Bad Things make for Good Films

When we first watched Breathless as a class, I didn't know what to think of it. With everything and nothing going on all at once, I was desperately searching for something to cling onto for grounding to understand what the film wanted from me, damn it! But the first thing that caught my attention in our class discussions was the fact that so much attention was drawn to Michel's sexism and overall poor character. I was a bit confused. Isn't that the whole point? He's supposed to be an asshole, clearly. At the time I wanted a second viewing of the film to make sure I wasn't missing something, but when I did watch it again, I found that I felt the same way.

Then I realized that the difference between me and some of my classmates might be what our expectations were in the first place. If you're going into the film with an explicitly feminist lens, then yes, you're sure to be disappointed by Michel. I think it would be quite hard to argue that he himself exudes any ounce of feministic energy, although one could argue his contrast to and somewhat submissive relationship with Patricia might. Either way, Michel himself was behaving in a way that demands no respect or admiration from the audience whatsoever. Unless you really are a sexist pig, I guess.

But my point is, the "protagonist", if you want to call him that—you could make the argument for him and/or Patricia, but he's seemingly the primary perspective—of this film is not meant to be someone we look up to or try to emulate. This is in heavy contrast to most film leads at the time, like the characters of Humphrey Bogart himself, perhaps an intentional nod of irony for Michel. 

Nowadays we are much more accustomed to "gray" protagonists, but often this grayness is reserved to the realms of violence and respect/disrespect. Anti-hero leads are allowed to be rude and they're allowed to shoot basically anyone but their companions, but that's the extent of their difference from the regular heroes, other than maybe flirting with the villain's side every now and then. To stay an anti-hero who's not just a regular good guy, they have not do too many good things, right? And to stay an anti-hero and not go full villain, they have to abstain from just as many bad things as good things. Sure, it is technically less generic to be an anti-hero when we're still coming down from countless decades of straight of pure heroism during the mid-20th century, when much of cinema was fully encoding itself into the pop culture. But does it actually make them more interesting to be the way they are, or is it just to be different for the sake of being different?

The entire spectrum of good to evil should not be so easily expressible in a simple Venn diagram. 

What is much more interesting to me is a gray protagonist who is impactfully flawed. To me, a good film will represent reality for what it is, not for an ideal. And even the heroes in our lives do things that are harmful to us in impactful ways. We might love our parents, partners, or closest friends, but most of us also have memories of their worst moments, when they were truly awful people even if just for a minute. Those parts of their "story" are real too, and it doesn't make them into villains.

Telling a story is impossible when you try to tip-toe around ever making someone do something legitimately bad. A character's worst actions shouldn't read to the audience as excusable. They shouldn't be "acceptable", but we also should appreciate the film for showing us that, not cancel it. I worry sometimes that the newest generation is being brought up to believe that if we see something bad, that that in itself is bad, and that's simply not the case. Knee-jerk reactions are always going make people feel strongly, and that's often the very intent of the film, yet people often blame the film for showing them something so "wrong" and "endorsing" it, when in reality the filmmaker's intent is probably the exact opposite of that. Cinema is a great place for us to explore the darkest parts of our collective human nature too, and to experience it in a safe and contained way while still showing us a reflection of what it might be like to experience such a thing in reality.

We should have more bad-but-not-evil people in cinema, because that's how it is in the world we actually live in.