Deconstruction / Film

Deconstruction in Films and Animated Films.

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The following have their own pages:

• Batman
• DC Extended Universe
• Spider-Man

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Films — Animation

• Arthur Christmas: The movie draws from multiple contrasting pop-culture interpretations of the character of Santa Claus. Is he the historical St Nicholas? An impossibly old man with a team of reindeer and a sleigh? A jolly fat man who enjoys pies and sherry? Or is he a modern CEO who applies advanced Magitek to the problem of visiting every child in a single night? Yes. Yes, all of those people either have been, or are vying to become, the Legacy Character of Santa, they all disagree how best to do the job... and they're all related.
• In Coco, Almighty Mom is deconstructed through Imelda. All the Riveras defer to her but the stubbornness, pride and inability to let go of grudges that comes with this trope ends up being Imelda's Fatal Flaw and causes problems for her family and herself. Like unintentionally nearly causing Héctor to undergo the final death or giving her blessing to Miguel under the condition that he never plays music again, leading him to run away.
• Despicable Me: Of comic book-style super-villains. They're shown as people with families who need to take out loans to fund their schemes and who use their gadgets to overcome everyday annoyances like waiting in long queues.
• Near the start of the 2004 film The Incredibles, many superheroes get into legal trouble because of the collateral damage they cause. A deleted scene shows how difficult it would be to hide super powers (specifically, invulnerability). At a barbecue, Mr. Incredible accidentally hits his fingers with a large knife, ruining the knife and leaving him unharmed. To cover up what happened, he begins screaming, douses his hand in ketchup, wraps an apron around his hand, and he and his wife quickly leave the party. Bob then complains in the car about the necessity of wearing bandages on his hand for months, wearing scar makeup, and coming up with a surgery story to explain his still-intact fingers. He also refuses to take on sidekicks, so that he only has to worry about himself. It comes back to haunt him when a young boy who’s clearly in over his head takes being rejected so poorly that he becomes the main villain and begins to come up with a massive scheme that leads to many supers dying.
• Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius deconstructs the "no parents would be great" trope by having difficulties pop up the very next day. A girl gets injured, everyone gets chronically lonely, and people get sick from eating nothing but bad food.
• NIMONA (2023): Of what a world centered around a fairy tale legend would look like in the long run. In a world that is insular and obsesses over a legend to the point of statically pinning their entire culture around it, civilization would still progress because of the enhanced needs of keeping themselves socially and geographically stunted. Nobody stops to question the monster hunter myth, making everyone subservient to the Knights' Institute. The knights themselves have spent all their training preparing for the supposed return of a Kaiju-class monster, and they're barely competent at catching regular criminals or even standard-sized monsters.
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
  • Of the Showy Invincible Hero. Puss's devil-may-care, irresponsible, and self-celebrating lifestyle is taken apart from different angles. For one thing, he's blown through eight of his lives due to assuming he'll always have another life to fall back upon, and now needs the Wishing Star for them to be restored if he wants to keep being an adventurer. Not to mention the many careless and outright stupid ways Puss has died along with his claim of "laughing in the face of death" literally pisses Death off to the point where the Grim Reaper wants to personally end his final life. Meanwhile, it's also revealed that Puss and Kitty Softpaws were to marry, but they both got cold feet and never showed up at the church: Puss because the responsibility scared him, and Kitty because she felt Puss could never love her or anyone else as he does his own legend. She therefore wants the Wish for someone she can count on. Puss eventually comes to realize just how sad his situation is when confronted with the disdainful reflections of his past lives in the Cave of Lost Souls.
    Puss: ...Yeah, Puss in Boots works... alone. Was the legend so big... there was no room for anyone else?
  • The Ethical Bug's relationship with Jack Horner deconstructs the concept of The Conscience. As the cricket learns the hard way, having a second opinion doesn't really affect the person if they are fully aware and committed to what they're doing. Sure enough, the Ethical Bug eventually deems Jack Beyond Redemption after he displays no desire to change who he is.
