Awesome protagonists in movie

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Steve McQueen in Bullitt. Paul Newman in Hud. I can think of many more.
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I tend to root for the most depraved of individuals, so hard for me to comment. I don’t get particularly attached to protagonists, but I remember rooting fiercely for Loki, Walter White, Annie from Hereditary (I must be a truly one-of-a-kind unappeasable consumer in the worst sense, because I was on her side and thought everything she did made sense), Hannibal (just recently), Anton Chigurh.

So, yeah. It’s tough to find things to watch & connect with emotionally.



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I tend to root for the most depraved of individuals, so hard for me to comment. I don’t get particularly attached to protagonists, but I remember rooting fiercely for Loki, Walter White, Annie from Hereditary (I must be a truly one-of-a-kind unappeasable consumer in the worst sense, because I was on her side and thought everything she did made sense), Hannibal (just recently), Anton Chigurh.

So, yeah. It’s tough to find things to watch & connect with emotionally.
To be fair, the word "protagonist" just refers to the main character in a story without necessarily indicating anything about their morality. You can have villainous protagonists and heroic antagonists, to say nothing of other variations. Annie in Hereditary is a weird choice simply because

WARNING: "Hereditary" spoilers below
she strikes me as a relatively ordinary person who only turns villainous once she ends up being possessed at the end, so I don't think it's automatically weird to be sympathetically invested in her journey throughout the film.



To be fair, the word "protagonist" just refers to the main character in a story without necessarily indicating anything about their morality. You can have villainous protagonists and heroic antagonists, to say nothing of other variations. Annie in Hereditary is a weird choice simply because

WARNING: "Hereditary" spoilers below
she strikes me as a relatively ordinary person who only turns villainous once she ends up being possessed at the end, so I don't think it's automatically weird to be sympathetically invested in her journey throughout the film.
I know, I was in no doubt as to what the word itself means - just tend to root for antagonists for some deeply ingrained psychological reasons, obviously. That’s why I kind of went off on a tangent re: antagonists. Hardly ever find ‘good guy’ protagonists awesome.

I watched Hereditary a couple of months before my own grandmother passed away. I adored that woman, we were inseparable. The matriarch funeral was very topical and really resonated.

So, having rewatched the thing a dozen times since then, it really hits me hard how no one even tries to make Annie feel better. Her feelings, albeit inconvenient and ugly and raw, are completely dismissed, even by her husband who supposedly
WARNING: spoilers below
is the love of her life (is that even reciprocal?). To me when she says in the support group meeting, ‘…not that I am to blame, but I am blamed’ really drives it home, because she is! The family and the director see/designate her as a villain long before anything untoward happens
.

I think there’s definitely a kernel of truth to the fact that women are ignored when someone dies and expected to behave appropriately. I would not even call myself a feminist, like, at all.

But to me, she is being portrayed as a villain from the get-go, because
WARNING: spoilers below
she unreservedly loved one of her children more (or didn’t love the other at all, depending how you look at it), because she dared be creative and put her work above her family ( @Takoma11, remember the Atlantic piece we discussed?). She doesn’t try to be ‘nice, maternal and understanding’ towards Peter. Hell, her funeral speech is rather… quirky. Not empathetic, people would say. All of that, to me, looks like she’s being put across as a villain almost immediately.
But that could be a deeply subjective take for a variety of reasons.

Either way, so many reviews make an explicit point of her being extremely unlikeable that I see it as deliberate. Quite small a sample though it may be, I don’t have a single IRL acquaintance, male or female, who sympathised with her.



I know, I was in no doubt as to what the word itself means - just tend to root for antagonists for some deeply ingrained psychological reasons, obviously. That’s why I kind of went off on a tangent re: antagonists. Hardly ever find ‘good guy’ protagonists awesome.

I watched Hereditary a couple of months before my own grandmother passed away. I adored that woman, we were inseparable. The matriarch funeral was very topical and really resonated.

So, having rewatched the thing a dozen times since then, it really hits me hard how no one even tries to make Annie feel better. Her feelings, albeit inconvenient and ugly and raw, are completely dismissed, even by her husband who supposedly
WARNING: spoilers below
is the love of her life (is that even reciprocal?). To me when she says in the support group meeting, ‘…not that I am to blame, but I am blamed’ really drives it home, because she is! The family and the director see/designate her as a villain long before anything untoward happens
.

I think there’s definitely a kernel of truth to the fact that women are ignored when someone dies and expected to behave appropriately. I would not even call myself a feminist, like, at all.

But to me, she is being portrayed as a villain from the get-go, because
WARNING: spoilers below
she unreservedly loved one of her children more (or didn’t love the other at all, depending how you look at it), because she dared be creative and put her work above her family ( @Takoma11, remember the Atlantic piece we discussed?). She doesn’t try to be ‘nice, maternal and understanding’ towards Peter. Hell, her funeral speech is rather… quirky. Not empathetic, people would say. All of that, to me, looks like she’s being put across as a villain almost immediately.
But that could be a deeply subjective take for a variety of reasons.

Either way, so many reviews make an explicit point of her being extremely unlikeable that I see it as deliberate. Quite small a sample though it may be, I don’t have a single IRL acquaintance, male or female, who sympathised with her.
To tie this back into what I wrote about the movie in the other thread just now, I didn't find Annie's characterization to be so much "unlikeable" as it was frustratingly inconsistent, like when...
WARNING: spoilers below
...she admits that she doesn't feel as sad as she maybe "should" about her mother's death, due to her being a difficult woman, but then when Charlie dies (who was an extremely difficult, unlikeable character in her own right), she's completely, emotionally devastated, without a hint of her previous resentment at Charlie peeking through at all... but then later, even though she was so upset at that death, Annie has the emotional detachment to create a model of her daughter's death scene, and then just casually brushes off her husband's inevitable consternation at such a response? It's like, did Ari Aster start from complete scratch with her characterization for every new scene, or what?



To tie this back into what I wrote about the movie in the other thread just now, I didn't find Annie's characterization to be so much "unlikeable" as it was frustratingly inconsistent, like when...
WARNING: spoilers below
...she admits that she doesn't feel as sad as she maybe "should" about her mother's death, due to her being a difficult woman, but then when Charlie dies (who was an extremely difficult, unlikeable character in her own right), she's completely, emotionally devastated, without a hint of her previous resentment at Charlie peeking through at all... but then later, even though she was so upset at that death, Annie has the emotional detachment to create a model of her daughter's death scene, and then just casually brushes off her husband's inevitable consternation at such a response? It's like, did Ari Aster start from complete scratch with her characterization for every new scene, or what?
I mean, Charlie is her CHILD and she definitely does love her, Charlie is her favourite - not so sure re: her mother - so I think she really is devastated and the detachment comes later, once Annie is going through more ****.