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Comment by neaden | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've been struck by with movies and films like the Wolf of Wall Street, the film Wall Street, Fight Club, or even the Great Gatsby is how many people end up coming away with the exact opposite message of the movie. They end up idolizing the vapid, shallow lifestyle that the movie is critiquing, because even though the film is critiquing that it can't help but also make it glamorous. Michael Douglas has said that he has had people come up to him and tell him that Gordon Gekko inspired them to get into finance, so it's not surprising that Belfort is now inspiring a new generation.

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It's because film is a visual medium, and in these movies the protagonist always looks cool. He may be doing terrible things, but he's wearing hip clothes and driving a gorgeous car while he does them. The visual language is all screaming "this guy's great!", and it ends up overwhelming the message the story is trying to tell.

If you want to know what most people will think of a character in a movie, watch the movie with the sound off.

I don't think it's just the visual element. I mean Scarface looks pretty terrible by the end of the movie, and people idolize him. I suspect it's more that stories are now told purely for short-term entertainment value. We don't focus on the substance of the story or the moral, we focus on the kind of clips that end up in a trailer. You see similar trends in popular literature too.

His house still looks nice, though.

>I mean Scarface looks pretty terrible by the end of the movie, and people idolize him.

You got the wrong idea. I don't think anyone idolizes Tony. It's a great movie and Tony is a great character and Scarface tells an interesting story, not because the protagonist made himself rich. Same as Godfather, I like it and I like them not because they are rich, but it was because they made interesting choices. Let's talk about Scarlett in Gone with the wind -- was she rich? Was she poor?

Recently, I listened to Shit Town and it gave me an everlasting impression on me. The main character in the story was a very poor man. I liked him -- not because he is poor either, but because he is interesting.

Who cares about whether the character is rich or poor, the character's background is merely a medium to tell the story. Being very rich or poor or desperate is just a convenient choice to get the story flowing because the characters in such extreme circumstances tend to have interesting experiences and choices.

>You got the wrong idea. I don't think anyone idolizes Tony.

If you'd like I can provide a short list of rap songs about selling drugs which contain lyrics positively representing scarface/Tony. People idolize him. He's a self made man who took what he wanted. He's betrayed in the end, but plenty of people look at that as the actions of outside actors and not the consequences of his behavior. I'm not going to go into possible alternative analysis for Tony's character/the events of the movie in which he's a heroic figure betrayed by Sosa and the government (which can also be viewed as a bad guy in drug culture), but it's there.

TL;dr- There are people who aspire to be Tony, understanding full well that Heavy Weighs the Crown.

I do wonder, though - do people want to be Tony end-to-end, or do they just like the middle and think it wouldn't end that way for them? Even a visceral, horrid ending is easy to downplay when it's just on a screen.

I mean, what does Jay-Z have to say about Montana? Fuck Sosa, this Hova this is real life // This is what the ending of Scarface should feel like. Because he's better than Tony, and he's going to make it all work.

There are definitely people who idolize the Achilles bit, living gloriously and briefly, but I feel like the most common reason people celebrate that is that they get to downplay the messy ending.

Haha, if you'd like I can provide a short list of rappers named after Scarface/Tony

Sorry, I think I expressed what I meant the wrong way. Not that no one idolizes Tony. What I meant was not all the people who liked him and liked the movie idolize him. I liked the movie not because he was rich or someone to be idolized.

>but plenty of people look at that as the actions of outside actors and not the consequences of his behavior.

That's the recipe for a great story/a great movie: The great moment in storytelling is when the viewer/reader starts to see the world as the protagonist sees it. The viewer stopped caring about whether the protagonist was objectively right or wrong/moral or immoral, the viewer starts caring more about whether what they did given the situation make sense or not.

That is - given the situation, could/would you have done the same? The answer for me in the cases of Tony Montana, Scarlett O'Hara, Michael Corleone were a really convincing yes.

>> It's a great movie

It's a horrible movie. Terrible acting, no story, shallow characters, it's almost a parody of the Miami drug scene.

Yeah, I've always found idolising scarface a little strange. Likewise, I find it odd when people go around wearing t-shirts with Che Guevara's face on them: I mean, the guy's allegedly a mass murderer. Kind of an odd hero to pick, right?

Just about every revolutionary hero is a mass murderer, from Che to Mao to Stalin to Churchill to Washington.

And not everyone knows all the history of symbols.

There are some of those names who killed civilians in bulk, and some who killed enemy soldiers — and most people would hold that there is a moral difference.

Did Washington kill civilians? He was a slave owner. Not sure mass murderer is on the money like it is for Stalin and Mao. Don’t know enough about Che.

Does destroying houses and food supply so that civilians starve or freeze to death count? If so, yes. See the Sullivan Expedition.

During the Revolutionary War both sides committed a number of acts that would be recognized as war crimes today. Washington destroyed Iroquois villages, true, but keep in mind that the Iroquois supporting the Loyalists were outright scalping and murdering civilians. I think you would find little argument that destruction of property, while a bad thing, is a lesser crime than actual murder. Nobody played clean in that war.