    Ethical Bug: That was horrible! Your wish is horrible! YOU'RE HORRIBLE! You're an irredeemable monster!
    Jack Horner: Ah! Wha... What took you so long, IDIOT?
  • The Wolf deconstructs the Knight of Cerebus and Outside-Context Problem. In a world of light-hearted fairytale parodies, subversions, and potshots, this guy is an incarnation of The Grim Reaper played entirely seriously. He only gets one funny moment in the whole movie, after Puss has already proved his courage against him, and every other scene with him feels like a cross between a Slasher Film and a Cosmic Horror Story. In fact, the true theme of the movie is literally that of a Cosmic Horror Story. This is especially notable considering Jack's Laughably Evil nature, Goldilocks and the three Bears' status as Anti-Villains, and the general Denser and Wackier feel of the movie. However, the sheer shift in tone and threat level he poses is one of the reasons Puss cleans up his act and comes to respect his mortality by the end of the climax, costing Death the satisfaction of actually taking the life of an arrogant legend.
  • When you live in a Fantasy Kitchen Sink world where All Myths and Fairy Tales are True, you should watch that your boast does not offend the wrong concept, as concepts have ways to come after you personally. Puss' boast of laughing in the face of death results in The Grim Reaper himself going after Puss.

Films — Live-Action

• Better Watch Out: This film is a deconstruction of the "Home Alone" Antics. One of the film's most memorable traps is replicated as an explicit Shout-Out and given a more "realistic" (read: bloody and fatal) result, and the "Kevin" stand-in is every bit as psychotic as the fandom jokes tend to paint McCallister as.
• Bram Stoker's Dracula
  • The film deconstructs the Dracula myth by reconstructing many of the Unbuilt Tropes of the original, such as clarifying the vampires are not killed by sunlight trope. (Rather, they are depowered.) More broadly, the film expands upon the book as a portrait of Victorian London and the changing mores of sexuality, women, and the advances of science which were part of the time, and goes on to expand on the sexual subtext of the story, which is what underlies the Mina-Dracula romance.
  • More importantly, it deconstructs Dracula's vampire image by never giving him a fixed human and vampire form, often changing and shifting identities in the course of the movie, never arriving at a fixed classical image unlike Bela Lugosi's or Murnau's Nosferatu who are so Obviously Evil that you wonder why anyone is surprised when they turn out to be vampires. Here Dracula has a different form for different occasions, the iconic traditional Old Dracula look when he greets Jonathan, a younger Londoner appearance when he visits Mina in daylight and a monstrous bat form and so on.
  • Coppola also noted that the story's setting paralleled the birth of film, and one scene shows Dracula and Mina seeing early films. His aversion of CGI for In-Camera Effects and technology stemmed from a desire to use primitive special effects like Magic Lantern shows and practical effects in the mode of Georges Méliès. In terms of visual effects, the movie is an encyclopedia of the history of the gothic horror-fantasy film genre itself, alluding to everything from Melies to German Expressionism to Val Lewton, to Beauty and the Beast, to Alfred Hitchcock, Roger Corman, to The Exorcist (Van Helsing treating Lucy). The characterization of Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker in the film also explores the Final Girl trope in horror, with Lucy's victimization heavily focused on her sexuality, while Mina more or less commits adultery with Jonathan and willingly encourages Dracula's affections and returns it, and ends up defeating and redeeming the Count, presumably surviving the film's events.
  • Coppola was also alluding to the fact that Victorian Britain was the era when Psychology first became a major field. Lucy Westenra's condition and illness is directed in a manner similar to cases of hysteria in the Victorian age, and Van Helsing's weird attitude to sex and vampirism, (i.e. civilization and syphilization proceeds in parallel to each other) is a parody of the patriarchal nature of conventional Freudian psychology, with women's sexuality being controlled, policed and punished by men. Renfield is imprisoned in a Bedlam House symbolizing the more inhumane ways mentally ill people were treated in that time and place. Mina repeatedly asks Jonathan and Van Helsing if they would chop her head off like Lucy, or treat her like a beast too. Likewise, the heavy focus in the film on blood-transmitted vampirism aludes to '90s fears and anxiety about sex in the post-AIDS world.
