| dc.description.abstract | Over the last half-century, the antihero archetype has gained significant prominence across several film genres of American cinema. Despite a unified, widely accepted definition of the antihero not existing yet among film and media scholars and theorists, most studies treat the antihero as a central character who lives in the morally “grey area,” whose actions diverge from the typical “heroic” character patterns and whose personality is often characterized by contradiction and inner conflict. In terms of music, while some academic attention has been directed to famous television antiheroes such as Walter White in Breaking Bad (2008-2013) and Dexter Morgan in Dexter (1999-2007), the musical underscoring of antiheroes in films remains almost entirely unexplored. This thesis attempts to fill this gap by examining the role of music as a narrative device in constructing the antihero in American cinema through the analysis of three landmark antihero Hollywood films: Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta (2005), and Todd Philipps’ Joker (2019). These films were selected because their protagonists’ profiles, while diverse, share several relevant features that make them fit the antihero description above, but also for their rich musical underscoring, which spans almost fifty years of evolution in compositional styles.
This thesis uses Nicholas Cook’s theory of musical multimedia to examine the interaction of music with other formal elements in film, focusing on its role in constructing meaning and shaping emotional experiences. Drawing on the three basic models of conformance, complementation, and contest, the analysis focuses on key scenes that mark turning points in character development, testing the hypothesis that the antiheroes’ position in the “in-between” of good and evil has to be translated into a musical underscoring that comments or contradicts the visuals, offering a nuanced understanding of film music’s contribution to the construction of narrative complexity, and ultimately demonstrating its role as a central agent in conveying the complex, fluid, and morally ambiguous nature of the antihero. | |
