April 23, 2025 • 48 mins
Fair warning: this episode spoils a lot of (older) media.
Antiheroes make for great television. But why are we obsessed with them? Why are they in nearly all prestige dramas? Is this a result of our cultural beliefs, or is it (re)producing a culture of cynical realism? What impacts might it have for politics and climate change?
This ascendancy of the antihero is a trend I've been watching (and often enjoying) since my teen years. Shows like The Sopranos helped bring television to its lofty artistic status, but it did so by confusing the natural empathy that good storytelling generates. The longer one watches shows like The Sopranos, the more one ends up rooting for bad guys to be successful. In a world that is ever more mediated by media, could a similar trend be happening in politics?
Today's show is an attempt to make sense of the antihero through a number of prestige dramas, and look for some ways of telling stories that don't lead us into the abyss of constant moral ambiguity.
Today we're going to talk about hope, reclaiming moral authority, and why it's cool to believe in things. I hope you'll join me in that ambition.
This Episode's Sponsors
Listen to the RCC episode with Lisett Luik from Arbonics
Email me to sponsor at carbon.removal.strategies [at] gmail.com.
Resources
Become a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate Change
"The judge speaks in the name of justice; the priest speaks in the name of pity, which is nothing but a more lofty justice."
- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
"Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven."
- Matthew 18:21-22, KJV
The Sopranos (here's a clip where Anthony Jr. steals sacramental wine from the church and the shot lingers for a few extra seconds on St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes—perfection)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on Wikipedia
Littlefinger Tells Varys That Chaos Is A Ladder | Game of Thrones | HBO
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello, this is your host, Ross Kenyon.
I'm doing something that I have not done before.
I feel like I did a long time ago, but it's been a while.
But in trying to make this show financially sustainable, I was
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It would do me a great favor if you could please listen and
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(00:20):
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(00:42):
difficult time within carbon removal.
You should go listen to the showthat I did with with Lizette
Louis from our Bionics. We did a show probably about six
weeks or 8 weeks ago and we talked about how the trajectory
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(01:03):
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(01:25):
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(02:09):
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(02:31):
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(02:52):
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(04:17):
notes too. And let's talk.
And OK, now I'm going into the show proper, the intro.
Here it is, and thank you again for listening.
Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change
(04:38):
podcast. I'm Ross Kenny and I'm a long
time climate tech and carbon removal entrepreneur.
Today I'd like to share with yousome thoughts on why the
antihero is such a popular archetype or structure for
telling a story in American culture.
I don't think it's an especiallygood thing, and I'm going to
tell you why. That's very, very difficult to
(05:02):
have a show worthy of critical acclaim without having anti
heroic elements to it. By which I mean an anti hero is
someone often in the slot of theprotagonist.
And classically, the protagonistis someone that you are rooting
for, that has admirable qualities, that you want to see
(05:23):
them supersede their difficulties and, and grow and
and and win. And an antihero is someone that
is, you know, maybe more morallycomplex.
They're not a villain. It's not like a straight
reversal always. But it is one of those cases
where they fall into this fuzzier area in between
(05:43):
television just littered with antiheroes.
They're all over the place now. And it is commonly tracked back
to Tony Soprano and the, you know, potentially the first
great, truly artistic televisionseries, The Sopranos.
Maybe you've heard of it. It.
It has a similar moment for the medium in a similar way that
(06:07):
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles is
considered to be the first art rock album.
And people can quibble over whether or not it truly deserves
that status or not. But in popular memory, that is
the role that this album serves.Before that, rock was much more
saccharine, much goofier. Songs weren't necessarily
(06:30):
connected, concept albums were not that common.
And Sergeant Pepper's changed that.
Rock became a medium that could be as sublime as any other
musical media style, and that was a great coming of age
moment. Television before Sopranos.
People associate very strongly with sitcoms and with soap
(06:51):
operas, but not high art. And when HBO produced The
Sopranos, that was considered tobe a transcendent moment where
television had arrived. This is a great thing, and while
it was a great thing for television, and presumably we've
all benefited from the birth of a new cultural medium that has
(07:15):
been so influential, has enabledso much more storytelling at
such greater length. It's been a terrific thing.
There's so many shows that are worth watching in the post
Sopranos era, whereas there's very few pre Sopranos shows that
are worth going back and revisiting.
By which I mean with filmmaking,there are many films that go
(07:37):
back essentially what to the Lumiere brothers as things that
you should watch from more than 100 years ago.
That's not really true for television.
If you're a comedy nerd, you want to go back and watch Johnny
Carson or Carol Burnett, or you want to experience the popular
cultural value of something likeAll in the Family or The
Jeffersons. Like, OK, there's that Seinfeld.
But Sopranos, for whatever reason, is considered to be the
(08:01):
moment for better, for worse. It may not actually be true.
Maybe there are some shows that brought high art to television
much earlier. But for the purpose of this
narrative, it's Sopranos. That's that's what it is.
I've seen Sopranos all the way through I think two or three
times make call it 2 1/2 times. It's a great show.
It's funny, it's supernatural. It's it's so strange in so many
(08:24):
ways. A lot of unanswered questions.
But one of the things about the show is that as you're watching
it, if you're someone like me, Ihad the feeling of being
manipulated and not in a not in a way that felt intentional,
like I didn't feel like I was being LED astray by the
(08:44):
producers of the content. But I did feel that the longer
that you watch content like that, the more you empathize
with the protagonist. Because if you don't have
empathy for the protagonist, it's really hard to keep
watching a show. You need someone that you're at
the very least curious what's going to happen with them.
(09:05):
But ideally you are emotionally invested in what is happening to
them. And if you become emotionally
invested in someone like Tony Soprano, you start thinking
thoughts like, I really hope Tony outsmarts the FBI or I
really hope Tony doesn't get caught with his Guma and
Carmela. His wife divorces him.
(09:26):
And as you're watching, you're like, why am I thinking that?
This is a terrible thought? He probably should be divorced.
He's, you know, a philandering, unfaithful husband.
And Carmela's pretty miserable for the duration of the show and
he is doing very bad things to the people of of North Jersey
(09:48):
and should not be out on the streets able to do more of them.
It's weird if you watch what's happening inside of yourself as
this show is almost generating empathy against your will.
And This is why it's considered to be great part because it was
humanizing. It's really hard to sustain
(10:09):
viewership or interest in a workof art if there is not empathy
being generated ideally for multiple characters.
Like a good example of this is that recently I've been reading
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. The movie version or the more
recent one doesn't do a great job and in fact I don't know
(10:30):
that the musical does a great job of exploring why Javier is
an interesting character that's worth support in the book.
It's, it's a really rich story and character.
So I'm just going to run you through this.
If you you've never seen or, or or read Les Miserables.
Jean Valjean is convicted of stealing a loaf of bread to feed
(10:51):
his family. He had sentenced for five years
in just horrible conditions in the French prison system in the
early 1800s. He's overseen by a policeman, a
warden named Javert, and he tries to escape several times so
that his sentence ends up something like 19 years.
(11:12):
And he is marked by having a yellow passport document so that
people know he's a dangerous convict or believe that he's a
dangerous convict. No one will take him in.
He's just a pariah. And he goes to a Bishop's house
almost by accident. And the Bishop welcomes him in
(11:33):
as a godly act. And rather than appreciating
that for his own sake, he falls back into his ways, that the
book is about how the prison system essentially inculcated
this sense of criminality into him and he can't break out of it
at that moment. And he steals the silver of the
(11:55):
Bishop and is caught for doing so.
And then it's taken back to the Bishop.
And the Bishop tells the the police that captured Jean
Valjean that actually he had given him the silverware as a
gift and tells him that he bought his soul for God and that
his job is now go be a changed and redeemed man.
(12:18):
And even still he can't quite doit and has one more incident
where he essentially steals froma small child and then leaves
and from that point on is invisible to the authorities and
is not tracked down essentially.And he becomes a a factory owner
through some innovation and becomes a very charitable person
(12:41):
and has changed his ways until someone is caught for crimes and
is charged with the crimes of Jean Valjean.
And he has to decide whether or not he wants to go and confess
that he is Jean Valjean and savethis man's life, or if you would
rather live a lie and do more good on his own.
