Fighting hacking and stalking: toxic masculinity and the revolutionary anti-hero

Through my analyses of the films Taxi Driver (1976) and Fight Club (1999), and the television series Mr. Robot (2105), I will unpack the ways each text represents masculinity and mental illness through the trope of revolutionary psychosis, the ways these representations reflect contemporaneous political and social anxieties, and how critical analyses of each text can account for the ways that this trope fails to accurately represent the lived experiences of men and those with mental illnesses. In recognizing the harmful nature of each of these representations' depictions of both masculinity and mental illness, we can understand why such bad tropes circulate, and how to recognize and refuse them, or make them better.