The Bad Boy Trope, Explained

sweets you can ignore me if you tried the bad boy it seems like he's been around forever that's right I'm cute too in movies books TV even music he's the guy who's not so nice but we're supposed to obsess over him anyway not despite his antisocial qualities but because of them you wanna have sex we their sex for a conversation ideally both looking at the bad boy on screen over the years there are some key recurring qualities that define him he stands out from the crowd that's Edward Cohen it's totally gorgeous obviously a bad boy acts like he doesn't care about normal morals or values he's created to be the antithesis of the nice guy why come on nice guys be more like you cuz then that'd be bad of course once we get to know him we learn he does care about right and wrong just on his own terms the bad boy is the strong silent type the human equivalent of a mystery waiting to be solved let's just say I'm a friend yeah well maybe I don't want a friend I didn't say that was yours he's stereotypically attractive usually tall dark and handsome [Music] to cite the old cliche men want to be him and women want to be with him and that's fitting because the bad boy is a cliche how can you like that guy I don't know maybe because he's an outlaw most important of all the bad boy seemingly has the potential to be redeemed by love from a girl who cares enough to try and fix him shallow and cynical and selfish and immoral and and completely worthless and I like you liked you very much while there are different types of bad boys and these types have changed over time popular culture has started to turn against this character type here's our take on the bad boy what he represents how he's evolved on-screen and why bad boys aren't as bad as they once were you are bad guy but this does not mean you're bad guy you're watching the tape thanks for watching and be sure to share and subscribe this video is brought to you by mu B a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe it's like your own personal Film Festival streaming anytime anywhere he has an almost irresistible appeal he's also an arch-criminal only because he was written like that bad boys in their purest form represent temptation something that's not good for you but you want it anyway as John Milton's Satan says in Paradise Lost better to reign in Hell than serve in heaven that original embodiment of bad is the archetype that defines the bad boy charismatic arrogant attractive simultaneously alluring and dangerous I think I'm gonna go for you in the 1930s and 40s bad boys were the men in gangster movies James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart playing outlaws seducers guys who broke laws and hearts at the same time but these guys always got their comeuppance The Hollywood studio system made sure characters who behaved like that got punished but by the 50s as the cracks began to appear in Hollywood's system of self-censorship movies began to portray bad boys more as tragic figures than villains they were still impossibly cool but their bad behavior was usually a mask for some noble or misguided idealism in other words they were bad but with a hidden reserve of good inside the new embodiments of this masculine bad-boy image were Marlon Brando and James Dean avatars of outlaw pool who behaved irresponsibly on-screen but who also revealed fragile beating hearts beneath their tough exteriors this change was symbolically depicted in their fashion choices too as Vanity Fair's Laura Jacobs notes both men wore white t-shirts an item of clothing that had previously been considered an undershirt this represented the way these bad boys were exposing the inner vulnerability that had historically been covered up by the end of the decade it was the Wardrobe of choice for any bad boy on screen even the singing and dancing type delinquents one misunderstood down inside his daddy's boy by dying at the young age of 24 James Dean became the iconic figure of bad boy rebellion so much so that decades later TV shows introducing bad boy characters were still imitating his style wake up Brandon everybody knows about Dylan McKay Beverly Hills 90210 Dylan McKay was the classic James Dean bad boy right down to his perfectly quaffed hair and on Gilmore Girls the arrival of Milo Ventimiglia character Jess introduced a new generation of kids to the Dean style bad boy want to talk about this outside a rude outsider who always gets into trouble Jess is standoffish often cruel and uninterested in proper social behavior so naturally Rory has to fall for him think dull your life with me without me but it wasn't all James Dean knockoffs there were other versions of the bad boy that entered the popular consciousness the swinging 60s saw the ascendance of the Rat Pack the suit-wearing band of entertainers led by Frank Sinatra Sammy Davis jr. and Dean Martin they embodied a more adult version of the bad boy the bad man so to speak now that's the prettiest [Music] and the movies they starred in usually emphasize that any attachment to a woman in their lives was destined to be short-lived at least until the right one came along there's only one thing you love Danny that's danger cliff-hanging you could never love a woman like you love danger this type of bad-boy is more concerned with where the next party is then with any tortured idealism his appeal is based in expensive style cocky attitude and the romanticism of living for the moment the idea that we could die at any time so we better seize the day and live it up the 11 of us cats against this one little city we're an overlay a more recent version of this bad boy can be found in the 1996 movie swingers Vince Vaughn's character Trent is the embodiment of the Rat Pack bad boy maybe she smiled no no she was smiling at how money I was and when Gossip Girl premiered a decade later in 2007 the character of Chuck Bass as played by Ed Westwick was the epitome of arrogant and supercilious bad-boy attitude hedonistic