(13:03):
And he chooses to go and confessand save this man from unjust
imprisonment because as a reoffender, this person faces
lifetime back in the prison hulks, which just terrible,
horrible conditions. It's a beautiful story of, of
how his soul changes. And what's really powerful about
it is that Javert, the the man of authority here, the police
(13:27):
officer, the inspector who is tracking Jean Valjean and his
officer like always hunting him,he's not just like a jerk.
He actually has an ethos here that is really beautiful.
He also comes from very impoverished circumstances.
And rather than becoming a criminal, he ends up working on
(13:47):
the side of the law and he caresabout the rule of law.
So the book is a very powerful illustration of justice versus
mercy. And justice versus mercy is an
idea that I come back to a lot. In fact, when I was reading Les
Mis, I was like, oh, I'm so gladthat I am not the first person
(14:08):
to contrast this. I obviously I was not, but it
was nice to just have it spelledout so beautifully.
In fact, I wrote down a quote here.
The narrator has a line that I, I loved, which is the judge
speaks in the name of justice, the priest speaks in the name of
pity, which is nothing but a more lofty justice, Pity being a
synonym for mercy here. And Javert believes very
(14:31):
strongly in the rule of law sentiment.
Doesn't matter why something happened doesn't matter.
What matters is that it did happen and that the consequences
for society if we were to start making exceptions in this way
would be catastrophic. And the book illustrates this
very well. Russell Crowe is not well
(14:51):
respected for his portrayal of Javert in the more recent film,
but in the book he's a very thoughtful character.
You can disagree with him, but Idon't think that Victor Hugo is
unfair to him. That is sort of the best of the
law and order mentality. There is a logic to it.
(15:13):
It's not just being mean spirited.
And I think that makes the storymuch more robust because in in
the movie, Javert feels a littlebit more like a cartoon.
And again, that could be RussellCrowe, but or just in the play
in general, like understanding why someone would so prioritize
the rule of law rather than exonerating circumstances.
(15:38):
Did society or did Jean Valjean's prison time make him
or confirm him in his worst impulses?
That doesn't matter to him. And in fact, us giving ourselves
over to mercy in this way would violate justice and make society
both less just and less mercifulas a result, because people
would take advantage of those forgiving tendencies.
(16:02):
That's one of the reasons why Christianity feels to me
irrational in such a powerful, interesting way.
Like what does it mean to forgive someone 70 * 7 times?
I don't know if you are pessimistic about that.
You are enabling very toxic behavior with how permissive and
freely 1 is forgiving, but I like that it is not irrational.
(16:30):
Faith should ask you to do some irrational things in that way
that makes me laugh. And so it's it's AI find that to
be inspiring or beautiful in a way that is out of step with a
very practical life. I'll be talking more about this
soon. I'm doing a podcast I'm really
excited about that'll be coming out soon where I'm going to talk
(16:51):
much more about these ideas. So that's a case where a story
has a protagonist and an antagonist who are really
well-rounded out that have independent rationale for why
they do things, why they believethings.
And it's it's believable. But we've gone past that now
(17:12):
somewhere in between that book and, and Sopranos, I'm thinking
of just like bad TV westerns andJohn Wayne making several
westerns a year. And it's the good guys versus
the bad guys. The Indians are bad, the, the
Pilgrims are good. There's not a lot of brain power
spent on like more revisionist western takes of maybe The
(17:35):
Pioneers aren't so good. Maybe they have their own moral
complexity. Maybe there are Native Americans
who have their own reasons for doing things.
Maybe there are settlers who areworse than the quote UN quote
savages. If you watch westerns that are
more contemporary, you'll you will notice that that is present
most famously in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.
(17:56):
I think that is the sort of quintessential inverted Western
where The Pioneers come from a corrupt settler colonial
civilization and the Native Americans actually are the good
guys. And then there's a bunch of
things that fall somewhere in between where they're just
trying to make well-rounded humans on both sides.
But in any case, Sopranos, you're meant to identify with
(18:19):
Tony. You're meant to be supportive of
Tony. If you are not supportive of
Tony, it's really hard to watch,you know, dozens of of hours of
this thing. And the same thing happened with
Breaking Bad. And then someone who who watched
Breaking Bad and came away from the with the conclusion that,
you know, Walter White did everything that he did for his
family, which was always a really bizarre thing to say to
(18:43):
me because there's a scene very late in the show where Walt
admits that he did it for himself.
He wanted an empire. He he wanted to be good at
something. He wanted to be more than a
chemistry teacher. And it wasn't just about
providing for his family after he died of cancer.
(19:05):
His criminal lifestyle was driven by cancer, but that might
be more of a proximate cause. The ultimate cause of Walter
White was something more like spiritual fulfillment, being
important, being powerful, beingrespected.
It wasn't just about the money or not only about the money.
And after the money ceased to berelevant, it became about so
(19:26):
much more than that. I don't know if people here
remember, but when the show was active, people would get really
mad at Skyler, his wife, you know, a long-suffering woman,
you know, being married to Walt was not a good experience in so
many ways. Maybe it once was, but he put
(19:47):
his family in in great jeopardy both legal and physical.
Remember people commenting abouthow horrible she was on social
media and on Reddit and places and he's like, are we watching
the same show? Skyler's is concerned for her,
her family's safety and Walt is not.
(20:10):
Skyler's on the side of right here.
But the way that media works is that you end up identifying with
protagonist. You want their goals to be
achieved. That you can end up feeling
manipulated by it. And I think that's increasingly
prominent now. Like one of the reasons why Ted
Lasso was such a popular show, Ithink it's because it just went
(20:35):
back to a protagonist that is onAlloyed.
Good, very obviously good. No one is.
I mean, Can you imagine if Ted Lasso had some sort of weird
dark side? He has some complexity with his
own personal family. And I know there's some of that
going on, but no one's going to argue that he's a, a, a morally
(20:59):
compromised or difficult character.
I'm hard pressed to think of of too many shows, especially the
the really big important shows that everyone is watching at the
time that don't fit this. I mean, Game of Thrones was
potentially the most immoral or nihilistic show that ever
existed in this way. The Littlefinger speech of, you
(21:22):
know, all there is is the ladder.
All there is is the the climb tothe top and stepping on people
to get there. Even the characters that we
thought of as good. I didn't watch all the way
through, so forgive me if I'm I'm getting some of the details
a little bit wrong here. I was not a Game of Thrones
obsessive, but even Daenerys Targaryen, everyone thought that
(21:44):
she was going to be the young breaker of chains.
She was going to free all the slaves and lead this sort of
like just left wing kind of revolts against against the
world in Game of Thrones. And even she ended up becoming a
(22:06):
terrifying leader by the end that you wouldn't you couldn't
necessarily just root for, even though I think a lot of people
did ended up rooting for her andeven name their kids after her
before they they knew what she was going to do.
Oops. I guess that happens sometimes.
Right now, the the show that is doing this is the Last of Us.
(22:29):
So in the game and in the first season of The Last of Us, they
live in this horrible post apocalyptic world where a fungus
has spread that essentially turns people into zombies.
They attack living humans and then those humans reanimate into
(22:50):
being undead in some mycologicalway.
That's pretty disgusting. And in the first season, Joel,
who's a smuggler, is tasked withdelivering Ellie across a
continent to bring her to a medical base of a group called
(23:14):
the Fireflies. Just sort of a rebel group, A
faction within this world where they have a hospital.
He doesn't find this out until later.
But the the point of it is that since Ellie is, is immune from
this fungus, they're going to beable to develop a vaccine from
her blood or, or some sort of tissue.
(23:35):
And as he delivers her there, he's told that the only way to
extract a theoretical vaccine oror cure from Ellie is to take it
out of her brain, because that'sapparently what the fungus
attaches to. And this would require killing
her. And rather than Joel accepting
(23:56):
this as a sacrifice that may save the human race, Joel sides
for Ellie and kills all the doctors and just goes on a
rampage and and pulls Ellie out of there.
And Ellie survives and then he doesn't tell her the truth of
what happens. And so the second season is
about the repercussions of that failure to disclose.
(24:18):
And there's a lot of open questions here about should the
1 be sacrificed to save the many?
What is the duty of a caretaker like Joel to someone like Ellie,
both in telling her the truth and what would she have wanted?
Would she have given her life freely to save humankind or
theoretically save humankind or not?
(24:39):
There's there's much ambiguity here.
Joel has a Han Solo S quality, both in terms of his profession
but also in his attitude. He's gruff, sort of jaded, seen
it all. And he's mercenary.
Like he even calls LA cargo to her face like she's not a
person. He's interested in the money.