>Not sure mass murderer is on the money like it is for Stalin and Mao

umm. Andrew Jackson... look up the trail of tears

Your observation sounds like what Daniel Kahneman described in his book: Thinking, Fast and Slow as the peak-end rule [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak%E2%80%93end_rule

Such movies should not show the person until the very end, just a series of shorts of the victims lifes becoming worser by one phone call. Absence of moral should be depicted as the absence of a person and decency it is.

I probably would not pay to see movies directed by you.

Well, nobody going to step between America and its love-in-denial obsession with its outlaws.

Al Capone may have murdered a small town- but hey - at least he didn't bow to the man, working 9to5...

To be fair, he also managed to get expiry dates put on milk which may very well in the long run have saved many more lives than was lost because of him.

> It's because film is a visual medium,

It happened with books too: See "Liar’s Poker", by Michael Lewis. He says that he wrote it "so that fewer idealistic college kids would dream of working on Wall Street. ... Somehow that message failed to come across ... They'd read my book as a how-to manual."

http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~pel/misc/The-End-of-Wall-Street... https://danwang.co/liars-poker-by-michael-lewis/

Michael Lewis also wrote "Moneyball" and "The Big Short" which were made into films.

The original is Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther causing so many to emulate the titular character and commit suicide.

Monkey see, monkey do.

I’m increasingly suspicious of the idea that humans are independent and rational, because so much humam behaviour can be explained as uncomplicated animal mimicry.

Have you heard of mimetic theory?

I wonder what that says about people. I remember being extremely impressed/infatuated with Matt Damon's character in The Talented Mr. Ripley when I was 18 or 19. So impressionable I was!

Maybe it says they have a innate ability to not simply do as they are told. Instead they gather in lots of details from the movies and books, but don't necessarily trust the spin put on them.

I don't know if it's a matter of the protagonist looking cool. When Breaking Bad was on the air, I had a surprising number of friends who identified with Walter White. He did not look cool, he did not act cool, and the writers of the show did everything in their power to communicate "This man is a moral monster and a horror of a human being." Yet some people that I otherwise respected still identified with him. They would get angry at Skyler White for leaving her husband, as if the mother of a new baby should stay loyal to a drug dealing serial killer.

In the case of Walter White, I think it's a slightly different phenomenon: the wish-fulfillment fantasy of the tortured genius who is allowed to be a snarky misanthrope because he's so brilliant. There have been a whole bunch of (usually male) protagonists like this, especially recently: Walter White, Don Draper, Dr. House, Rick Sanchez... I'm sure you can fill in plenty more examples.

The interesting realisation for me about Walter White came when I started watching the season through for a second time.

But first... SPOILER ALERT!

I mean the first time around I had some sympathy for the guy - he was a disappointed and somewhat embittered middle aged man still trying to do his best to support his family, and then he's given this crappy cancer diagnosis. I felt bad for him. Fair to say that by the time he just lets Jesse's girlfriend, Jane, choke to death on her own vomit whilst unconscious I'd entirely lost that and felt nothing but loathing for the character (which isn't to say I didn't enjoy the show, or think he was a great character).

But what I realised on revisiting the show a couple of years later is that Walter White didn't break bad. He was bad from the very beginning. I mean look at the way he interacts with people in the early episodes of season 1: he's largely an asshole. The only thing that changes is that, initially because he's driven to, he becomes much more comfortable with manifesting his assholery overtly.

I think that's right. I recently heard someone argue "Power doesn't corrupt, but rather it reveals who you really are." I think that applies to Walter White. He was morally corrupt from the start, but that became more obvious as he gained money/power.

I think it was Michael Irvin who said something similar when he was talking about how people say, "Money CAN buy you happiness." He said no, it just makes you more of what you already are.

If you're a huge asshole before you got rich, now you're just a rich asshole. If you're an empathetic, kind person, before you got rich, now you're just a rich, kind person. He also lamented society benefits more from the latter than the former for obvious reasons.

> Fair to say that by the time he just lets Jesse's girlfriend, Jane, choke to death on her own vomit whilst unconscious I'd entirely lost that and felt nothing but loathing for the character

> But what I realised on revisiting the show a couple of years later is that Walter White didn't break bad. He was bad from the very beginning.

Jesse's girlfriend got him hooked on heroin. Jesse was on a downward spiral and would surely die thanks to her continued interference. Walter saw the toxicity of both the drugs and the relationship and did Jesse a cruel but necessary kindness by letting her asphyxiate. It wasn't ethical, it wasn't humane, but it served a greater purpose (even if it was so Walter wouldn't be without an assistant).

He did far worse deeds for less grounded reasons as the series went on; there are better examples to choose from to make a case of villainy. If anything, what changes through the series is his disconnectedness from everything he was fighting for. As he lost his son's respect, his wife, his family, and his friend, his world became significantly more introverted and he was willing to tolerate greater and greater amounts of collateral damage in the interest of his own survival (since he had nothing left to care about but himself until the ending).

