Here’s a fun question to ask about your favorite movie characters: Are their adventures, exploits, relationships, and personality quirks really just due to the fact that they’re a bunch of shitty people? That’s the question Tim Byrne pondered on Twitter last night, turning the real-life advice subreddit, r/AmITheAsshole, into a vessel for examining the movies that shaped us. Are the characters we love so dearly the asshole? Yes, it seems. They are.
“I (F25) abandoned my boyfriend (M37) at a train station, leaving him nothing but a vague note, after I discovered that my supposedly dead husband was actually still alive. AITA?” Byrne wrote of his favorite film, Casablanca, and, yeah, that sounds like a pretty jerk move when you put it like that. Others soon chimed in with their own examples, making us reevaluate so many films that formerly brought us happiness in these difficult times.
So yeah, Ferris Bueller was always a little shit. That’s not too big a surprise there. But Indiana Jones? O Brother, Where Art Thou?’s Everett McGill? Dear sweet Wesley from The Princess Bride? C’mon! Well, if it’s any consolation, the Twitter discussion did also cause us to pause and reconsider one of cinema’s most famous assholes…
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