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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

> 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 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.

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.

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).

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