>necessary kindness by letting her asphyxiate. It wasn't ethical, it wasn't humane, but it served a greater purpose

that is exactly the issue - for him ends justify the means. That is his main, core, villainy.

>what changes through the series is his disconnectedness from everything he was fighting for.

natural result as evil means hollow out whatever ends he wanted to reach.

SPOILERS

It's a great show, and I agree with a lot of what you're saying.

> Jesse's girlfriend got him hooked on heroin. Jesse was on a downward spiral and would surely die thanks to her continued interference.

Jesse was on a downward spiral, yes, but the other two points are less clear. They might be true from Walt's perspective.

> Walter saw the toxicity of both the drugs and the relationship and did Jesse a cruel but necessary kindness by letting her asphyxiate. It wasn't ethical, it wasn't humane, but it served a greater purpose (even if it was so Walter wouldn't be without an assistant).

It's impossible to tell how much Walt's letting Jane die / killing Jane had to do with helping Jesse. I think it's clearer Walt killed Jane to keep control over Jesse and to protect himself. And that worked out pretty well, for a while. Jane didn't fear Walt, and she knew too much about him for Walt's comfort and safety. So he let her die / killed her.

> He did far worse deeds for less grounded reasons as the series went on; there are better examples to choose from to make a case of villainy.

This is true. For me, Jane's death caused a major nosedive in sympathy for Walt. Definitely previous things he did were villainous and later things even more so. But there was something about Jane's death. A big step down in his descent.

Very much. I watched the show for the first time by "binging" the first four seasons, just ahead of the season 5 premiere, so I went in already having heard all the buzz about the showing being "Mr. Chips to Scarface." By episode 2 or 3 I was already thinking he was always Scarface.

Oh that really depends on which season. The brilliance of that story was how he evolved into the moral monster from someone who was morally unassailable. Could it happen to you? To me? What are our limits, and where is the tipping point of no return once we start down the path?

I saw Walter in the beginning as someone who had no control of their life (even in his choice of how to die/reject treatment).

He slowly gains this confidence and control. He goes from being talked down to and ignored to being powerful (though at massive cost), but there's something appealing to that story of taking control. There's also an element of masculinity tied up in this too - when he stomps on the bully's leg in the clothing store early on. I think it's just being the alpha monkey.

Skyler was pretty controlling and self-righteous, I found her to be a pretty unlikable character. She cheats on Walt primarily to hurt him and she was also hypocritical, breaking the law for Ted when it suited her and helping with the money laundering without taking accountability for anything.

Walt at least (early on) started with the goal of raising money to leave his family - though this obviously mutates pretty quickly.

I think a big part is the emotions surrounding the combined feeling of thinking you're smarter than the rest while being stuck at a lower station in life. Unfairness compounded by the one thinking they're smarter so it's even more unfair. 'I'm smarter than this guy, why is he rich'

It's very easy to fall into this mindset and I think a lot of people identified.

  the writers of the show did everything in their 
  power to communicate "This man is a moral monster 
  and a horror of a human being."

No they didn't. No they didn't. No they didn't.

The qualifiers of his moral character only took on darker notes toward the end of the series, near the fifth and sixth season. But remained justifiable, within the context of the fatalistic continuity of the series, where characters are left with limited options, granted the hand they are dealt.

Throughout the rest of the series, Walter White is as laughable as any petulant straight man in a comedic duo (e.g. the Hardy role of Laurel and Hardy, Larry Appleton from Perfect Strangers, the Moe of the 3 stooges), while Jesse Pinkman plays the foil.

As a comedic duo, the two are rendered harmless, and thus, any morality is diffused by the beat of each joke, within the care free scope of a goof. It's all gallows humor, with a wink, shrug and a nod that everyone's hands were tied, so just go with the flow and enjoy the ride.

The actress playing Heisenberg's wife was so good portraying depression and melancholy I disliked her too.

The dinner scene with her, Heisenberg and Jessie makes up for it though.

I think he had tons of charisma and that is why people like him. Most people like actors who are the strong, silent type with good looks. That's why that type is in almost every action movie and TV show.

> He did not look cool, he did not act cool, and the writers of the show did everything in their power to communicate "This man is a moral monster and a horror of a human being." Yet some people that I otherwise respected still identified with him.

That's because nobody starts watching from the later seasons, they start watching from season one. In the beginning, Walter White is an overqualified for his work, struggling to support his family on a meager teacher's salary, and then a cancer diagnosis kicks in. Everybody identifies with him because most of us feel like we struggle with unfulfilling work and with money issues, and then the cancer diagnosis is the cherry on top - how can you judge somebody who's put in that position? Who will leave his wife saddled with debt and put in charge of raising her kids alone?

Breaking Bad reminds us that in human psychology, first impressions have outsize influence over our perceptions of other people. Battered women stay with their husbands because they still see the caring individual their husbands were when they were first dating, and hold onto hope that somewhere, their husband is still that person; if their husbands were originally abusive in the first set of dates they never would have stuck around.

