Summer has traditionally been the dominion of the hero, whether he be of the spandex-clad, sword-wielding, or galaxy-hopping variety. But in 2017, we’re seeing the flighty wind of pop culture blowing in the unexpected direction of a specific breed of antihero instead. First, Jason Bateman hightailed it for Missouri with his wife and children in tow to start a mom-and-pop money-laundering operation in the Netflix original series Ozark. Next month, the Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau portrays a regular Joe toughened by a prison sentence and the white-power gang that welcomes him aboard in the crime drama Shot Caller, and in September, Tom Cruise takes on the true story of a career pilot turned drug smuggler in American Made.
This recurring myth of the everyday antihero embodies a specific set of American values that play to our shared escapist impulses while simultaneously exposing the limits hard-wired into those dreams of criminal flight.
All three share a common point of origin, in terms of the psychological fantasies girding their premises. Each story sees a typical middle-aged white man – if not mild-mannered guys, they’re all recognizable as “normal” people with a commitment to their families and work that your average viewer can tap into – thrown into a situation that forces them to wield a seductive power.
Better still, it allows them to do so ethically, as the man in question can rationalize his earlier misdeeds as being done for the sake of his family. Conflict arises when the character sinks low enough that any criminal activities can no longer be justified as selfless acts, and he must choose between the life he originally set out to defend and the brutal, tempting new one he’s built for himself. This is a simple, primal projection of man’s desire for savage strength, claimed with a ruthlessness that the realities of present-day office life cannot engender.
American pop culture has long been fascinated by the notion of the tough guy in spite of himself. In HBO’s infancy, the network struck gold with the prison drama Oz, the ethical lynchpin of which was the ineffectual nebbish Tobias Beecher. His path was almost identical to that of Coster-Waldau in Shot Caller, metamorphosing from a meek presence fearful of the prison culture to a merciless master of the game. And of course, this micro-genre’s runaway success was Breaking Bad, a show that worked to turn Mr Chips into Scarface.
While these shows and movies collectively tend to a sense of empowered self-determination from which your typical present-day American has been estranged, they more subtly illustrate the hazards and faults of this specific lawless daydream.
Consider the fact that all these men just so happen to be white and middle class. The personal trajectory of this stock narrative hinges upon the assumption of inconspicuousness for its central character, his ability to fly under the radar. He is only able to pull off this vacation outside of the justice system because he doesn’t attract attention to himself – Breaking Bad repeatedly emphasized that Walt’s picture-perfect family life was his greatest defense against the peering eyes of the law, to the point that he had to forcibly maintain that family for the sake of the facade once they learned of and were horrified by his criminal empire. Call it the privilege of nonchalance.
The figure of color looming largest in this tradition is Breaking Bad’s Gus Fring, a foil for Walter White who achieved supremacy in the criminal world by rendering himself polite and utterly nonthreatening in his outward-facing life. He sticks out from the other characters diversifying the program – the Latino American crime family of the Salamancas, for example – by virtue of his genteel veneer, as he is forced to mask his more violent impulses for the sake of appearance. If black characters tend to get relegated to side positions, it’s because the adult white male’s skirting of the law is nothing short of a national tradition.
The bedrock of United States’ identity has always been the independence and determination of its people to flout laws they feel are of no use to them. The pilgrims did it, the cowboys did it, the gangsters that built the 20th-century economy did it, and now the latest and most immediately accessible iteration is the run-of-the-mill kingpin. The sudden influx of variations on Breaking Bad’s theme indicate that the public taste for these fraught power-reclamation arcs is far from expiring. Seizing authority in the name of personal agency, then rationalizing away the questionably legal means because the ends feel so darn good – it’s the American way!