and more focused on money than morality I don't have a romantic bone in my body [Music] one version of the bad boy has a pseudo-intellectual streak what you do is very baller he's very anarchists and he has a dark cynical take on the world which might sound exciting and insightful at first sucks but usually his nihilism turns out to be either shallow like with Timothy shall amaze Kyle in ladybird I like your band with Jonah Ruiz when fans knew malfunctioning or dangerous like with Christian Slater's JD and Heather's who's an actual murderer today was great chaos was great chaos would killed the dinosaurs darling often it's both oh I was just finishing Infinite Jest sometimes the bad boys defining quality is simply his isolating behavior whether he's intentionally mean to keep other people at bay or committing criminal acts that get him condemned by society at large a bad boy can often be easily identified as a character prevented from establishing meaningful relationships either by choice or happenstance you believe in bad luck let's just say my relationships don't last James Bond is a perpetual bad boy combining arrogance outlaw behavior sexual voracious Ness and stylish cool into a single package the nature of his work means he will forever be unattached keeping women at arm's length save for sporadic nights of passion Christmas only comes once in yeah but underlying all of these different kinds of problematic behavior or misanthropy is a fundamental rule the bad boy only gets away with being bad because he is extraordinarily attractive what can I tell you baby I've always been bad this is the essential element to all bad boys whether he's a gangster a player or even a vampire the bad boy is defined by good looks which are the means by which he's allowed to continue his behavior avoid all non-pc overtones and future deeply apologetic PS like it that top bad boys tempt us because they offer a fantasy of making the wrong choice there's a thrill to doing what you shouldn't breaking rules is fun being bad feels pretty good in philosophy this concept is known as transgression going beyond the limits of conventional behavior it can mean ignoring resisting defying or refusing to comply with social institutional or cultural norms you know I got most really then why don't you get up there by doing this we remind ourselves that we aren't bound to the expectations of others we experience the fact of personal freedom in other words the bad boy literally helps us to feel free you always do what you told bad boys are almost never wholly bad there is a very simple reason for this we wouldn't like them if they were ultimately if he doesn't have any redeeming qualities then he's not a bad boy he's a jerk [Music] writer Capra zosky has cited the term moral event horizon the line that separates characters who are redeemable from those who are not they may not care about the same things we do but they care about something and that passion for some value however abstract is what keeps them from being just a dirtbag see a good example of this principle is How I Met Your Mother is Barney Stinson as played by Neil Patrick Harris barney is gleefully amoral in most aspects of his life especially his treatment of women the only reason to wait a month for sex as if the girl is 17 years 11 months old Barney's single-minded drive to bed as many women as possible is his primary characteristic for most of the show's run but Barney has other qualities that pull him back from the brink of being solely a creep whatever you do in this life it's not legendary unless your friends are there to see he's fiercely loyal to his friends and will go to extraordinary lengths to make their lives better Lily you have to come home you and Marshall belong together by demonstrating selfless devotion to his friends Barney at least partially makes up for his boorish and sexist behavior keeping himself on the right side of the moral event horizon at least for most audiences at the time the show aired I caught feelings bad protection and everything similarly Judd Nelson's character in The Breakfast Club John bender manages to escape total condemnation through a rare act of kindness throughout much of the film bender is vindictive and cruel to the other kids leaving him stuck on the jerk side of the moral event horizon anyway but if you say you get along with your parents well you're a liar too but MIT film the students sneak out to Bender's locker and realize they're about to get caught by mr. Vernon so bender sacrifices himself to let the others get safely back to the library without detention bender reveals that he's willing to cause greater grief for himself to help these kids he spent the entire morning excoriating an act of kindness that betrays his nasty exterior and it leads to the revealing back half of the film where bender opens up more and more becoming a fully three-dimensional person a necessary element to transition him from jerk to bad boy one of the surest ways to humanize a bad boy is to give them a backstory full of hardship after all nothing creates sympathy for a character faster than showing the audience that someone has endured suffering this has been a core element of most bad boys on screen throughout history from Jim Starks fraught relationship with his father and rebel without a cause to Tony Stark's fraught relationship with his father in the Iron Man films to Damon Salvatore's fraught relationship with his father in the Vampire Diaries Maria honestly it's a lot of problematic dads that tend to be involved in the backstories of bad boys that stand up for me and this is another reason the bad boy trope is about a form of wish fulfillment his backstory serves to excuse his more unpleasant behavior it takes away some of the personal responsibility for his actions instead talking everything up to a history he was powerless to do anything about my daddy said he would stay with my mommy forever and he left it takes a complex person and provides