And if this sounds like Han Solo, it's because they're very
(25:01):
much of a similar ilk. That is who they are.
I'm going to get into this later.
This is a a topic that I I care a lot about and I'm going to
talk more about this type of archetype.
I'm not even sure what you call it.
I think I'm going to call it theredeemed rogue because it's
something that you can see in places like Rick from
Casablanca, Han Solo from Star Wars, Clive Owens character from
(25:25):
Children of Men. Even in places this is a weaker
connection, but I think it also works.
It's also true of Miles and Sideways.
These are characters who used tobe hopeful, used to believe in
things, and then stopped. They're no longer trying,
they're no longer morally ambitious.
(25:46):
They're interested in themselvesand advancing their own interest
in a world gone bad. And the arc of the story is
built around them recommitting themselves to believing in
literally anything again. But those examples I gave are
all examples where the protagonist learns and grows and
realizes that their self-interest is an insufficient
(26:11):
envelope for their lives. They in fact need to change.
That belief system is not givingthem what they want, and that
they need to make themselves vulnerable and to believe in
things again in order to do anything noteworthy at all.
And Joel gets like halfway there, but so much of his quote
UN quote protection of Ellie is about his own trauma of losing
(26:34):
his daughter in the first episode in the very beginning.
And Ellie is being a, a surrogate daughter and wanting
to replay it and protect her. So we're not even left with a
sense of of Joel's moral transformation because in fact,
it's unclear if he even did the right thing that he do it for
traumatized and maybe selfish reasons and or selfish reasons.
(26:55):
It's hard to know. It's not straightforward.
Lee Joel did something good, butso much of antihero content
doesn't even make an attempt to show moral transformation.
Tony dances around it for the entire series because he's going
to therapy and he's talking to Doctor Melfi about how hard it
(27:19):
is for him to do this job and how hard it is to be a gangster
and the sad hard things that arenecessary to get it done.
But there's never a sense of and, and therefore I might give
it up. In fact, people who give up the
lifestyle and Sopranos are haunted down and there's there's
(27:41):
no leaving it. Especially once you're a made
man in the show and you're you're like truly a member of
the organization. You don't get to retire.
That's a big part of the show. If that's not how it works, Tony
actually never has much of a chance for moral transformation.
Most of that action inside of the narrative takes place in his
(28:03):
family members. Carmela, his wife, who acts the
absolute hell out of that role if you ever watch it.
She's faced with several moral decisions about whether to leave
Tony and to do something else, and she ultimately waffles and
and stays with him. Anthony Junior, Tony's son,
(28:24):
faces questions about whether ornot he can supersede fate.
He has so much momentum that's pushing him towards this mafia
lifestyle, and the question for him is, can he escape the center
of gravity that's just sucking him into this way of being?
And the same thing happened to Tony, too.
(28:45):
It's unclear if he was going to go into the same line of work as
as his father. But there is this sort of fate
or caste system dynamic where it's like once you're caught in
this family cycle, like you haveto try really hard or be really
smart to to come out of it. Meadow, Tony and Carmelo's
daughter, she does escape and goes to school in New York and
(29:11):
lives a normal life and escapes the falling into marrying
someone from this field and becoming her mother, but only
just barely because she has a, avery deep romance with someone
who's very, with a Jackie juniorvery involved in, in this
criminal lifestyle. He's also someone that was
(29:32):
starting to pull away and he wasgoing to Rutgers and also just
sort of fell back into this sortof like criminal pattern of his
of his parents and and his family.
And he ends up dying and there'sa big question of what would
have happened to Meadow had he not died?
Would Meadow have married him and just become Carmela?
(29:53):
There's so many questions like this that are really interesting
but but most of the characters fail at it.
Like even Meadow, she ends up making peace with the fact that
her dad is in the mob and that that's a normal career choice
that someone can make. Almost in the same way that if
you watch the original Godfather, Michael Corleone, Al
(30:17):
Pacino has a very famous conversation with Diane Keaton
where Diane Keaton is saying, you know, senators don't have
men killed Michael. And he says, well, of course
they do. And, and Michael and his father
are no different from other powerful men.
And Meadow coming to that same conclusion that her dad is no
(30:39):
different from other powerful men.
This link is not made explicitlyso much as I'm reading into this
and I'm sort of surprised Sopranos don't reference that
scene around that because this is such a Sopranos is famously
postmodern and self referential to as being.
Everyone within the show are bigfans of mobster movies and so
the references here are are deepand they come often.
(31:03):
Maybe there is, I just don't remember.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise meif if they do reference the
original Godfather scene for this, but the entire family has
these moments of, of moral testing of can they escape the
pull of this lifestyle And most of them fail it.
The only person that we could consider that got out, which is
(31:25):
Meadow. It still ends up blessing her
dad's behavior and career choiceby virtue of continued
association. And she's like, there's a
blessing there. There's a coming to peace
because she she struggles with it for a long time of what do I
do with this? And ends up just sort of at some
point accepting that this is theway that it is and that she
(31:46):
cares about her family and is nolonger at ideological odds or at
war with her own family. So essentially everyone that I
can think of, at least within the Soprano family core unit
there is a moral failure, but only Tony seemingly has very
little chance to break out of the lifestyle as a whole and
(32:09):
seemingly barely entertains it at all.
I think content like this is badfor us culturally.
I think the prominence of the antihero relates to climate
action in several ways. One of the things that I think
made Trump a popular political candidate is that he sort of
(32:33):
embraced an antihero status. One of the things that I
associate quite strongly with him is this sense that America
is not exceptional. American rhetoric, especially
presidential rhetoric, is very powerfully rooted in American
exceptionalism. And there's plenty of ways we
(32:53):
can poke at it. And it's fine if you're
listening and you think it's alla load of horse crap.
But America is an idea. The mythology and the idea of
America is that anyone can come here, start over.
Your last name no longer matters.
In the old country, your name mattered a lot.
(33:16):
Were you part of the aristocracy?
Literally doesn't matter here. Or theoretically it should not.
We started from first principlesabout what kind of government
and society we would like to have.
We stated explicitly, and it's something that you can join, not
by blood, you know, not by dissent.
(33:37):
It is by adopting those ideas one can become an American.
And we've been grappling with a failure to live up to those
ideals ever since, of democracy and liberty and justice, things
that are always incomplete and always a work in progress.
But we very much have the idea, the striving that America is
(34:02):
meant to be a place the rest of the world can look to, that
breaks us out of the old world and the old way of doing things.
And that rhetoric. Can you just see like a I'm
looking at literally out of the window.
I'm at 90 in Seattle right now. I'm looking out the window and I
(34:22):
can see an American flag in a building flapping.
I just imagine that behind me right now, there's a, you know,
hand on my heart, American flag flapping, and it probably sounds
cheesy. I imagine many people listening,
whether left of center or right of center listening, might hear
that and say those are either bad ideas, they're incomplete,
(34:44):
they're fatally flawed, we've never even come close to this,
or it's no longer relevant to current reality.
Like, whatever. There's plenty of ways to pick
out what I just said. You don't have to just take it.
But ideally, you can probably recognize what I'm saying as
part of our civic mythology of being an American, and Trump had
a tendency to not play into thatrhetoric very much.
(35:08):
In fact, rather than America as a beautiful and bountiful place
of opportunity for all and a place of ever increasing moral
virtue, Trump tends to focus on rhetoric of that's all baloney.
The world is taking advantage ofus and we're actually just
(35:31):
looking out for our own interests.
Every other country in the worldlooks after their own interests.
Why don't we? Why are we taking bad deals with
people when we could be looking out for our own selves?
Because it puts set a game theoretic disadvantage by not
doing this. And I think a lot of people know
that the rhetoric is a little bit hokey, a little bit goofy,
and we never quite get there. I think someone just taking that
(35:53):
down a peg and saying like that's, you know, that's that's
for the hoi polloi, but you're smarter than that.
Like you know that we're actually just as geopolitically
realist and orientation as any other country, right?
He uses different words for saying it, but I think there's
something like that that has an anti heroic feel to it.
I think one of the reasons why the anti hero became such a
(36:15):
popular archetype for a protagonist in media is that we
got sick of those John Wayne shows where the good was good
and the bad was bad. We knew who was on which side
and who you wanted to get killedand who you wanted to to win the
day. And that's what media taught us
to to root for is very simple. And when he had shows that had
(36:36):
anti heroes that had moral complexity to them, that was a
revelation. That was a moment that we
realized that you could tell complex stories in the same way
that in the novel, like I mentioned with Javert and Jean
Valjean from from Les Mis, thoseare characters that are
oppositional. They are antagonistic to one
another and yet they are flesh and blood.