• Orson Welles' Citizen Kane was in many ways an attack on the narrative style of The Golden Age of Hollywood as well as several American types like the Self-Made Man and The American Dream. Namely that the idea of defining life in terms of social success and wealth ultimately makes you value people less and makes you desire to control and buy people around you. Likewise the characters are not entirely one type and single dimension, with the main character being an unpleasant, manipulative Jerkass who never learns his lesson even in his old age and who leaves behind several disappointed friends and broken loved ones and who eventually dies alone. The harshness of the story, the lack of easy conflict resolution and the ultimate sense of the futility of life in the wake of the passage of time was quite a contrast to the sentimental and life-affirming stories in films at the time, good films included.
• The Thematic Series called "The Iberian Trilogy" by Spanish director Bigas Luna, composed of Jamón, Jamón (1992), Golden Balls and The Tit and the Moon (1994), explores the darkest depths of eroticism and stereotypical Spanish machismo.
• Martin Scorsese's The Irishman deconstructs Scorsese Mafia movies, and the entire Mafioso mythos, quite possibly one of the bitterest, most depressing deconstructions ever filmed of the genre:
  • If associating with hostile criminals, making tough decisions, ruining your life, and killing a great friend is not enough, in the end, all you get in the modern day is to create resentment among your loved ones and live a lonely life.
  • This article emphasizes how the movie does a very good job of deconstructing the aftermath of the classic American Mafia during the last half-hour of the film, particularly from Mafia movies like GoodFellas where the aftermath of said lifestyle in modern times is never shown. The result of such deconstruction is an incredibly depressing epilogue to the genre. In many ways, the film undermines what came before, and the central characters don't come out in a blaze of glory. Instead, they march towards a lonely and desiccated retirement where everything they have worked for means nothing for modern times. The movie invokeddrives home relentlessly how men like Frank, Russell, Jimmy and other wiseguys are nothing but a pitiful shadow of what they once were. In other words, they are just people who belong to the past. All these attributes make this film one of the biggest deconstructions ever made of the Mafia genre, which is especially remarkable considering that Scorsese's own GoodFellas was already a deconstruction of its own film genre, yet this film takes things to a new level of deconstruction, especially in the downfall of the classic American Mafia.
  • Frank Sheeran himself is a Deconstructed Character Archetype of characters such as Henry Hill and Jimmy "The Gent" Conway, showing just how miserable and pitiful a man like them could become if they reached old age and lived in modern times.
• Almost Famous is a deconstruction on the illusion of rock-star life. It seems glamorous at first, but then the fame starts getting to your head and you start doing stupid things that you would never do while in your right mind. Fame leads to an idea of invulnerability and often creates tension between band members (often brought on by record execs to force them to create a big radio hit against the will of the band member's better judgment or creative being all for the sake of profit). It just goes to show that the rock-star life is nothing more than a gilded cage.
• Fargo serves as a darkly comedic deconstruction of your typical crime thriller. Jerry Lundegaard's supposedly simple plan is to con his rich father-in-law, Wade, out of a million dollars. To that end, he hires a pair of trigger-happy crooks he's never met, on the recommendation of a violent parolee, to kidnap his wife, Jean, while telling them the ransom is only eighty grand. But he apparently didn't consider the traumatic effect it might have on Jean. It also never occurs to Jerry that the crooks might try to blackmail him for what they think is the entire ransom once they have his wife and know that he's playing Wade. Or that Wade, who's a tightfisted Control Freak and trusts Jerry about as far as he can throw him, might try to interfere and confront the crooks rather than just hand over a million dollars. Jerry also never stops to think about how his semi-estranged son, Scotty, would take the kidnapping (and possible murder) of his mother. In other words, being The Chessmaster is not as easy as Jerry seems to think it is, and his entire plan collapses in on itself because of things he either didn't think through or had no control over. End result: Wade, Jean, and several innocent people are all dead, he's arrested while trying to flee and will likely spend decades in prison, and while Scotty will probably inherit Wade's fortune, he's effectively an orphan now. And it's implied that even if Jerry's plan had gone off without a hitch, the scam he ran on GMAC using fake loans still would have landed him in prison for fraud.