an easy out for the badness simple as a cartoon character I'm not bad I'm just drawn that way going back to How I Met Your mother's Barney Stinson we can see a textbook example of this kind of tragic backstory it's revealed that Barney's mother was a neglectful single parent and that as a child she offhandedly told him that his father was the prices rights Bob Barker though this storyline is often played for laughs growing up fatherless is shown as a tragedy one that created a void and Barney he eventually filled with his meaningless sexual conquests and that gets mind for real Patos once Barney does meet his real father you're gonna be some lame suburban dad for me here the bad boy is to be pitied not condemned Jess from Gilmore Girls is granted an equally troubled childhood he also grew up without knowing his father I am a screw-up that is my genetic code the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree and had a stormy relationship with his mother who eventually ships him off to live with his uncle Luke rather than deal with him herself I'm trying to help you but stop trying stop talking to me stop following me and stop asking me questions just thus the modern bad boy can never just be bad there is a reason for his badness one which partially or sometimes even totally serves as an excuse for his bad behavior if I do this I'm teaching you that your bad behavior will always be rewarded what makes the bad-boy trope so problematic is the way it has historically relied on the war of heterosexual romance specifically the love of a good girl to rehabilitate the bad boy into a good guy I love you to the idea that someone so toxic will transform just because a woman commits herself to him has literally been around since the days of Greek myth but it remains ever dangerous to sell young women on the false promise that if they would just work hard enough and sacrifice their own hopes and feelings the bad boy will eventually fall in love with them and become a different better person I swore that I would stop it if that's what it took to get you back but I am done with it you mean more to me than anything else because the fictional versions of the bad boy are made to seem so appealing we can have hypothetical crushes on them without any issues especially when I'm I'm not with him you're probably right but in reality men who exhibit problematic traits like the kinds we've just described aren't secretly sensitive souls who only need the right woman they are cruel or worse yet abusive a recent essay and cosmopolitan recounts the experience of a woman who thought she had fallen in love with a bad boy only to describe in horrifying detail how being conditioned to accept such behavior eventually led her to accept mistreatment and abuse this is the truth about real world bad boys they don't actually exist people define themselves through their actions when people show you who they are believe them and someone whose actions are selfish manipulative and vindictive isn't waiting to be saved why are you like this like what like how you are they're in need of serious counseling and treatment and at long last the women they have mistreated are starting to be heard for too long women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men but their time is up the bad boy is a harmful myth for men to the idea that straight women are only attracted to this kind of guy encourages a culture of toxic masculinity where young men are trained to be rude self-serving and uncaring of the thoughts and needs of women this guys finish last I shoulda in fact it's so commonly believed that women are attracted to bad boys that there is an entire industry of pickup artists teaching impressionable boys and men how to be worse people in hopes of attracting dates but recent studies have shown that the myth of women preferring bad boys is just that a myth plenty of people make mistakes while dating and choose people who aren't good for them but this isn't what anyone wants what you falling for it burial it's also worth noting when matchmakers and other experts give advice to men on how to be a bad boy practically none of the traits they describe as desirable are the ones actually embodied by attractive on-screen bad boys for example Huffington Post's advice for how to be more of a bad boy includes to talk about your experiences and be passionate even to share stories about your family and be animated in other words the exact opposite of the quiet mysterious bad boy we see in movies and TV we can go home and you could sit in the dark alone John yes so while the fictional stereotype of the bad boy may seem deliciously intriguing in movies and TV he is a non-starter in the real world even if it can sometimes take a while to realize it I'm attracted to pie doesn't mean I feel the need to date pie we can all love a good version of the bad boy in our entertainment hey drama is fun to watch as long as we remember that's where bad boys belong in the world of fantasy there are so many bad men in this world you're goddamn right if you're new here be sure to subscribe and hit the bell to be notified about all of our new videos this video is brought to you by Mubi a streaming service we love every day movie premieres a new film whether it's a movie you've been dying to see or one you've never heard of before there is always something new to discover so in this world where it's very easy to spend hours 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Channel: The Take

Views: 798,041

Keywords: the bad boy, trope explained, mad men, mad men don draper, james dean, humphrey bogart, james bond, james bond daniel craig, casino royale, no time to die, skyfall, billy stranger things, community jeff, iron man, iron man tony stark, tony stark dad moments, ocean's eleven, rat pack, breakfast club, joker, the joker, harley quinn, harley, han solo star wars

Id: Gx-AL4nqm4I

Length: 21min 33sec (1293 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 26 2020