I also think having that a big part of it is that at least the characters had a high point, even if they paid the price.

Like Jordan Belfort eventually loses his wife and access to his kid in The Wolf of Wall Street. But that can happen to any Joe on the street anyway, and he didn't get to have drug fueled orgies like Jordan did. Walter White descends into chaos and death in the pursuit of using his singular skills. But before he dies he leaves an enormous amount of money to secure his family's security forever and he get to experience a moment of pure fulfillment, working for himself, achieving at the outermost limits of his abilities. Joe Sixpack can get cancer and leave his family a pile of debt after spending his life working middle management at a life insurance firm, achieving no self-actualization and leaving his family in financial destitution.

These programs think that they are portraying some sort of cautionary tale by saying "Look this person got to have everything, but then they lost it all due to the method with which they acquired it", without realizing that the common man on the street could do everything by the book and above board and still find themselves losing everything and in the same spot as the characters in these shows, and they didn't even get to have fun along the way!

I think you got it.

Burning out due to doing something dangerous but fulfilling is much more appealing than losing everything you have due to some health problem...

I don't know. My biggest frustration in season one was "why the hell doesn't Walt have life insurance if his family depends so much on his income?!" I bet Joe Six-pack working middle management at a life insurance firm has some form of life insurance, so his family is still financially fine without anyone having to resort to cooking meth.

I see a lot of comments reading into this with convoluted explanations when it's simply that tv/film is an escapist medium and most people 'live vicariously' through the main protagonist or the character(s) they relate with the most.

the problem lies deeper than film. america at its core is obsessed with wealth, and it's always been this way. the ethics of how the wealth is acquired and spent matters very little. we idolize drug dealers, mobsters, serial bank robbers, bookies, counterfeiters, etc.

America is obsessed with competitive narcissism.

No one makes movies or TV shows about people who are heroically kind, empathic, or generous.

There are many movies and shows that promote those positive values. Marvel superhero movies, children movies, movies like Marshall. Films and documentaries that critique consumerism or society. TED talks, YouTube channels like The School of Life, even blogs like Brainpickings.

Most of the countries I've lived or worked in (around Asia, Europe, South America ) are largely the same. I think it is a human quality.

Kind of like how people want to look like Rambo too. They don't care about the moral consequences of their hero's villainous actions- they just want muscles and guns.

The original Rambo is actually surprisingly nuanced and, well, non-Rambo-like. It's the sequels that cemented the word as a synonym for mindless slaughter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Blood

>He may be doing terrible things, but he's wearing hip clothes and driving a gorgeous car while he does them.

You think they're terrible. Ascribing to everyone the same moral code and then reasoning why they might ignore it seems like a poor basis for reasoning? To me it's about understanding what metrics really matter to people

> the story is trying to tell they are trying to make money it's not a documentary

Fight Club gets a lot of retroactive flak now that people know how they were "supposed" to read it. The book was a dramatization of the way young men feel about life. If the author and book had any valid insight, then of course young men would identify with the "bad" lifestyle in the movie, and not suddenly turn into old men while watching the movie. The movie is entirely showing the fantasy from the "vapid" perspective. It does nothing in itself to destroy the fantasy except at the very end where it shows "maybe it's possible to take this too far?"

I think the problem with Fight Club could be that the movie changed the ending just enough that the message was lost. In the book is was more obvious what the message was.

Wasn't the message of Fight Club ostensibly anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist, the exact opposite of the lifestyle of #richkidsofinstagram ?

Yes, but capitalism is more than capable of repackaging those subversive themes to push product.

No. Project Mayhem was anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist. The message of Flight Club was that nihilism is a destructive force.

Similar to A Clockwork Orange. Ultimately nihilism/anarchism are juvenile philosophies that one (hopefully) outgrows when they are older.

Fight Club had a lot of messages. I could name a couple more:

* A generation of men raised with absent father figures is leading to listless depression.

* Every person has an idealized version of themselves in their head where they are powerful and purposeful.

* Modern middle class culture has no real danger in it, and we have lost our connection to the world of physical violence and dominance.

* Living for the acquisition of more IKEA furniture is a poor life decision.

And so on and so forth. Like most decently thoughtful and provocative film and writing it throws a lot of things at you and makes you think and reconsider your values a little. It has a lot of messages, some contradictory, some confusing or banal, and some intriguing.

I think, in a way, FC and The Matrix were the msg. That is, be complicit and conform, as zombies so. Or don't, and be alive, be yourself.

Sure there are particulars. But is FC's consuming consumer that much different (metaphorically) from being a battery for the machines?

I don't think so.

> If the author and book had any valid insight, then of course young men would identify with the "bad" lifestyle in the movie

Nicely put. I don't really understand how the negative ending of Fight Club is supposed to stop people from identifying with it; it's not as though it shows another happier path people with the same sentiments ought to endorse.

"If you feel this way and commit to it completely, things will go wrong for you" is totally compatible with "many people feel this way", and if the movie wasn't relatable it's not clear to me how it would have anything useful to say.

