it in the first reboot season’s false ending. Fox keeps going, trying to patch his relationship with Scully and to do right by his son. Carter is old school—more apt to shine a light on dark trends and cynicisms from a dire warning and moralistic orientation than to shamelessly capitalize on them as inevitable ugliness. For legions of  X-Files fans it is all about “I want to believe.”

Is the journey still worth taking if there is no redemption, no hope that the lead male character will overcome and make better? That there will not be multi-generational carnage? I remain more than a little skeptical that the answer is anything but no.