• Four Lions is a deconstruction of the La Résistance genre films. The protagonists, four jihadists, are hopelessly incompetent and amateurish, and their ally Barry is but an Ax-Crazy thug, while the British police and army show ruthless efficiency in eliminating the protagonists. It also deconstructs the tropes that The War on Terror has created relating to the counter-terrorists. The police and army make multiple mix-ups that only cause more death and suffering ( such as capturing and torturing one of the terrorist's pacifist brother, shooting an innocent funrunner, and utterly failing to stop two terrorists from doing their suicide bombing when they were in fact willing to stop), and the terrorists actually manage to do their job better when they accidentally kill Osama Bin Laden. So really, both sides are deconstructed.
• James Bond:
  • The Pierce Brosnan films featured quite a few reality checks on the series formula, namely the fact that he's openly described as "a relic of the Cold War" by the new M in GoldenEye, and that rather than villains who were fairly conventional and stereotypical in motivations, it instead featured villains like Alec Trevelyan, Elektra King and Renard who were more psychologically motivated and even tragic in their own right. Even the disliked Die Another Day showed what would happen if James Bond actually got captured in enemy territory; like with most spies, he's disavowed by his government, subject to torture and brutal conditions for a year and later released in a Prisoner Exchange for the same bad guy he was pursuing in the first place.
  • The Daniel Craig set of films play out like deconstructions and reconstructions of the Bond character and universe by showing what a lonely, damaged outsider Bond is and has to be in order to do his job. Though in many ways this was already tackled in earlier films like On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Licence to Kill.
• The 1954 Nicholas Ray western Johnny Guitar was one of the first to definitively upturn many of its genre conventions.
  • The classic (but apocryphal) White Hat = Good and Black Hat = Evil division in Westerns is turned, since the film's villains are the "townsfolk" whipped into a frenzy by Emma Small and they are all dressed in black, while the protagonists and the outlaws are dressed in colorful clothes of different shades. Indeed, it's Small's insistence on seeing her enemies as entirely evil and in cahoots with each other, ignoring the divisions between them, that leads to violence.
  • It also examines the attraction and danger of gun violence. Turkey, the young outlaw of the Dancin' Kid's gang, associates masculinity with being a a fast shooter, whereas Johnny Logan is a Retired Outlaw who is fleeing his outlaw past by trading a weapon for a pistol.
  • Frontier justice is nothing more than brutal Kangaroo Court that leads to the townsfolk and authorities acting like another gang, and in many ways being far worse than the outlaws. Emma Small, the "leader" of the posse, uses the Dancin' Kid and other crimes as an excuse for her personal rivalry with Vienna.
• Come and See' dissects the reality of being a resistance fighter in World War II. Flyora doesn't become some brave hero who fights the Germans. He is a poor kid who struggles to survive in a hellish war zone, with his sanity being eroded by the numerous war crimes he witnesses and barely escapes from. The only vaguely heroic thing Flyora does is balk at the idea of shooting baby Hitler.
  • The film sucks out any romanticism of being the resistance. The film makes it starkly clear that the Belarusians are fighting for their right to exist and lets the subject of being the victim of genocide be so front and center that the film more resembles a horror film than a war movie. There is nothing cool or romantic about being a resistance fighter, it's the only option in a almost unfathomable situation.
• Scanners sets up a fairly standard Hero's Journey, as Cameron Vale, blessed with Psychic Powers, is sent by wise old Dr. Paul Ruth to defeat Ruth's former pupil, Darryl Revok, who also has Psychic Powers. Vale befriends a white-haired girl, Kim Obrist, who can help him infiltrate Revok's organization. Not unsurprisingly, it is revealed that both Cameron and Darryl are the two sons of Paul. With us so far? And then Darryl points out what kind of father would abandon his sons like that, and weaponize one against the other, and, indeed, would test a potentially dangerous new drug on his pregnant wife, thus making Cameron and Darryl psychic in the first place. "That was Daddy." Also, the psychic stuff is quite eerie: the scanners suffer severe social and psychological side effects from hearing other people's thoughts (the main character starts the movie homeless, and another scanner murdered his family when he was a child).
