Word: antiheroes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Family," and more specifically against O'Connor's performance, was that people might enjoy it for the wrong reasons: bigots could use his most troglodytic insults, or sexists could call their wives "dingbats," and claim they were just quoting Archie. Worse, they argued, he made his working-class antihero empathetic and therefore, they argued, made his beliefs attractive. Wrong. Archie Bunker spoke to a whole country engaged in a second American civil war, fighting bitterly in their own living rooms with people they loved nonetheless. If he was too unreconstructed to admire, he was too real to dismiss...
DIED. FRANCIS YOHANNAN, 79, World War II bombardier and inspiration for the antihero Captain Yossarian in Joseph Heller's satiric novel Catch-22; in Spokane, Wash. Yohannan, who served with Heller in Corsica, was not a rebel; in the Air Force, he earned a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Bronze Star...
...birth of the nation is not an altogether blessed event in this canonically loose novel about the Revolutionary War. Patriotism masks hypocrisy and greed. The Founding Fathers cloak private agendas and petty motives in lofty ideals. After decades of antihero worship and historical revision, are there still readers who can be jolted or amused by caricatures of national legends behaving like lesser mortals? Yet the author seems to have had a chortling good time burlesquing the past in a style that swings between Henry Fielding and Mel Brooks...
...movie execs as venal, corrupt sleazebags. Like most moralists, of course, the senator was too narrow-minded to look past the fact that the show contained a bunch of dirty words. But one standout episode also contained a blistering rejoinder to Lieberman's kind of moralizing. The show's antihero, movie producer Peter Dragon, defends his sex-and- blood-soaked movies to a sanctimonious senator at a congressional hearing...
...task facing Bret Easton Ellis at the end of the '80s. For Ellis, the death of feeling among hip young urbanites was a criminal act. And so, in his black-comic tour de force novel American Psycho, Ellis pushed past parody into nightmare farce. He created, in his antihero Patrick Bateman, a moneyman with a true killer instinct: mergers and acquisitions become murders and executions. "I have all the characteristics of a human being," Patrick (Christian Bale) says in Mary Harron's handsome, icily funny film version, "but not a single identifiable human emotion, except for greed and disgust...