Word: antiheroics
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Even though the antihero has no morals, drive-in flicks always do. Ultimately, Jones finds himself surrounded by hostile children, who bring the joke full circle by insisting: "Everybody over ten ought to be put out of business." Everybody would include the operators of American International. That could be the greatest put-on of them...
...more important is the omnipresent hand of a born novelist, buoyantly bending and shaping each scene to his literary way, and successfully creating a single, superb, comic figure of the author himself. With a courageous measure of self-mockery, Mailer casts himself in the role of a black-humor antihero: a hard-drinking, self-important and snobbish dandy who, believing himself the star, is forever stumbling toward the camera, when all the time he is really only an extra, a bit player who will inevitably be cut out of the film...
...central figure, a paunchy, 37-year-old promoter of pop singers, is neither big enough to be a hero nor mean enough to be an antihero-it is simply a case of the protagonist as pudding (in this case, Yorkshire). Peter Reaney is as square as Trafalgar. He dangles from familiar hang-ups: a nagging wife whom he calls Her Malevolence, a job about which he feels guilty, and a loathing for the contemporary English way of life. His conversation is modishly cynical: "Take to the boats, lads, and let the women drown...
...converted to shoot-'em-ups three years ago. To lend a scent of sagebrush to his first western, Leone changed his name to Bob Robertson and imported Clint Eastwood, a lanky, rawboned drover on TV's Rawhide. Eastwood's image was too clean-cut for an antihero, so Leone added the necessary smudges-slouch hat, black cheroot, stubble beard and a ratty-looking scrape. For the villain's role, he hired veteran horse-opera heavy Lee Van Cleef, and the shooting commenced...
...drunkenness at a sinister plantation bar. Unconsciously, he falls victim to conspiracy, accident, destruction. "What is freedom in the last analysis," he says to himself, "other than the state of being totally, instead of only partially, subject to the tyranny of chance?" The photographer becomes Bowles's modern antihero, participating in "an invisible spectacle whose painful logic he followed with the entire fiber of his being, without, however, once being given a clear vision of what agonizing destinies were at stake...