• The 1990 film Short Time gives a good deconstruction of the trope Retirony. Seattle police officer Burt Simpson (Dabney Coleman) is nominally cautious of risk, and days away from retirement from the force. But a mix-up of medical records on his physical results in him suddenly being told he has two weeks to live. This puts dreams of sending his son to Harvard at risk, as his post-retirement life insurance wouldn't be enough to cover it. So he suddenly tries to get himself killed in the line of duty so his family can tap his professional life insurance, being more lucrative.
• The 1991 film The Dark Backward contains an animated sequence that deconstructs the Tom and Jerry cartoons: Tom's Captain Ersatz gleefully pursues Jerry's, hatchet in hand, and then cuts him in half with it (guts spill); then Spike's Captain Ersatz appears and blows the cat's brains out with a shotgun. The main character's mother laughs out loudly at this scene.
• Mr. Holmes and “A Slight Trick of the Mind” from which it was adapted, deconstruct the reclusiveness and asociality of Sherlock Holmes. Nearing the end of his life, the now-elderly detective starts to increasingly feel the need for human contact. He then becomes a putative father for Roger, a war orphan, and goes even so far as to tell to his Japanese contact, Tamiki Umezaki, a blatant lie about his father’s mysterious disappearance in order to provide him with some closure about a painful episode of his life. The book is much more radical, however: after Roger’s death, Holmes is forced to acknowledge that he is going to die alone and that his life has basically been a failure, as his logic and rationality were unable to penetrate the mystery of life and the depths of the human mind.
• A scene from The Mirror Has Two Faces shows Streisand's character deconstructing "Cinderella", saying that she drove the prince nuts with her obsessive cleaning.
• Last Action Hero runs full-on into this, deconstructing the action hero genre and then putting it back together while emphasising the distinction between real-life and fantasy and how they inform each other. The first two-thirds of the film mines its humor and situations from a random kid getting thrown into the fantasy world of Jack Slater IV — a universe where the hero(es) have copious amounts of Plot Armor, the villains are comically inept, and the humor is mined from the Culture Clash that the plucky kid sidekick has with the invincible action hero. And then the hero and the villain get thrown into the real world, and all bets are off. The main villain, Benedict, displays a clear case of Even Evil Has Standards when he's mortified to find a teenage prostitute propositioning him and two men who shoot and kill a homeless man for his shoes, and subsequently discovers that unlike the movies, the police don't respond instantly when you kill someone. Meanwhile, the hero is shown to be a deeply-depressed man who's faking parts of his life (his ex-wife has long-since moved on, he's deeply unhappy and worried his daughter is growing up with No Social Skills because she spends all her time alone prepping weapons), he's injured during a slow-speed car crash he initially thinks he will walk away from unscathed, and the bullet wound he suffers would most likely have been fatal — had the kid not realized he could send him back into the film universe, where his Plot Armor kicks back in again.
• The 2008 movie JCVD is a deconstruction of Action Genre Hero Guy. What made it special is that the actor, Jean-Claude Van Damme, often plays that character archetype. But not in JCVD.
• Milla Jovovich in The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc plays out the way the true story went until she is captured by the English, at which point it deconstructs the entire mythology surrounding Joan of Arc. In prison, she hallucinates a character (played by Dustin Hoffman) whose only function seems to be to question her calling from God.
• Saturday Night Fever harshly deconstructs America's hedonistic take on life in The '70s. Sure, there were beautiful clothes, music, and lots of dancing, but there was a dark side to the life led by people like Tony and his friends. For example, Tony, who turns to hedonism as a way to cope with his own life as a low-class Brooklyn guy with a really Dysfunctional Family, has no thought for the future (and the culture as a whole didn't either), and his friends are involved with drugs, drinking, and casual sex which does cause them huge problems.