(37:00):
Their internal logic holds. It's not just like 1 is the bad
guy because he's mean and stupid.
Not so like those are rounded out characters and that's really
great. I've referenced this before in
other shows too, but I think Tolstoy is a master of this as
well. Reading something like Anna
Karenina was a revelation for mewhen I first read it years and
years ago because I I would havethe sort of kaleidoscopic
(37:23):
empathy where I could identify which each of the characters,
whenever the chapter would change and we would change into
their perspective and be learning about their inner life.
Like, Oh yeah, I this is like a real person.
I get this. I I've had some of these same
feelings, same thoughts, and that's a really beautiful thing
and television doesn't have thatas much.
It's hard to to share all of those things with a purely
(37:45):
visual medium like television orcinema.
But with the long form nature ofTV, we are able to explore some
of these anti heroic elements where we had just more time to
sit with Tony and understand what made him tick, what made
him feel sorrow, some of his conflict.
Even if he failed to achieve moral transformation in the way
(38:05):
that we might hope from a protagonist in a show, there was
enough there that gave us something to to hold on to, even
if it was maybe more plot driventhan necessarily moral driven or
Interstate driven. Since the inauguration and Trump
became president in a second time, there have been a number
(38:26):
of these more cynical changes where I understand why companies
are doing this. I'm not necessarily judging
anyone for doing so, but focusing on regional economic
development, focusing on American supply chains.
And I get it. They're trying to pursue climate
and other goals under rhetoric and often does have those
benefits too. It's not an insincere way of
(38:48):
framing their work, but of of changing these things.
And I haven't always liked this.And I don't know that I've
always felt morally courageous enough to like this publicly.
But I think projects like all wecan save.
And what if we get it right fromDoctor Ayanna Johnson?
Parts of me at points I felt more cynical and like unable to
(39:10):
appreciate that work. I think being hopeful in this
way is an act of supreme vulnerability.
It's way easier to look at a situation like this as a quote
UN quote realist and accept thatyou may have to compromise your
values a little bit or your change your rhetoric to tack to
(39:34):
the wind and be more politicallypalatable.
There's something beautiful about someone just believing in
the good of humanity and wondering about what if we
created a beautiful world and weactually did commit ourselves
to, you know, high flying rhetoric that a cynic might look
(39:57):
at and say, you know what? America was never exceptional.
It was always a little bit of a lie, a little bit of a
mythology. I like when someone says,
actually, we're constantly reinventing ourselves, and even
if we fall short of that rhetoric, it's still a beautiful
(40:17):
idea that we should believe in and continue working towards.
And I think climate activism andcarbon removal are very much in
that same category too. To quote the famous X-Files
image, I want to believe. I think you want to believe too.
(40:37):
It's not as beautiful of a placeif we can't actually feel that
hope in our hearts. And when our media is so focused
on anti heroes and moral complexity, we start to lose
moral authority. Watching shows like that, it's
hard to know who to root for. And then when you look outside
(41:00):
of media, back to the real world, while you turn your gaze
back, are you making excuses formoral complexity in our leaders?
There are probably some cases where moral complexity is the
right frame to understand human behavior and causality.
There are many cases though, where having a strong moral
(41:21):
bright line is much more important.
And our media, insofar as it is focused on anti heroes and moral
complexity, is training us out of simple good versus evil
stories and into moral complexity.
But it's not the good kind of moral complexity.
Like there isn't Les Mis. It's the bad kind of complexity
(41:43):
where there's no good. All there is is the latter.
And all you can do is make sure your own family is taken care of
and your political status is going well and upwardly
ascendant. I'm going on record right now
that as someone who can be occasionally a little bit
(42:04):
contrarian, can be a little bit closed off emotionally, can be a
little bit tight on what I thinkthe opportunities are for human
flourishing in the world. I don't want, I don't want to be
that person. I want to be someone who hopes.
(42:28):
If we're not doing that, then I thought, what are we doing here?
That's all to say, I'm declaringmyself ASAP.
I'm OK with that. I want content that helps me
proclaim moral authority, that teaches me what I believe.
But not in a pedantic way either.
(42:50):
One coda I will add to this beautiful Symphony I've just
composed. Not really.
But this one little note I will give you though on this topic
though, is I also don't like it when documentaries are
especially bad at this. But when they are heavily
editorial and they tell you essentially how to think, at the
(43:12):
end of it, they make a case thatyou're supposed to accept or
reject and ideally accept. And I've always felt pandered to
by that rather than letting me make my own conclusions a little
bit more. Maybe the difference here is
just skill and a film that I just thought of that I I really
love that. If you haven't seen it, it might
(43:32):
be the most interesting documentary I've ever seen in my
entire life. The Act of Killing, which is
about the anti communist effortsin Indonesia in the 60's.
The filmmaker tracks down several men who were involved in
the mass killings of alleged communists during the Cold War
(43:53):
in Indonesia, and he convinces them to reenact how these
killings would go and allow him to film the reenactments,
presumably for some sort of anniversary of celebrating their
activities. And I keep saying quote, UN
quote in quote, UN quote, savingthe Indonesian nation.
(44:14):
And as they are reenacting thesekillings that these these men
did themselves years and years ago, they'll say things like,
well, we can't do it this way. It is how it happened.
But this makes us look like the bad guys.
And in the process of reliving and and showing someone else
(44:35):
what happened, there ends up having a, a a moral
confrontation inside the subjects of the documentary.
You could also just make a documentary that shows all the
bad things that happened in Indonesia and tells us how to
think about it. But somehow watching these men
come to terms with the actions that they did and justifying it
(44:58):
decades later, I don't, I didn'tfeel pandered to at all.
It had sublime moral authority without any of the, you know,
the end of Food Inc or whatever,where it's like and write your
congressperson and like take these actions.
And this is exactly what you should do and feel with regard
(45:18):
to the subject matter of this film.
Something about the way the act of killing did.
It was the best of both of thosethings.
It was morally indisputable and it did not pander.
It did not spoon feed or editorialize in a way that I
felt was manipulative or or pedantic.
(45:40):
In some ways it was didactic, but in the best kind of open my
mind, I'm still thinking about that film a very long time after
I saw it. So I'm not saying that we should
return to the old John Wayne Cowboys and Indians kind of
films. We have our own Dang media
culture to blame for it. Delightful as those programs,
(46:03):
maybe. I've certainly enjoyed.
I don't even know how many loadsof them that feature anti
heroes. But the world, such as it is,
has room for heroes too. It can be cooler to be an anti
hero, but as I'll discuss in a future episode, it's much cooler
(46:24):
to be an anti hero who becomes ahero like all of the characters
that I named like Theo from Children of Men, Han Solo.
Rick from Casablanca is perhaps the best known example of this.
By the end of Casablanca, he decides to rejoin the resistance
(46:45):
movement against the Nazis, something that he he once did
until he was heartbroken and wasno longer able to do so.
So if you find yourself with a broken heart in this way but
want to believe again, I'm giving you permission to believe
again. It's OK to do that.
(47:07):
Our culture doesn't want you to do that.
Go ahead and do it. Believe again.
It's cool to believe again. I'll leave you with that.
Thanks so much for listening. That was a very fun, mostly
freestyled monologue based upon an article where Vince Gilligan
(47:31):
is quoted talking about anti heroes and it very much echoes
my own thoughts. I hope you enjoyed this.
If so, share it out, send it to a friend.
Thanks so much for listening andI hope you have a wonderful day.
Hello, this is your host, Ross Kenyon.
I'm doing something that I have not done before.
I feel like I did a long time ago, but it's been a while.
But in trying to make this show financially sustainable, I was
able to pick up a couple of sponsors.
It would do me a great favor if you could please listen and
learn more about each of them since they offer something to
(00:20):
different parts of our audience that I think you will care about
These two sponsors and thank youfrom the bottom of my heart for
becoming sponsors are off stream.
And our bionics, our Bionics is a project developer.
They're the ones that are actually pulling carbon dioxide
out of the atmosphere and storing it and they are doing it
through trees. You know, trees have had a
(00:42):
difficult time within carbon removal.
