Popular Anti-heroes: Origin, Changes, and Influences

Abstract

This paper examines the role of anti-hero works in recent years' film history and their influences on audiences. By incorporating evidence from academic articles in film reviewing and narrative analysis, this paper explores how film producers create novelty anti-hero images to satisfy audiences. This study demonstrates the change in the tastes of audiences by comparing the anti-hero film and television works and classic heroic ones. During the transition process, the differences and similarities between these two kinds of characters also demonstrate the consistent and changed representative ideas in reality. The background of these audiences from different cultures and languages is also considered as the variable factors of their aesthetic view and absorbed information since cultural differences and language barriers could twist the meaning during the information transmission.Through the analysis of relative academic articles, this study found the existence of different social factors, various propositions, and ideologies that cause these anti-hero images' creation and lead to the impact on audiences and their psychological changes. These varied impacts assert both negative and positive influences on them. Negative influence contains the pursuit and imitation of violent scenes and further change into morally- ambiguous ways of thinking, while positive influence includes stress relieving function and reflection of themselves or others.