• Hanna is a deconstruction of both the Kid Hero trope and the idea of giving a child superhuman abilities. The main character gets hunted down constantly, every person she comes in contact with is threatened with death, and the antagonists are all willing to kill test subjects of a child Super-Soldier project.
• Pig: Of Roaring Rampage of Revenge flicks, particularly John Wick in the abduction/abuse of an animal kickstarting the plot. Especially with Nick Cage in the spotlight and a marketing campaign that steered into the skid, Pig is poised to unravel like any other action-revenge flick. In its first act, Robin even visits some kind of underground fight club to with which he was supposedly involved in the past. After this plot point serves its purpose, however, it's dropped and never mentioned again. This sets up a theme that most of Robin's Dark and Troubled Past is largely irrelevant, and he never flies of the rails in an Action Hero rage (except to cause some petty, mundane damage to Amir's car in a short burst of irritability). The whole film culminates in Robin cooking a meal for the Big Bad instead of just kicking his ass like a revenge flick would inevitably require him to do.
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The subtitle of this movie could just have easily been The Deconstruction of Kirk. Most of the core traits associated with Kirk and what their consequences in Real Life would probably be are examined and pulled apart. The adventurer who faces a problem on a weekly basis, solves it and promptly forgets it ever happened is suddenly brought face to face with one of those problems from a decade and a half before, and discovers the consequences of his thoughtlessness can be measured by the body count. The suave lady-killer with a girl in every port discovers that one of his conquests (and it's implied that it's the only one he ever truly loved) has resulted in a son he either never knew he had, or knew but never spent any real time with, and who hates him. His tendency to play fast and loose with the rules leads to his ship being crippled and a score of dead cadets, all of which could and should have been avoided by simply raising the shields, and his trait of finding novel solutions to intractable problems ends the life of his best friend and trusted right hand. It also shows what happens when you take the dashing, devil-may-care heroic adventurer, let him get old and put him in a desk job: a full-blown mid-life crisis.
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes a bit of time to deconstruct the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Crazy, fun-loving Clementine and shy Joel really hit it off... at first. But as time goes on, Clementine proves to be too wild and overwhelming to Joel, causing problems in the relationship. And when their memories are erased, they hit it off again. In a broader sense, this can be considered a deconstruction of the whole romance genre. They're great at the Meet Cute and the Falling-in-Love Montage, but things fall apart when they actually try to live with each other.
• Adam Sandler, famous for his comedic portrayal of characters with anger problems, shows just how unfunny and scary a person with anger problems can be in the movie Punch-Drunk Love.
• The Social Network is a deconstruction of the myth of the self-made man by showing how many people Mark Zuckerberg screwed over as he became a billionaire.
• In The Cable Guy, Jim Carrey deconstructs the kind of character he usually plays. In the beginning we're introduced to what at first seems to be the same kind of quirky, eccentric, wacky, Catchphrase spewing character seen in other Jim Carrey films. However, as the plot unfolds, Carrey's character becomes a deranged stalker, and goes from being a funny character to a deeply disturbing one. We learn that this character is a severely mentally unbalanced social outcast, that his "wacky" antics are in fact reckless and dangerous and actually ruin the life of the one person he considers to be his friend, and that his obsession with spewing famous Catch Phrases comes from his unhealthy obsession with TV, to the point that he has a hard time telling the difference between it and reality.
• Woody Allen's aptly-titled film Deconstructing Harry is both a deconstruction of Allen's own work and the concept of Author Avatar characters and autobiographical fiction in general. It could also be considered a deconstruction of authors literally writing themselves into their own work, both played straight (Harry Block is a pretty obvious autobiographical character) and inverted (in-universe, Harry's characters come to life to interact with and deconstruct him. How's that for a mind-screw?
