There’s a disconnect in what is happening in popular media between the real-life heroes and role models that we read about in magazines, listen to on the news, and vote for in the ballot boxes, and the fictitious protagonists in film and television. In popular culture the athletes, musicians, politicians, and celebrities that we place in the national spotlight are held up as paragons, but only as long as they are paragons. The first extra-marital affair, drug overdose, or break-up and they simultaneously becomes pariah AND instant news fodder; like casting out a criminal and subsequently scrutinizing their every move. In film and television, however, we’ve seen the rising star of the “anti-hero”; the protagonist that, despite unredeemable flaws, is the narrative focus and the character that the audience is meant to ultimately care for and admire. Why do we find such empathy for despicable heroes in film and TV, yet do not accord real people, beholden to real human failings, the same lenience?

Horrible Bosses, Bad Teacher, and other films in the fluff comedy vein, make light of our tolerance for really terrible people. However, a number of serious films and television have come out with protagonists with almost no redeeming qualities. Two recent films, The Descendents and Young Adult, both feature the anti-hero protagonist. In Young Adult, Charlize Theron plays a developmentally repressed author of young adult fiction named Mavis, who attempts to ride a delusional wave of fame back to her hometown in Minnesota. There she attempts to steal back her former high school boyfriend, undeterred by the fact that he has a wife and kids. George Clooney, likewise, plays a character that is not a good father, or husband, and routinely fails in the basic functions of both. He takes his daughters on a revenge tour to face the man his dying wife cheated on. In both films, there’s little redemption to be found. Some of our highest ranked television, like Breaking Bad and Dexter, feature detestable protagonists.

This fascination is a strange foil to our real-life heroes, who seem to be cycled through in a flavor-of-the-day fashion with the unveiling of the slightest flaw. Extra-marital affairs have seen incredible airtime in the last year, precipitating some equally dramatic falls. Drug-use, legal troubles, infidelity, all precipitate a media feeding frenzy that simultaneously thrusts them out of public favor and into the limelight; a 21^st century stockade. How is it that we, as audiences, can both care about fictitious anti-heroes and the flawed detritus of society as protagonists, and zealously mock the real people in the media that show themselves to be, ultimately, human? Is this a function of our voyeuristic society, or is it a symptom of something more dysfunctional?