You should go listen to the showthat I did with with Lizette
Louis from our Bionics. We did a show probably about six
weeks or 8 weeks ago and we talked about how the trajectory
of trees, Afro station reforestation within carbon
removal has played out, how thatimpacts whether we are storing
(01:03):
biological material and anoxic environments for carbon removal
purposes alone. Arbonics is doing something a
little bit differently. Europe has over 14,000,000
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Not a lot is happening there. A lot of it once was forced.
It was cleared a long time ago for farming, but the global food
supply and better yields elsewhere has meant that a lot
(01:25):
of this land is just underutilized and we haven't
quite figured out what to do with it yet.
So our bonnets uses technology to help land owners find this
land and then restore it back into carbon, removing biodiverse
forest. And that last point is really
important because a lot of forestry that takes place is a
monoculture, which is maybe solving one problem, but it's
not solving the overall Poly crisis, ecological crisis.
(01:48):
So our bionics pursues that way of going to market in order to
offer corporates high quality data backed European carbon
removal credits, helping companies reach their
sustainability goals with maximum trust.
So goals of that conversation with Lizette.
I'll put a link in the show notes if you want some more.
And if you're thinking about this in terms of a cycle here,
(02:09):
Off Stream would be a service provider to our Bionics.
Off Stream is there to make carbon compliance simple for
project developers. If you're listening, if you work
at a carbon removal company or company producing other types of
carbon assets, the data portion of this is super challenging.
If you're listening and you haven't had to read through a
methodology or any registry documentation, you'll probably
(02:31):
live longer than the rest of us who have.
It's non trivial. It's difficult, and that's not
to say that it shouldn't be difficult.
Much of this should be. So we make sure that quality is
actually taking place when carbon is removed or avoided or
anything like that. And Off Stream exists to make it
easier for product developers tonot get stuck on the level of
(02:52):
data. Barsha Ramesh Walsh, Off Stream
CEO, She likens their platform to being Agps For your carbon
credit and your MRP plans. It's guiding you through the
jungle of certifications and compliance.
Oh, I love that. That's such a fun, visual way of
putting it. This is a world where you can
develop and iterate on your project.
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LC as in minutes, not weeks. Where you can focus on doing the
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in carbon removal where minimizing headcount may be
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(03:34):
going. And Off Stream is here to help
you do that. They're here to help you with
your LCA needs. If you're listening, you're a
project developer, you know one and they are having persistent
migraines for paperwork like go over to use off stream.com.
Tell them that Off Stream can help them handle the quote UN
quote boring bits while they canfocus on saving the planet off
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stream because paperwork shouldn't be a full time job.
Crack me up. Thank you Off Stream and our
bonics for sponsoring Reversing Climate Change.
I'm really appreciative that you're able to help me do this.
It means a lot. If you're listening to this and
you'd like to sponsor Reversing Climate Change, feel free to
send me an e-mail. I'll put the e-mail in the show
(04:17):
notes too. And let's talk.
And OK, now I'm going into the show proper, the intro.
Here it is, and thank you again for listening.
Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change
(04:38):
podcast. I'm Ross Kenny and I'm a long
time climate tech and carbon removal entrepreneur.
Today I'd like to share with yousome thoughts on why the
antihero is such a popular archetype or structure for
telling a story in American culture.
I don't think it's an especiallygood thing, and I'm going to
tell you why. That's very, very difficult to
(05:02):
have a show worthy of critical acclaim without having anti
heroic elements to it. By which I mean an anti hero is
someone often in the slot of theprotagonist.
And classically, the protagonistis someone that you are rooting
for, that has admirable qualities, that you want to see
(05:23):
them supersede their difficulties and, and grow and
and and win. And an antihero is someone that
is, you know, maybe more morallycomplex.
They're not a villain. It's not like a straight
reversal always. But it is one of those cases
where they fall into this fuzzier area in between
(05:43):
television just littered with antiheroes.
They're all over the place now. And it is commonly tracked back
to Tony Soprano and the, you know, potentially the first
great, truly artistic televisionseries, The Sopranos.
Maybe you've heard of it. It.
It has a similar moment for the medium in a similar way that
(06:07):
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles is
considered to be the first art rock album.
And people can quibble over whether or not it truly deserves
that status or not. But in popular memory, that is
the role that this album serves.Before that, rock was much more
saccharine, much goofier. Songs weren't necessarily
(06:30):
connected, concept albums were not that common.
And Sergeant Pepper's changed that.
Rock became a medium that could be as sublime as any other
musical media style, and that was a great coming of age
moment. Television before Sopranos.
People associate very strongly with sitcoms and with soap
(06:51):
operas, but not high art. And when HBO produced The
Sopranos, that was considered tobe a transcendent moment where
television had arrived. This is a great thing, and while
it was a great thing for television, and presumably we've
all benefited from the birth of a new cultural medium that has
(07:15):
been so influential, has enabledso much more storytelling at
such greater length. It's been a terrific thing.
There's so many shows that are worth watching in the post
Sopranos era, whereas there's very few pre Sopranos shows that
are worth going back and revisiting.
By which I mean with filmmaking,there are many films that go
(07:37):
back essentially what to the Lumiere brothers as things that
you should watch from more than 100 years ago.
That's not really true for television.
If you're a comedy nerd, you want to go back and watch Johnny
Carson or Carol Burnett, or you want to experience the popular
cultural value of something likeAll in the Family or The
Jeffersons. Like, OK, there's that Seinfeld.
But Sopranos, for whatever reason, is considered to be the
(08:01):
moment for better, for worse. It may not actually be true.
Maybe there are some shows that brought high art to television
much earlier. But for the purpose of this
narrative, it's Sopranos. That's that's what it is.
I've seen Sopranos all the way through I think two or three
times make call it 2 1/2 times. It's a great show.
It's funny, it's supernatural. It's it's so strange in so many
(08:24):
ways. A lot of unanswered questions.
But one of the things about the show is that as you're watching
it, if you're someone like me, Ihad the feeling of being
manipulated and not in a not in a way that felt intentional,
like I didn't feel like I was being LED astray by the
(08:44):
producers of the content. But I did feel that the longer
that you watch content like that, the more you empathize
with the protagonist. Because if you don't have
empathy for the protagonist, it's really hard to keep
watching a show. You need someone that you're at
the very least curious what's going to happen with them.
(09:05):
But ideally you are emotionally invested in what is happening to
them. And if you become emotionally
invested in someone like Tony Soprano, you start thinking
thoughts like, I really hope Tony outsmarts the FBI or I
really hope Tony doesn't get caught with his Guma and
Carmela. His wife divorces him.
(09:26):
And as you're watching, you're like, why am I thinking that?
This is a terrible thought? He probably should be divorced.
He's, you know, a philandering, unfaithful husband.
And Carmela's pretty miserable for the duration of the show and
he is doing very bad things to the people of of North Jersey
(09:48):
and should not be out on the streets able to do more of them.
It's weird if you watch what's happening inside of yourself as
this show is almost generating empathy against your will.
And This is why it's considered to be great part because it was
humanizing. It's really hard to sustain
(10:09):
viewership or interest in a workof art if there is not empathy
being generated ideally for multiple characters.
Like a good example of this is that recently I've been reading
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. The movie version or the more
recent one doesn't do a great job and in fact I don't know
(10:30):
that the musical does a great job of exploring why Javier is
an interesting character that's worth support in the book.
It's, it's a really rich story and character.
So I'm just going to run you through this.
If you you've never seen or, or or read Les Miserables.
Jean Valjean is convicted of stealing a loaf of bread to feed
(10:51):
his family. He had sentenced for five years
in just horrible conditions in the French prison system in the
early 1800s. He's overseen by a policeman, a
warden named Javert, and he tries to escape several times so
that his sentence ends up something like 19 years.
(11:12):
And he is marked by having a yellow passport document so that
people know he's a dangerous convict or believe that he's a
dangerous convict. No one will take him in.
He's just a pariah. And he goes to a Bishop's house
almost by accident. And the Bishop welcomes him in
(11:33):
as a godly act. And rather than appreciating
that for his own sake, he falls back into his ways, that the
book is about how the prison system essentially inculcated
this sense of criminality into him and he can't break out of it
at that moment. And he steals the silver of the
(11:55):
Bishop and is caught for doing so.
And then it's taken back to the Bishop.
And the Bishop tells the the police that captured Jean
Valjean that actually he had given him the silverware as a
gift and tells him that he bought his soul for God and that
his job is now go be a changed and redeemed man.