• Gary from The World's End can be read as a deconstruction of the typical 'Manchild' characters who populated the other works that Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright and Nick Frost were involved in. His hedonistic embracing of alcohol and drugs and his refusal to move on from his teenage pursuits and obsessions is seen as more pathetic than charming. He's also significantly older than most of them were, being an example of what happens to that type of character if he maintains his refusal to grow up when he's almost in his forties. Reconstruction happens at the end, as his childish view on life lets him adapt quite well to a new life as a world-wandering, sword-wielding post-apocalyptic hero.
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day provided deconstructions of both the Kid Hero and the Mama Bear as well as militant feminism in the forms of John Connor and his mother, Sarah, from the previous film. John is an alienated, anti-social outsider who doesn't fit in, doesn't get along with his foster parents and has only one friend due to his mother's odd ball way of raising him because she had to prepare him for the end of the world. Sarah, meanwhile, has become violent and emotionally unstable over the years since the end of the first film as she had to step up to the plate, training not just herself but her son, and suffering the heart ache of losing Kyle Reese, the soldier sent back to protect her, whom she fell in love with and who was in fact John's father all along, without either of them knowing it. John is far from a likable protagonist when we first meet him, and Sarah is not exactly pleasant, but this is what happens to a Chosen One and the mother mentor burdened with terrible knowledge. Eventually reconstructed when their preparations allow them to stop Judgement Day.
• Unforgiven is one for Westerns, and Munny is a Deconstructed Character Archetype of the kind of gunslinger characters Clint Eastwood played in the 60's and 70's. William Munny is a Retired Monster, a murderer of women and children before his wife got him to quit drinking and become a settled family man, and re-immersion into this violent life brings the monster back out again. With truly disturbing results.
  • There is also English Bob, a famed "gunslinger" who is ultimately just a vicious coward trying to cash in on a reputation. His actual record is shooting Chinese railroad workers and murdering poor Two-Gun Corcoran in his sleep for having an eye on a woman Bob liked.
  • Unlike previous Eastwood westerns where the main character can gun down scores of people like nothing, killing is shown to be an awful thing to do even if you might think it is for heroic reasons. Munny is plagued with guilt for all the people he has killed over the years. The Schofield Kid has never killed anyone, and his first kill is poor Quick Mike, who was ambushed in the outhouse and spent his last moments on earth pleading the Kid not to kill him. The Kid is emotionally broken by the affair and departs vowing to never pick up a gun with the intent to murder again.
  • The film (considering the title) viciously deconstructs Honour Before Reason and frontier justice. From the moment Mike cuts up Delilah's face for giggling at his pecker, it is established that all of the characters' problems come from the unfortunate fact that honour and the law mean nothing in the Crapsack World that is the frontier west, and the only real protection you have is building a reputation as The Dreaded, by being someone so frightening and awful that nobody in their right mind would mess with you (enforced by Disproportionate Retribution for slights). The film ends with a lot of people needlessly dead or emotionally broken because nobody in the story could forgive each other.
  • Conservation of Ninjutsu is also deconstructed. Confronted with all of Bill's deputies, Will kills all of them without them managing to hit him. Despite their numbers, none of them are hardened killers and they panic-fire in an enclosed space against a man who is one.
  • Even the trademark Clint Squint gets this treatment. The Schofield Kid does it, but it doesn't look badass or intimidating in the least. Especially seeing as he does it on account of his rubbish eyesight.
• Cloud Atlas: Of a large number of tropes, maybe even storytelling itself, using Cross Throughs and Acting for Two to demonstrate the presence of the same tropes in six rather different stories.
• Full Metal Jacket: The first half of the Vietnam segment is filmed in a deliberately flashy Hollywood style, with heroic and badass American soldiers taking out hordes of Vietcong with surprising ease. This is explicitly pointed out by a U.S. soldier who says "This is Vietnam: The Movie!" to a cameraman, and later Joker's unit are shown lounging on a bunch of seats pulled out of a cinema. When they "exit" through the cinema door into the real war, the film takes a much more realistic and chilling tone, the soldiers are much less invincible, and the single Cold Sniper they're going up against turns out to be a Child Soldier.