This always perplexed me. With Mad Men and Breaking Bad too, people idolized the main characters, which is interesting not only because they are bad people but because they are deeply unhappy, too.

There's something extremely surface-level about people's takeaways from film characters. They want a certain level of panache that the characters can muster, but they ignore that even the characters themselves are miserable.

That might have also to do with how movies are made usually. If you really think about it, most detectives in detective stories abuse power and do things that cops really really should not. But, we are supposed to suspend reality and root for them.

Same with action movies - main character does a lot of damage to everyone around, steal cars, hurt innocent people and we are supposed to ignore that. Happy end involves massive fight in the middle of city that would displace thousands of families. And so on and so forth.

People take the usual expected reading of movies and apply them to these too.

It is possible to make movies differently. I have seen movies that made me feel bad about violence and events and that made it clear that "this is not a cool thing". But the movies mentioned here are not like that - they sort of criticise it but are still made so that we feel happy about them. They show events from the point of view of perpetrator, but not much from point of view of their victims.

It's not just movies. Real life attitudes toward war are similar. Hawks advocate for fighting, especially fighting on foreign shores, with little regard for collateral damage. And that attitude is far older than movies, so movies didn't create that attitude, though they may reinforce it.

To your point its possible to make movies differently, there is a game called spec ops that is very subversive of the military shooter genre. Where other games want you to feel cool shooting and killing people spec ops constantly wants you to feel bad about your actions, at one point asking "do you feel like a hero yet? "

Very good game.

People like the idea of it when they read about it online, but it sold poorly and the few people who played it didn't enjoy it.

I one of these few people who played it, I really enjoyed it. Thought on hardest difficulty it was a really good challenge.

The subversive games that teach a moral lesson to a player can be great, but they work best as short one-time plays, which isn't great for commerce.

There's not a lot of replayability in subverting your own expectations.

I liked the game as a shooter but I thought all the moralizing was ham fisted nonsense. It was incredibly obvious what it was doing and it didn't affect me the way it seemed to affect a lot of other people.

I heard that "this war of mine" is similar in that regard. You don't kill people tho, you manage survivors.

Were Draper and White unhappy because of their actions in the shows, or where they already unhappy and their actions in the show were them making the best of it? They both had a tragic backstory (child abuse, cancer) before the show started. Maybe other hurting people identify: Better to be a drug kingpin than just waste away into nothingness.

That's a very good point. They may or may not be making the best of their circumstances, but they're certainly trying to break out of "something" pre-existing.

At least in the case of Breaking Bad, you can sort of believe Walter White at the start of the show is "making the best of a bad situation" but then he indeed "breaks bad" and turns into a genuinely bad and selfish character. He is terrible to Jesse, he lets innocent people die.

Something similar happens with Vic Mackey in The Shield: he starts as a morally grey antihero (if you forget he's a cop killer, of course) but gradually turns into something else. He's selfish, murderous and in the end doesn't really put his friends first, contrary to what he claims. He's a fascinating character, but not someone we should root for! (But we still do!)

> Maybe other hurting people identify: Better to be a drug kingpin than just waste away into nothingness.

It seems like this is an obvious read, right up until I see people mystified by these shows. "Better to be hated than pitied" is a simple enough sentiment, and if it comes alongside direction and certainty than all the better - even the certainty of having no way out.

Most people don't actually do that, thank god, because they have consciences. But it's simple enough to understand "I want to just commit to something, anything, and stop feeling empty" as a principle. Hell, Jim Profit literally slept in a cardboard box every night and people wanted to be him.

Jim Profit had faith, fortitude, and "family". We all should aspire to that.

There's a fascinating TLP article on this very topic[0]. Here's the most relevant bit:

The reason TV sociopaths are admired is that they are on TV. They have a story.

Do you really admire Tony Soprano? Which part? His loveless marriage to a crazy person? A mistress who is even crazier? His gigantic belly and panic attacks? The fact that no one actually likes him? That his daughter was dating a black guy? ("I wouldn't have a problem with that." Yes you would if you were Tony.) What part do you admire?

The answer you tell yourself is you admire his power, that he can do whatever he wants. No he can't. The whole show was nothing but repeated examples of how limited his options were. The things you think you admire-- having hot sex with the other crazy woman at his psychiatrist's office, eating microwaved Sysco at Italian restaurants, avoiding his wife-- can be done by anyone, you don't need to be Tony to do it. But when you do it.... it just doesn't feel the same. I know.

What people admire about Tony isn't his freedom; that thing you think is freedom is actually the lack of freedom. His story. His identity-- that he has one, an obvious one, a clear one. Tony Soprano is not free, his behavior is completely tethered to what makes sense for his character. He acts exactly like Tony Soprano would act. That's what people want: the limitations of that identity: if I know who I am, I know what I am capable of, I know my strengths and my limits, I know how I'd react to unknown dangers. And I want other people to know this. If other people know who I am, I wouldn't have to keep proving myself. Strike that: I wouldn't have to prove myself in the first place.