(12:18):
And even still he can't quite doit and has one more incident
where he essentially steals froma small child and then leaves
and from that point on is invisible to the authorities and
is not tracked down essentially.And he becomes a a factory owner
through some innovation and becomes a very charitable person
(12:41):
and has changed his ways until someone is caught for crimes and
is charged with the crimes of Jean Valjean.
And he has to decide whether or not he wants to go and confess
that he is Jean Valjean and savethis man's life, or if you would
rather live a lie and do more good on his own.
(13:03):
And he chooses to go and confessand save this man from unjust
imprisonment because as a reoffender, this person faces
lifetime back in the prison hulks, which just terrible,
horrible conditions. It's a beautiful story of, of
how his soul changes. And what's really powerful about
it is that Javert, the the man of authority here, the police
(13:27):
officer, the inspector who is tracking Jean Valjean and his
officer like always hunting him,he's not just like a jerk.
He actually has an ethos here that is really beautiful.
He also comes from very impoverished circumstances.
And rather than becoming a criminal, he ends up working on
(13:47):
the side of the law and he caresabout the rule of law.
So the book is a very powerful illustration of justice versus
mercy. And justice versus mercy is an
idea that I come back to a lot. In fact, when I was reading Les
Mis, I was like, oh, I'm so gladthat I am not the first person
(14:08):
to contrast this. I obviously I was not, but it
was nice to just have it spelledout so beautifully.
In fact, I wrote down a quote here.
The narrator has a line that I, I loved, which is the judge
speaks in the name of justice, the priest speaks in the name of
pity, which is nothing but a more lofty justice, Pity being a
synonym for mercy here. And Javert believes very
(14:31):
strongly in the rule of law sentiment.
Doesn't matter why something happened doesn't matter.
What matters is that it did happen and that the consequences
for society if we were to start making exceptions in this way
would be catastrophic. And the book illustrates this
very well. Russell Crowe is not well
(14:51):
respected for his portrayal of Javert in the more recent film,
but in the book he's a very thoughtful character.
You can disagree with him, but Idon't think that Victor Hugo is
unfair to him. That is sort of the best of the
law and order mentality. There is a logic to it.
(15:13):
It's not just being mean spirited.
And I think that makes the storymuch more robust because in in
the movie, Javert feels a littlebit more like a cartoon.
And again, that could be RussellCrowe, but or just in the play
in general, like understanding why someone would so prioritize
the rule of law rather than exonerating circumstances.
(15:38):
Did society or did Jean Valjean's prison time make him
or confirm him in his worst impulses?
That doesn't matter to him. And in fact, us giving ourselves
over to mercy in this way would violate justice and make society
both less just and less mercifulas a result, because people
would take advantage of those forgiving tendencies.
(16:02):
That's one of the reasons why Christianity feels to me
irrational in such a powerful, interesting way.
Like what does it mean to forgive someone 70 * 7 times?
I don't know if you are pessimistic about that.
You are enabling very toxic behavior with how permissive and
freely 1 is forgiving, but I like that it is not irrational.
(16:30):
Faith should ask you to do some irrational things in that way
that makes me laugh. And so it's it's AI find that to
be inspiring or beautiful in a way that is out of step with a
very practical life. I'll be talking more about this
soon. I'm doing a podcast I'm really
excited about that'll be coming out soon where I'm going to talk
(16:51):
much more about these ideas. So that's a case where a story
has a protagonist and an antagonist who are really
well-rounded out that have independent rationale for why
they do things, why they believethings.
And it's it's believable. But we've gone past that now
(17:12):
somewhere in between that book and, and Sopranos, I'm thinking
of just like bad TV westerns andJohn Wayne making several
westerns a year. And it's the good guys versus
the bad guys. The Indians are bad, the, the
Pilgrims are good. There's not a lot of brain power
spent on like more revisionist western takes of maybe The
(17:35):
Pioneers aren't so good. Maybe they have their own moral
complexity. Maybe there are Native Americans
who have their own reasons for doing things.
Maybe there are settlers who areworse than the quote UN quote
savages. If you watch westerns that are
more contemporary, you'll you will notice that that is present
most famously in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.
(17:56):
I think that is the sort of quintessential inverted Western
where The Pioneers come from a corrupt settler colonial
civilization and the Native Americans actually are the good
guys. And then there's a bunch of
things that fall somewhere in between where they're just
trying to make well-rounded humans on both sides.
But in any case, Sopranos, you're meant to identify with
(18:19):
Tony. You're meant to be supportive of
Tony. If you are not supportive of
Tony, it's really hard to watch,you know, dozens of of hours of
this thing. And the same thing happened with
Breaking Bad. And then someone who who watched
Breaking Bad and came away from the with the conclusion that,
you know, Walter White did everything that he did for his
family, which was always a really bizarre thing to say to
(18:43):
me because there's a scene very late in the show where Walt
admits that he did it for himself.
He wanted an empire. He he wanted to be good at
something. He wanted to be more than a
chemistry teacher. And it wasn't just about
providing for his family after he died of cancer.
(19:05):
His criminal lifestyle was driven by cancer, but that might
be more of a proximate cause. The ultimate cause of Walter
White was something more like spiritual fulfillment, being
important, being powerful, beingrespected.
It wasn't just about the money or not only about the money.
And after the money ceased to berelevant, it became about so
(19:26):
much more than that. I don't know if people here
remember, but when the show was active, people would get really
mad at Skyler, his wife, you know, a long-suffering woman,
you know, being married to Walt was not a good experience in so
many ways. Maybe it once was, but he put
(19:47):
his family in in great jeopardy both legal and physical.
Remember people commenting abouthow horrible she was on social
media and on Reddit and places and he's like, are we watching
the same show? Skyler's is concerned for her,
her family's safety and Walt is not.
(20:10):
Skyler's on the side of right here.
But the way that media works is that you end up identifying with
protagonist. You want their goals to be
achieved. That you can end up feeling
manipulated by it. And I think that's increasingly
prominent now. Like one of the reasons why Ted
Lasso was such a popular show, Ithink it's because it just went
(20:35):
back to a protagonist that is onAlloyed.
Good, very obviously good. No one is.
I mean, Can you imagine if Ted Lasso had some sort of weird
dark side? He has some complexity with his
own personal family. And I know there's some of that
going on, but no one's going to argue that he's a, a, a morally
(20:59):
compromised or difficult character.
I'm hard pressed to think of of too many shows, especially the
the really big important shows that everyone is watching at the
time that don't fit this. I mean, Game of Thrones was
potentially the most immoral or nihilistic show that ever
existed in this way. The Littlefinger speech of, you
(21:22):
know, all there is is the ladder.
All there is is the the climb tothe top and stepping on people
to get there. Even the characters that we
thought of as good. I didn't watch all the way
through, so forgive me if I'm I'm getting some of the details
a little bit wrong here. I was not a Game of Thrones
obsessive, but even Daenerys Targaryen, everyone thought that
(21:44):
she was going to be the young breaker of chains.
She was going to free all the slaves and lead this sort of
like just left wing kind of revolts against against the
world in Game of Thrones. And even she ended up becoming a
(22:06):
terrifying leader by the end that you wouldn't you couldn't
necessarily just root for, even though I think a lot of people
did ended up rooting for her andeven name their kids after her
before they they knew what she was going to do.
Oops. I guess that happens sometimes.
Right now, the the show that is doing this is the Last of Us.
(22:29):
So in the game and in the first season of The Last of Us, they
live in this horrible post apocalyptic world where a fungus
has spread that essentially turns people into zombies.
They attack living humans and then those humans reanimate into
(22:50):
being undead in some mycologicalway.
That's pretty disgusting. And in the first season, Joel,
who's a smuggler, is tasked withdelivering Ellie across a
continent to bring her to a medical base of a group called
(23:14):
the Fireflies. Just sort of a rebel group, A
faction within this world where they have a hospital.
He doesn't find this out until later.
But the the point of it is that since Ellie is, is immune from
this fungus, they're going to beable to develop a vaccine from
her blood or, or some sort of tissue.
(23:35):
And as he delivers her there, he's told that the only way to
extract a theoretical vaccine oror cure from Ellie is to take it
out of her brain, because that'sapparently what the fungus
attaches to. And this would require killing
her. And rather than Joel accepting
(23:56):
this as a sacrifice that may save the human race, Joel sides
for Ellie and kills all the doctors and just goes on a
rampage and and pulls Ellie out of there.
