Spoiler warning for a 20-year-old TV show: when I first watched Tony Soprano brutally murder Ralph Cifaretto in the kitchen of his New Jersey home, I gasped – then I cheered. Surely in a showdown between two such objectively awful people the ideal outcome would be mutual destruction. But Tony was my guy. He was a violent, misogynistic crime boss, but by the fourth season of The Sopranos, I, like so many other people, was profoundly invested in his journey. This is the power of the anti-hero – they bid you leave your usual moral standards at the door.

The upcoming “Anti-Hero Takeover” at ACMI includes screenings, pop culture panel discussions and “anti-hero inspired artworks”. A look at the line-up reveals an eclectic array of six decades’ worth of anti-hero antics, but also makes plain the elasticity of the mantle. There are gangsters, bank robbers, drag queens, vampires and super-anti-heroes aplenty – so without cracking open a screenwriting manual, how exactly does one define the anti-hero in 2024? And how can we explain its ever-increasing popularity?

To answer the second question first: we’ve evolved as audiences. The first stories humans ever told were myths about deities, simple parables with binary values and predictable outcomes. But just as visual effects have graduated from hand-drawn matte paintings to miniatures to CGI, and performance styles have gone from Vaudeville to Stella Adler to Nicolas Cage’s “nouveau shamanism”, our understanding of human psychology has deepened, leading to more complex characters in our multiplexes.

Where those old stories about gods were told to inspire greatness, stories about people evoke understanding; and the more flawed a person is, the more there is to understand. Alien warrior with bulletproof skin who can leap over tall buildings in a single bound? Not much to unpack there, morally. Chemistry teacher who’s diagnosed with cancer and decides to cook meth to prove his worth before his time is up? Now we’re talking.

In modern parlance, the anti-hero is your “problematic fave” – we root for them not because, but despite. There will always be something fundamentally relatable about a character wrestling with their demons, even if the end result is them digging their heels in and refusing to change. After all, nobody’s perfect.

The slippery definition of an anti-hero might come down to simple authorial perspective. If you were a low-level grunt in the army of the Sheriff of Nottingham, you probably wouldn’t enjoy hearing tales of Robin Hood’s philanthropic larceny any more than a bank security guard on the receiving end of one of Bonnie and/or Clyde’s pistols would enjoy watching Arthur Penn’s 1967 film about the duo. But history has a tendency to elevate underdogs, and in these instances, the storyteller has made it abundantly clear whose side the audience is meant to be on.

As a simple case study, consider two versions of Scarface: one made by Howard Hawks in 1932 and one by Brian De Palma in 1983. Inspired by Al Capone, the original film was mauled by the censorship board, who demanded a new prologue and a new ending explicitly denouncing gangsterism, plus a new subtitle: Scarface: The Shame of the Nation. In the end, justice prevails, the anti-hero is defeated, and woe betide anyone who considers following in his footsteps.

These anti-heroes let us vicariously enjoy the sight of our own misanthropic fantasies being acted out within the safe confines of fiction.

Cut to 50 years later, and De Palma’s Scarface, starring a smooth-talking, bug-eyed Al Pacino, is far more aspirational than it is cautionary; without needing to satisfy any censors, it shamelessly glorifies its title character’s ill-gotten gains as if testing the audience’s own moral resolve, to the point where any upstanding citizen might be convinced it’s well worth dying in a hail of automatic gunfire for the sake of a tiger-skin rug and two minutes with Michelle Pfeiffer on your arm. Scarface: Hell Yeah.

Truth is, the rule of law doesn’t always tidily align with what’s morally right. This explains the wave of female anti-heroes doling out vigilante justice post-#MeToo, as in Emerald Fennell’s flashpoint Promising Young Woman and a raft of other thrillers that feel like spiritual successors to the rape-revenge exploitation flicks of the ’70s (Revenge, The Perfection, Asking for It, 2019’s Black Christmas).

In the final season of House of Cards, Robin Wright’s Claire Underwood took over as arch anti-hero after her nefarious president husband, played by Kevin Spacey, was killed off in light of sexual assault allegations made against the actor; art barely managing to keep up with real life. We’ve rooted for Jodie Comer’s psychotic assassin in Killing Eve, Ali Wong’s vindictive entrepreneur in Beef and Dominique Fishback’s unhinged superfan in Swarm, while Ella Purnell’s murderous wallflower in Sweetpea is now testing the limits of audiences’ bloodlust.