Translating to the present topic, what makes Jordan Belfort attractive is not his role as "rich stock trader crook" or the cars and yachts that go with it, it's that he has a role and is confident that that is his role, as opposed to, let's say, oscillating between "Maybe I should start day trading" and "Maybe I should write the great American novel" and "Maybe I should write an indie game" but never doing any of them because that would remove the option of doing the other ones.

0: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/04/why_we_love_sociopat...

Nice, relevant excerpt.

A while back I got very interested in Lucian Freud, moreso for the relationships he had with his portrait subjects rather than the portraits themselves. Long story short many of these relationships became romantic (many even led to children), but across both the romantic and non-romantic ones the subjects seemed to find Freud's keen (even selfish) interest in portraying them seductive. He could be demanding, cruel, temperamental, etc. but he was fundamentally a talented painter who was very simple to understand: he wanted to paint you, he was very interested in you, and didn't much care about how this affected you. For the reasons you outline, at least a broad subset of people find this kind of singular character (literally) attractive.

Animal Kingdom did not made me feel like crime life is good and murder there felt badly. Similar with American Psycho. Westworld made mass murder by the end feel fine, a bit sad at maximum, while Game of Thrones made them feel disgusting. People don't root for sociopaths or even good guys in Game of Thrones as much. So I think a lot of admiration for sociopaths comes from how they are shown on screen, what kind of music is played etc, and not just from what they technically do.

Similarly, I like horror movies a lot. But, it is not nearly the same as video of real person suffering (or realistic portrayal). I don't like those at all. Horrors are made to feel you fake bad and it is similar with most popular movies about sociopaths.

I noticed this exact thing when Desperate Housewives became popular. Suddenly (it seemed), many of the people around me started to act like the characters on the show; tuning in for more information each Sunday night. I seriously kid you not, some even started to take their kids' Ritalin just like on the show. It was... bizarre. Many people really do take their cues about how to behave/act from the pseudo-Jungian gestalt that is TV/YouTube/Pop-media. I just can't understand it, but I do observe it. Maybe that is more to say something about me than anything.

This is interesting, do you think people do this because the people they see in Desperate Housewives and the examples in the parent comment have a sort of "clearly defined" identity and people watching this media look at how explicitly defined these characters are portrayed and contrast it against their own sense of self, find it lacking (either because it is, because they imagine it to be, or because something like that is inherently truly difficult to pin down because in reality "bright line" definitions of character don't exist?) and then start to model their life on what they see because it gives them something concrete to centre themselves on?

That's a lot for one sentence. I think the people I know/knew whom are like that are doing it out of boredom mostly. Their lives are fairly comfortable, they have never really seen hunger nor war nor diseases. Most of their lives have been really nice. As such, to give meaning to those lives, they need strife, and the path that the media/gestalt provides is a 'safe' one to introduce struggle, so to speak. They tend to be somewhat religious as well. Having been to those congregations, the pastors/priests/padres stress that you have to really confess your sins a lot, because we all have a lot of sins, so struggle that way. Turns out, almost none of the flock has anything to confess, but 'sin' is at least something to struggle against. There is also an out-sized (though still very small) anti-vax/flat-earther/conspiracy element too, as that also provides some meaning to their otherwise safe and comfortable lives.

In essence, those that get their 'plan' from the TV/gestalt just need to volunteer more and travel.

Haven't watched "Mad Men", but I think part of the appeal of Walter White was that his character, being the show's main character, was also the most well-written and nuanced which almost necessarily leads to him being the most sympathetic. The reality that he was unhappy is more than outweighed by the fact that he was living out carpé diem rather than surrendering to terminal illness.

I think your on to it. But can we just say that people and characters aren't just "good" or "bad".

I want to be Don Draper because he is handsome, well dressed, and extremely intelligent. That doesn't mean I want to do everything negative he did. Although I wouldn't mind being able to drink at work.

When kids play Batman, one of them has to be The Joker. It could be that they like clowns or the color purple. It doesn't have to mean that the child is murdering cats in the backyard.

> Haven't watched "Mad Men", but I think part of the appeal of Walter White was that his character, being the show's main character, was also the most well-written and nuanced which almost necessarily leads to him being the most sympathetic. The reality that he was unhappy is more than outweighed by the fact that he was living out carpé diem rather than surrendering to terminal illness.

One other thing is that he had great talent and competence as a chemist, which was often on full display. Many of the other characters in the show had no clear talents, or if they did, they it was more background or reputation than something clearly shown.

I think any character that shows extreme talent will attract fans, regardless how evil or unhappy they are, because people will divorce the talent from the other attributes and admire it on its own.

Not only great talent, but unrecognized and unused talent -- he was working as a schoolteacher and at a car wash. And there were allusions that he had been cheated of his fair share of a prosperous company.

I disliked Don Draper from close to the start of the series ( I hate watched it...) and disliked Walter White after he killed SPOILER's girlfriend by neglect until maybe the last episode of Breaking Bad (the unfolding trainwreck was compelling), and was pulling for Tony Soprano and Nuckie Thompson to die after the first seasons (those pesky survivors to the end at least).

