The Rise of the Anti-Hero

Comparison of Moral Ambiguity in Films

Abstract

Films have often defined the lines between heroes and villains by creating a clear distinction between right and wrong. There has been an increase in research that focuses on the moral grey areas seen in popular entertainment fiction.  The grey areas of morality point to characters having a more ambiguous nature, commonly called anti-heroes. There is little research to date on the increased prevalence of the anti-hero archetype. The main goal of this content analysis was to discern how the morality of the hero-type character has evolved. A small longitudinal sample of American action movies (n=30) from the past 50 years was analyzed; discerned by total gross and popularity ratings.  Morality-As-Cooperation Theory proposed by Curry et al. (2019) was used to determine the levels of the morality of the hero-type character in the coding schema. After each movie was coded, a percentage was computed for moral and immoral actions. The data was then interpreted to gauge whether the characters acted consistently good, showing a prototypical hero; or ambiguously, which would be consistent with an anti-hero archetype. Results of the study revealed that there was a strong positive correlation between the immoral actions of hero-type characters throughout the last fifty years. The findings should help to fill in the gap in the literature on the prevalence of anti-hero-type characters in movies.