Catholicism, moral ambiguity and the new Hollywood antihero

Many Hollywood films code characters according to the binary of good and evil, which seldom reflects lived human experience let alone religious struggles. In times of political, economic or social upheaval, this tendency towards polarity is replaced by a willingness to explore moral ambiguities, often resulting in antiheroic characters. This is especially true of the Hollywood renaissance when a political dissatisfaction intersected with the near collapse of the studio system. The changes that occurred at this time enabled a new generation of filmmakers, such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, to create new antiheroes with different concerns. Films such as The Godfather: Parts I and II portray antiheroic protagonists with complex motivations. These antiheroes often represent a horrifying mirror of the human condition when coping with changing circumstances. This new generation of filmmakers addressed struggles such as coming of age or bildungsroman. Within this milieu, the role of religion has often been overlooked. This paper explores Catholic identity in changing constructions of the antihero in the early- to mid-1970s using films such as Mean Streets and The Conversation