I think that some of it is that many people who identify with these characters are themselves deeply unhappy and don't believe that there is no hope for them to ever be happy. From that perspective, it is logical to conclude that if you are going to be unhappy either way then you might as well be cool/tough/glamorous/rich.

A big part of this to me, is the idea of yourself as an archetypal character. People are different each day, some days you are having conversations with strangers at coffee shops and patting yourself on the back for being so socially adept, other days you just don't want to talk to a soul. Some days you love your career path, other days you wish you had chosen something else. The idea of some reliability in your mood, desires and personality is attractive: "I am the computer guy, everyday, all day, 100%".

The idea of these characters who are so certain of who and what they are, and are driven by some greater purpose is very alluring, even if the personality is toxic and the purpose immoral.

These films are meant to depict a certain type of person, one who is drawn to the appeal of wealth and particularly the excess and display present in certain communities. I can imagine how someone who had this type of predisposition would feel inspired if they were exposed to that lifestyle by one of these movies and develop an aspiration for the specific position where previously it was a more amorphous longing for wealth and privilege.

This is the only comment in the whole thread that comes anywhere near the way I think about this subject. Everyone is presuming that people have their value systems formed by watching movies. I think that's as false as it is dismal. The way we form our value systems is highly complex. We get a lot from parents and real life role models, our own thinking about things, real life events, the systems we're part of, chance circumstances, and much more. A film or book may very well hint at the writers' value systems, but that is not simply transfered to the viewer. The viewer brought their own value system in with them, and at most had it very slightly modified, or more probably enhanced by whatever they identified with in the story, regardless of the presumed moral.

Think of it this way: It's a lot easier to look at someone ostentatiously wealthy and just say "well, I'll just cut out the bad parts like doing hard drugs and pissing it all away by being an asshole" than it is to look at Mother Teresa and say "I'll be just like her, except a billionaire".

That is to say, making a ton of money seems a lot harder than just not being an asshole.

I thought doing the hard drugs is part of the glamor.

Same thing happened with Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker [1]. Written as a parody. Now distributed to junior bankers as a handbook of hustle and an advertisement of the good life promised.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker

I have had scenes from Glengarry Glen Ross played in sales meetings dozens of times.

And were you always closing?

It's misleading to say it was written as a parody.

To quote from the Wikipedia article: "semi-autobiographical book [...] describing the author's experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s".

Before reading Liar's Poker I was ignorant about, and extremely hostile to the financial industry, and the book brought about complete change. The book is at best ambivalent about high finance, but clearly also glamourises the industry.

"because even though the film is critiquing that it can't help but also make it glamorous."

Honestly, they don't try hard not make it look glamorous. This extravaganza is totally part of what makes people watch it.

Indeed the one thing that sticks out in my mind about The Wolf of Wall Street is that no effort was made to show all the harm he did to the people he stole from. It was just one very, very long spectacle. Not a film I'd watch twice.

Agreed. It's a celebration of a lifestyle that Hollywood perpetually presents as the pinnacle of human experience - drugs, loose morals, sexual promiscuity, and fast cars; the means of acquisition aren't usually considered as important as the acquisition itself.

In the same genre, Boiler Room did a good job showing the harm done to the victims of Wall Street con artists.

I think one reason is that in these movies those actors you mention are the “heroes” of the story, in the sense that they’re the ones who undergoe the transformation. The flip side, all the people who have lost everything because of Belfort are not portraited at all.

Another reason might be that many people are simply greedy and the consequences for the main actors weren’t that bad in the end after all. I think the real Belfort made an appearance at the end of the movie and gives speeches nowadays...

I remember in Marketing class they taught us about "Herb the Nerd".

In the 1980's Burger King was expanding and as part of this came a big advertising campaign centered around a nerdy-looking guy called Herb, who was the only person who hadn't been to a Burger King. If you could spot him in a Burger King restaurant, you could win money. It was a colossal failure, and instead of increasing customer volume, ended up having the opposite effect and decreasing it.

Why? Because the overt message of

"Herb the Nerd" <-> "The only person who hasn't gone to Burger King"

was shortened in people's minds to

"... Nerd" <-> "... Burger King".

It's fascinating: indirect/subtext messaging will beat direct messaging every time.

Domino's Noid also had a tragic ending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noid

Can't forget the Quizno's rats.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/ad_report_card/2004/0...

Interestingly, American Psycho isn't on that list. Nor should it be.

It's easy to come up with a few theories as to what sets it apart, but I would love to see a proper analysis of how it tackles the subject matter without glorifying the lifestyle unnecessarily--and what other films should learn from it if they aim to accomplish the same

Aside from Patrick Bateman committing gratuitous murders on screen, the major difference is that he hates his life and he never looks like he's having fun.

Jordan Belfort might be doing terrible things (although not as bad as serial murder), but he looks and acts like he loves every minute of it. Bateman doesn't.