And Ellie survives and then he doesn't tell her the truth of
what happens. And so the second season is
about the repercussions of that failure to disclose.
(24:18):
And there's a lot of open questions here about should the
1 be sacrificed to save the many?
What is the duty of a caretaker like Joel to someone like Ellie,
both in telling her the truth and what would she have wanted?
Would she have given her life freely to save humankind or
theoretically save humankind or not?
(24:39):
There's there's much ambiguity here.
Joel has a Han Solo S quality, both in terms of his profession
but also in his attitude. He's gruff, sort of jaded, seen
it all. And he's mercenary.
Like he even calls LA cargo to her face like she's not a
person. He's interested in the money.
And if this sounds like Han Solo, it's because they're very
(25:01):
much of a similar ilk. That is who they are.
I'm going to get into this later.
This is a a topic that I I care a lot about and I'm going to
talk more about this type of archetype.
I'm not even sure what you call it.
I think I'm going to call it theredeemed rogue because it's
something that you can see in places like Rick from
Casablanca, Han Solo from Star Wars, Clive Owens character from
(25:25):
Children of Men. Even in places this is a weaker
connection, but I think it also works.
It's also true of Miles and Sideways.
These are characters who used tobe hopeful, used to believe in
things, and then stopped. They're no longer trying,
they're no longer morally ambitious.
(25:46):
They're interested in themselvesand advancing their own interest
in a world gone bad. And the arc of the story is
built around them recommitting themselves to believing in
literally anything again. But those examples I gave are
all examples where the protagonist learns and grows and
realizes that their self-interest is an insufficient
(26:11):
envelope for their lives. They in fact need to change.
That belief system is not givingthem what they want, and that
they need to make themselves vulnerable and to believe in
things again in order to do anything noteworthy at all.
And Joel gets like halfway there, but so much of his quote
UN quote protection of Ellie is about his own trauma of losing
(26:34):
his daughter in the first episode in the very beginning.
And Ellie is being a, a surrogate daughter and wanting
to replay it and protect her. So we're not even left with a
sense of of Joel's moral transformation because in fact,
it's unclear if he even did the right thing that he do it for
traumatized and maybe selfish reasons and or selfish reasons.
(26:55):
It's hard to know. It's not straightforward.
Lee Joel did something good, butso much of antihero content
doesn't even make an attempt to show moral transformation.
Tony dances around it for the entire series because he's going
to therapy and he's talking to Doctor Melfi about how hard it
(27:19):
is for him to do this job and how hard it is to be a gangster
and the sad hard things that arenecessary to get it done.
But there's never a sense of and, and therefore I might give
it up. In fact, people who give up the
lifestyle and Sopranos are haunted down and there's there's
(27:41):
no leaving it. Especially once you're a made
man in the show and you're you're like truly a member of
the organization. You don't get to retire.
That's a big part of the show. If that's not how it works, Tony
actually never has much of a chance for moral transformation.
Most of that action inside of the narrative takes place in his
(28:03):
family members. Carmela, his wife, who acts the
absolute hell out of that role if you ever watch it.
She's faced with several moral decisions about whether to leave
Tony and to do something else, and she ultimately waffles and
and stays with him. Anthony Junior, Tony's son,
(28:24):
faces questions about whether ornot he can supersede fate.
He has so much momentum that's pushing him towards this mafia
lifestyle, and the question for him is, can he escape the center
of gravity that's just sucking him into this way of being?
And the same thing happened to Tony, too.
(28:45):
It's unclear if he was going to go into the same line of work as
as his father. But there is this sort of fate
or caste system dynamic where it's like once you're caught in
this family cycle, like you haveto try really hard or be really
smart to to come out of it. Meadow, Tony and Carmelo's
daughter, she does escape and goes to school in New York and
(29:11):
lives a normal life and escapes the falling into marrying
someone from this field and becoming her mother, but only
just barely because she has a, avery deep romance with someone
who's very, with a Jackie juniorvery involved in, in this
criminal lifestyle. He's also someone that was
(29:32):
starting to pull away and he wasgoing to Rutgers and also just
sort of fell back into this sortof like criminal pattern of his
of his parents and and his family.
And he ends up dying and there'sa big question of what would
have happened to Meadow had he not died?
Would Meadow have married him and just become Carmela?
(29:53):
There's so many questions like this that are really interesting
but but most of the characters fail at it.
Like even Meadow, she ends up making peace with the fact that
her dad is in the mob and that that's a normal career choice
that someone can make. Almost in the same way that if
you watch the original Godfather, Michael Corleone, Al
(30:17):
Pacino has a very famous conversation with Diane Keaton
where Diane Keaton is saying, you know, senators don't have
men killed Michael. And he says, well, of course
they do. And, and Michael and his father
are no different from other powerful men.
And Meadow coming to that same conclusion that her dad is no
(30:39):
different from other powerful men.
This link is not made explicitlyso much as I'm reading into this
and I'm sort of surprised Sopranos don't reference that
scene around that because this is such a Sopranos is famously
postmodern and self referential to as being.
Everyone within the show are bigfans of mobster movies and so
the references here are are deepand they come often.
(31:03):
Maybe there is, I just don't remember.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise meif if they do reference the
original Godfather scene for this, but the entire family has
these moments of, of moral testing of can they escape the
pull of this lifestyle And most of them fail it.
The only person that we could consider that got out, which is
(31:25):
Meadow. It still ends up blessing her
dad's behavior and career choiceby virtue of continued
association. And she's like, there's a
blessing there. There's a coming to peace
because she she struggles with it for a long time of what do I
do with this? And ends up just sort of at some
point accepting that this is theway that it is and that she
(31:46):
cares about her family and is nolonger at ideological odds or at
war with her own family. So essentially everyone that I
can think of, at least within the Soprano family core unit
there is a moral failure, but only Tony seemingly has very
little chance to break out of the lifestyle as a whole and
(32:09):
seemingly barely entertains it at all.
I think content like this is badfor us culturally.
I think the prominence of the antihero relates to climate
action in several ways. One of the things that I think
made Trump a popular political candidate is that he sort of
(32:33):
embraced an antihero status. One of the things that I
associate quite strongly with him is this sense that America
is not exceptional. American rhetoric, especially
presidential rhetoric, is very powerfully rooted in American
exceptionalism. And there's plenty of ways we
(32:53):
can poke at it. And it's fine if you're
listening and you think it's alla load of horse crap.
But America is an idea. The mythology and the idea of
America is that anyone can come here, start over.
Your last name no longer matters.
In the old country, your name mattered a lot.
(33:16):
Were you part of the aristocracy?
Literally doesn't matter here. Or theoretically it should not.
We started from first principlesabout what kind of government
and society we would like to have.
We stated explicitly, and it's something that you can join, not
by blood, you know, not by dissent.
(33:37):
It is by adopting those ideas one can become an American.
And we've been grappling with a failure to live up to those
ideals ever since, of democracy and liberty and justice, things
that are always incomplete and always a work in progress.
But we very much have the idea, the striving that America is
(34:02):
meant to be a place the rest of the world can look to, that
breaks us out of the old world and the old way of doing things.
And that rhetoric. Can you just see like a I'm
looking at literally out of the window.
I'm at 90 in Seattle right now. I'm looking out the window and I
(34:22):
can see an American flag in a building flapping.
I just imagine that behind me right now, there's a, you know,
hand on my heart, American flag flapping, and it probably sounds
cheesy. I imagine many people listening,
whether left of center or right of center listening, might hear
that and say those are either bad ideas, they're incomplete,
(34:44):
they're fatally flawed, we've never even come close to this,
or it's no longer relevant to current reality.
Like, whatever. There's plenty of ways to pick
out what I just said. You don't have to just take it.
But ideally, you can probably recognize what I'm saying as
part of our civic mythology of being an American, and Trump had
a tendency to not play into thatrhetoric very much.
(35:08):
In fact, rather than America as a beautiful and bountiful place
of opportunity for all and a place of ever increasing moral
virtue, Trump tends to focus on rhetoric of that's all baloney.
The world is taking advantage ofus and we're actually just
(35:31):
looking out for our own interests.
Every other country in the worldlooks after their own interests.
Why don't we? Why are we taking bad deals with
people when we could be looking out for our own selves?