These anti-heroes are outlets. They let us vicariously enjoy the sight of our own misanthropic fantasies being acted out within the safe confines of fiction. As a writer, it’s a cake-and-eat-it-too scenario where you can still claim the moral high ground: depiction doesn’t equal endorsement, etc. But anti-heroes still have to stand for something, or at the very least, represent something. Tony Soprano has family. Walter White has science. Folk heroes like Bonnie and Clyde, and other similar killers-on-the-run (Badlands, Natural Born Killers, Thelma & Louise), represent defiant self-dependence in the face of an uncaring, if not openly malicious, society. Often these anti-heroes are doomed by design, and the lesson of the story lies in their brutal undoing.

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Then there’s the mercenary anti-hero, a specific sub-variety which suggests bad soldiers are only in need of a righteous mission (The Dirty Dozen, The Expendables). Both the DC and Marvel franchises have their own version of these B-tier villain supergroups (Suicide Squad and Thunderbolts), but is a psychopath chained with an explosive collar and forced to work for the government really the kind of “flawed but relatable” character that audiences crave? Are these anti-heroes merely villains with extra screen time?

The fact that we already have two Suicide Squads, three Venoms, four Expendables, a Cruella sequel and a Dexter prequel series in the works, an upcoming fifth season of The Boys, The Penguin in full swing, more Ryan Murphy serial killer shows than there are categories at the Emmys, and a just-announced reinterpretation of American Psycho on the horizon suggests we might have hit peak anti-hero. “Gritty reboot” has become mocking shorthand for a traditionally wholesome character getting a superficial R-rated makeover, like putting a biker jacket on a boy scout.

But whose fault is that, really? Did audiences’ appetite for edgy protagonists lead to this glut, or did creators unwittingly write themselves into a corner by removing all viable alternatives? In the absence of any genuinely compelling good guys, naturally we look to anti-heroes to inspire something more complex in us.

No doubt there are real-world ramifications here. The bargain has always been this: we indulge in an anti-hero’s escapades on the condition that we recalibrate our own moral compasses once the movie’s over. But cultural history is littered with wilful misinterpretations. To this day, there are those who view Fight Club as a sigma male instruction manual and not a broad satire of the very kind of masculinity they aspire to.

And while there’s no place in modern storytelling for Hays Code-era censorship or literality, it’s interesting to consider how our over-developed anti-hero empathy might have seeped into the real world. All villains consider their own causes to be righteous. Donald Trump has “America”. Elon Musk has “free speech”. Without an omniscient narrator to point a finger and explicitly tell us who we’re meant to be rooting for, we have to figure out for ourselves what these public figures stand for versus what they actually represent.

Perhaps the pendulum is beginning to swing back. Look at 2019’s Joker: a billion-dollar box-office behemoth lauded by many as a defining snapshot of our times, decried by others as an incel manifesto; a film that squarely blamed society for its troubled protagonist’s violent uprising without laying a lick of personal responsibility on him (something even Natural Born Killers managed to do). That film’s legacy seems to have reached its anti-climactic endpoint with the release of this year’s Joker: Folie à Deux, a $US200 million flop that feels like a direct repudiation of the first film’s anti-hero-worship. It painstakingly undoes all the original Joker’s myth-making, saying nothing and entertaining no one in the process.

The cure for Folie à Deux might be next year’s James Gunn-directed Superman reboot. Before casting David Corenswet in the lead role, Gunn told press he was looking for “somebody who has the kindness and the compassion that Superman has … somebody who you want to give a hug”. Is this the dawning of a new age of loveable, uncomplicated heroes? Gunn recently shared a photo of Corenswet’s Man of Steel posing with his pet pooch, Krypto – although he was quick to point out that even Superman’s superdog has a dark side. He’s a “not-so-good-good-boy”, apparently. A flawed but relatable canine sidekick? Nobody’s perfect, I guess.

The Anti-Hero Takeover is at ACMI, November 7–13. acmi.net.au