You could also compare The Hangover and Leaving Las Vegas. One makes a drug-filled weekend in Vegas look sort of fun, and one does not.

This a great film genre: juxtaposed double-headers. Any other pairings to recommend?

Hard to think of good examples. Bad Lieutenant and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans are very different takes on the same theme.

The Bateman character in the film was directed and shot by Mary Harron. See her other work to get an idea of what made him different.

The word "Psycho" has such a blatantly negative connotation, that it's pretty clear that he is not supposed to be a hero.

Also all the murdering.

Except "edgy" people view some bastardization of nihilism as a cool thing to aspire to. To this end they view Patrick as an ideal character. Powerful (at least more so than Steven nobody), and the psychopath concept intrigues them because it separates a person from their emotions, which for many people seem like an improvement, as not feeling would hurt less.

These films of destructive and unhealthy people are usually aspired to because even when the characters hit their rock bottom, they still have more money, power, control, and agency than the average viewer.

Belfort made it look effortless. Bateman made it look hard.

You're super hopeful if you think people don't idolize Patrick Bateman, but they do. People don't see the story, they see a young, good-looking Christian Bale with a powerful suit on walking the streets of NYC with headphones on. People want that image, and the message is lost or separated entirely.

I've heard designers talk about the business card scene in tones of deep respect.

Hollywood dont want people to be model citizen, otherwise they would want to consume recreation that has nothing to do with their business:

hiking

hanging out with friends families

reading

learning

whatever that is not being mind-washing by the popular entertainment

Why is reading part of being a model citizen, but not watching movies? I'd give Paths of Glory for someone to watch over 99.9% of books out there.

There are plenty of Hollywood films that promote those values. The Stephen Hawking biopic. Even the Harry Potter series. Marvel superhero films like Dr. Strange. Other biopics like Hidden Figures, etc.

I think the argument that: - A is claimed to be bad - This statement is wrong - Because some instances of A is not bad

Is a type of nonsensical logical reasoning.

I don't think that these films critique anything, they just tell a story and it's up to the people's judgement to critique the events and characters in the story.

I wouldn't say that people who idolize these characters have poor judgement or bad morale though. I mean, we shoot people or do illegal street racing in virtual environments for fun all the time, maybe it's just a human nature to entertain the idea of what we could have done if sociatal norms or laws wouldn't stop us.

Idealization of a persona usually doesn't mean wanting to become exactly that person but to have some quality of that person.

Maybe those people who actually do something are simply racionalizing their actions through these fictional characters?

Scarface may be the the epitome of that for me, but on the other hand Tony Montana was pretty successful up until the very end of the movie.

Thank you, everyone in this thread, for articulating for me why these types of movies and books have never sat well with me.

I think what people attach to (rightly or wrongly) is that these characters usually have wrestled themselves into a position of total control over their own lives. Most people watching the film won't have that freedom to stick it to the man, or run away from their situation and live a life that's their selfish own: there are usually financial, family, or even self-doubt constraints.

Control over your own life is something that everybody craves and it's clear that these characters have it in abundance, even if it's only for a brief period of time - i.e. to the end of the film. But up until that point, they're seen as individuals who have broken free from their respective shackles.

This also applies to almost every single gangster movie. "Scarface" being really the case study.

I believe it is mostly due to the last scene of these movies where the hero dies in some crazy action scene. Lot of adrenaline, and it looks so "cool" on screen that you can't help thinking "wow this guy was awesome!".

One movie that dealt with that really well was "Goodfellas". During the 2nd part of the movie, the downfall is filmed in a very slow, almost boring manner. And the end is boring as f*ck, specifically to avoid this pitfall of glorifying the "hero".

And yet, Goodfellas was directed by Scorsese. What was he thinking with TWOWS?

It's like how Truffaut said it's impossible to make an anti-war film, it looks too cool and exciting on the screen and there's no real understanding of the human costs involved.

It's part of the appeal of a popular movie: striking a chord with multiple audiences simultaneously, one with irony, another without. In many ways, if movies didn't do this, you probably would be less likely to have seen them.

When someone is insecure, they don't see war as a warning, they see it as a place to find new weapons.

When someone is narcissistically wounded, they are going to mimic the survival strategies of other high-status narcissists.

Because excitement, notoriety, achieving exceptional status - regardless of the specific around it - is wildly different than the average, mediocre, mundane life (relatively speaking).

For a lot of people a "vapid, shallow lifestyle" sure as heck beats their serious, suffocating lifestyle.

Or the granddaddy of them all - Scarface.

It's not like those viewers are stupid. People just see what they want to see. It's very hard to focus on an external stimulus in a way that really lifts you out of your own private world.

I got incredibly bored from Wolf of wall street and didn't finish it.

To me, it's just a ridiculous person acting like a teenager and having no intelligence or wisdom whatsoever.

Surfaces are important, because it is all most people ever get.

"There’s no such thing as an anti-war movie."

Same thing with Casino and Goodfellas both of which end quite disturbingbly for the main characters

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