Because it puts set a game theoretic disadvantage by not
doing this. And I think a lot of people know
that the rhetoric is a little bit hokey, a little bit goofy,
and we never quite get there. I think someone just taking that
(35:53):
down a peg and saying like that's, you know, that's that's
for the hoi polloi, but you're smarter than that.
Like you know that we're actually just as geopolitically
realist and orientation as any other country, right?
He uses different words for saying it, but I think there's
something like that that has an anti heroic feel to it.
I think one of the reasons why the anti hero became such a
(36:15):
popular archetype for a protagonist in media is that we
got sick of those John Wayne shows where the good was good
and the bad was bad. We knew who was on which side
and who you wanted to get killedand who you wanted to to win the
day. And that's what media taught us
to to root for is very simple. And when he had shows that had
(36:36):
anti heroes that had moral complexity to them, that was a
revelation. That was a moment that we
realized that you could tell complex stories in the same way
that in the novel, like I mentioned with Javert and Jean
Valjean from from Les Mis, thoseare characters that are
oppositional. They are antagonistic to one
another and yet they are flesh and blood.
(37:00):
Their internal logic holds. It's not just like 1 is the bad
guy because he's mean and stupid.
Not so like those are rounded out characters and that's really
great. I've referenced this before in
other shows too, but I think Tolstoy is a master of this as
well. Reading something like Anna
Karenina was a revelation for mewhen I first read it years and
years ago because I I would havethe sort of kaleidoscopic
(37:23):
empathy where I could identify which each of the characters,
whenever the chapter would change and we would change into
their perspective and be learning about their inner life.
Like, Oh yeah, I this is like a real person.
I get this. I I've had some of these same
feelings, same thoughts, and that's a really beautiful thing
and television doesn't have thatas much.
It's hard to to share all of those things with a purely
(37:45):
visual medium like television orcinema.
But with the long form nature ofTV, we are able to explore some
of these anti heroic elements where we had just more time to
sit with Tony and understand what made him tick, what made
him feel sorrow, some of his conflict.
Even if he failed to achieve moral transformation in the way
(38:05):
that we might hope from a protagonist in a show, there was
enough there that gave us something to to hold on to, even
if it was maybe more plot driventhan necessarily moral driven or
Interstate driven. Since the inauguration and Trump
became president in a second time, there have been a number
(38:26):
of these more cynical changes where I understand why companies
are doing this. I'm not necessarily judging
anyone for doing so, but focusing on regional economic
development, focusing on American supply chains.
And I get it. They're trying to pursue climate
and other goals under rhetoric and often does have those
benefits too. It's not an insincere way of
(38:48):
framing their work, but of of changing these things.
And I haven't always liked this.And I don't know that I've
always felt morally courageous enough to like this publicly.
But I think projects like all wecan save.
And what if we get it right fromDoctor Ayanna Johnson?
Parts of me at points I felt more cynical and like unable to
(39:10):
appreciate that work. I think being hopeful in this
way is an act of supreme vulnerability.
It's way easier to look at a situation like this as a quote
UN quote realist and accept thatyou may have to compromise your
values a little bit or your change your rhetoric to tack to
(39:34):
the wind and be more politicallypalatable.
There's something beautiful about someone just believing in
the good of humanity and wondering about what if we
created a beautiful world and weactually did commit ourselves
to, you know, high flying rhetoric that a cynic might look
(39:57):
at and say, you know what? America was never exceptional.
It was always a little bit of a lie, a little bit of a
mythology. I like when someone says,
actually, we're constantly reinventing ourselves, and even
if we fall short of that rhetoric, it's still a beautiful
(40:17):
idea that we should believe in and continue working towards.
And I think climate activism andcarbon removal are very much in
that same category too. To quote the famous X-Files
image, I want to believe. I think you want to believe too.
(40:37):
It's not as beautiful of a placeif we can't actually feel that
hope in our hearts. And when our media is so focused
on anti heroes and moral complexity, we start to lose
moral authority. Watching shows like that, it's
hard to know who to root for. And then when you look outside
(41:00):
of media, back to the real world, while you turn your gaze
back, are you making excuses formoral complexity in our leaders?
There are probably some cases where moral complexity is the
right frame to understand human behavior and causality.
There are many cases though, where having a strong moral
(41:21):
bright line is much more important.
And our media, insofar as it is focused on anti heroes and moral
complexity, is training us out of simple good versus evil
stories and into moral complexity.
But it's not the good kind of moral complexity.
Like there isn't Les Mis. It's the bad kind of complexity
(41:43):
where there's no good. All there is is the latter.
And all you can do is make sure your own family is taken care of
and your political status is going well and upwardly
ascendant. I'm going on record right now
that as someone who can be occasionally a little bit
(42:04):
contrarian, can be a little bit closed off emotionally, can be a
little bit tight on what I thinkthe opportunities are for human
flourishing in the world. I don't want, I don't want to be
that person. I want to be someone who hopes.
(42:28):
If we're not doing that, then I thought, what are we doing here?
That's all to say, I'm declaringmyself ASAP.
I'm OK with that. I want content that helps me
proclaim moral authority, that teaches me what I believe.
But not in a pedantic way either.
(42:50):
One coda I will add to this beautiful Symphony I've just
composed. Not really.
But this one little note I will give you though on this topic
though, is I also don't like it when documentaries are
especially bad at this. But when they are heavily
editorial and they tell you essentially how to think, at the
(43:12):
end of it, they make a case thatyou're supposed to accept or
reject and ideally accept. And I've always felt pandered to
by that rather than letting me make my own conclusions a little
bit more. Maybe the difference here is
just skill and a film that I just thought of that I I really
love that. If you haven't seen it, it might
(43:32):
be the most interesting documentary I've ever seen in my
entire life. The Act of Killing, which is
about the anti communist effortsin Indonesia in the 60's.
The filmmaker tracks down several men who were involved in
the mass killings of alleged communists during the Cold War
(43:53):
in Indonesia, and he convinces them to reenact how these
killings would go and allow him to film the reenactments,
presumably for some sort of anniversary of celebrating their
activities. And I keep saying quote, UN
quote in quote, UN quote, savingthe Indonesian nation.
(44:14):
And as they are reenacting thesekillings that these these men
did themselves years and years ago, they'll say things like,
well, we can't do it this way. It is how it happened.
But this makes us look like the bad guys.
And in the process of reliving and and showing someone else
(44:35):
what happened, there ends up having a, a a moral
confrontation inside the subjects of the documentary.
You could also just make a documentary that shows all the
bad things that happened in Indonesia and tells us how to
think about it. But somehow watching these men
come to terms with the actions that they did and justifying it
(44:58):
decades later, I don't, I didn'tfeel pandered to at all.
It had sublime moral authority without any of the, you know,
the end of Food Inc or whatever,where it's like and write your
congressperson and like take these actions.
And this is exactly what you should do and feel with regard
(45:18):
to the subject matter of this film.
Something about the way the act of killing did.
It was the best of both of thosethings.
It was morally indisputable and it did not pander.
It did not spoon feed or editorialize in a way that I
felt was manipulative or or pedantic.
(45:40):
In some ways it was didactic, but in the best kind of open my
mind, I'm still thinking about that film a very long time after
I saw it. So I'm not saying that we should
return to the old John Wayne Cowboys and Indians kind of
films. We have our own Dang media
culture to blame for it. Delightful as those programs,
(46:03):
maybe. I've certainly enjoyed.
I don't even know how many loadsof them that feature anti
heroes. But the world, such as it is,
has room for heroes too. It can be cooler to be an anti
hero, but as I'll discuss in a future episode, it's much cooler
(46:24):
to be an anti hero who becomes ahero like all of the characters
that I named like Theo from Children of Men, Han Solo.
Rick from Casablanca is perhaps the best known example of this.
By the end of Casablanca, he decides to rejoin the resistance
(46:45):
movement against the Nazis, something that he he once did
until he was heartbroken and wasno longer able to do so.
So if you find yourself with a broken heart in this way but
want to believe again, I'm giving you permission to believe
again. It's OK to do that.
(47:07):
Our culture doesn't want you to do that.
Go ahead and do it. Believe again.
It's cool to believe again. I'll leave you with that.
Thanks so much for listening. That was a very fun, mostly
freestyled monologue based upon an article where Vince Gilligan
(47:31):
is quoted talking about anti heroes and it very much echoes
my own thoughts. I hope you enjoyed this.
If so, share it out, send it to a friend.
Thanks so much for listening andI hope you have a wonderful day.
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