• Wendy: The film can be seen as this toward part of the Peter Pan story. Just because they don't age doesn't mean there's no issues for the kids on the island-danger still exists, even to the point of its being lethal. Wendy also grows increasingly unhappy and guilty about her mother, who she realizes has to be distraught over losing her children.
• In a Lonely Place: This movie is a deconstruction of the usual type of Humphry Bogart character. In this case it shows exactly how unbearable and destructive a Bogart character would be if you had to deal with him. Likewise it shows how sad and miserable the character own personal life would be.
  • Kiss Me Deadly: Like the above mention movie, the film adaptation of Kiss Me Deadly likewise deconstructs the typical noir detective and shows how much of a loathsome person the private detective is and how he is not really much better then the people he is going after.
• Seven Samurai deconstructs the Samurai lifestyle and ethos. Being a samurai meant you dedicated your life to being a Proud Warrior Race Guy. You could never change jobs to earn money peacefully, you could only ever rely on your martial prowess to earn a living. It's a violent life, and the possibility of death is extremely high. The Final Battle is quick and the opposite of grand, it's over in minutes and all of the bandits are dead, along with all but three of the seven samurai and many of the peasants died too. War Is Hell.
• Secretary: Of the brazen approach characters in love have toward their duties and job obligations. Lee's antics as she intentionally makes mistakes and tries to get Edward's attention prove problematic in that they are a distraction from the jobs they are actually supposed to be doing, even before getting into Edward's personal hangups about the nature of their relationship.
• X: It may be a slasher through and through, but this film offers a lot of social commentary and subtext on the dueling forces of free love and Christian chastity.
  • On one hand, free love is depicted in a very unflattering light. The porn shoot can, not withstanding the girls' youthful good looks, at times veer into Fan Disservice instead of Fanservice for some viewers, especially with Wayne's sleazy attitude scrubbing any higher ideals out of the film in favor of pure smut. The lack of commitment that sexual freedom encourages can also lead to emptiness and terribly hurt feelings over perceived betrayals, with RJ's reaction to Lorraine taking part in the film portrayed as Et Tu, Brute? at its finest. Finally, its fixation on a youthful ideal of beauty fuels a lot of Howard and Pearl's resentment of the porn crew.
  • On the other hand, Christian chastity is portrayed as encouraging hypocrisy, repressive environments, and suppressed desires that can build up into bitter resentments later in life, as evidenced by Lorraine's revolt against her Christian upbringing and the fact that Maxine was a Preacher's Kid with no regrets about going into porn. In many ways, the excesses of free love are portrayed as the logical conclusion of a deeply flawed Christian moral system imploding.
• The Northman deconstructs Norse Proud Warrior Race culture and A Real Man Is a Killer mentality:
  • Amleth's initiation is humiliating and debased, rather than some cool Awesome Moment of Crowning. King Aurvandil's words about the Cycle of Revenge seem less like a Badass Creed and more a curse being placed on his son, and given how empty revenge ends up being for him, it more or less is.
  • All Fjolnir gets from murdering his brother and usurping his kingdom is then promptly being exiled in disgrace himself to a remote community in Iceland with a handful of men and slaves. His tiny community ends up being terrorized and ultimately destroyed by Amleth.
  • Thorir is reintroduced as an adult, losing a sparring match and throwing a tantrum about it. He spends the rest of the film trying and failing to assert his authority over the other vikings, even though it is shown his father still loves him and thus he may not need to, because his Proud Warrior Race culture expects it of him.
  • Gunnar suffers in a violent culture that doesn't exercise restraint just because he is a boy. He recklessly involves himself in a knattleikr match, a primitive Blood Sport treated not far off a real battle, and an adult player bowls him over and nearly kills him on the pitch. When he sees his mother be murdered by Amleth, he attacks his Warrior Prince and ex-Berserker half-brother with a knife, and his half-brother easily kills him.
  • Amleth is so broken and insane by his quest for revenge that he runs on auto-pilot, looks uncomfortable pretty much all of the time, and outright tells his mother that only after he completes his self-imposed mission will he find out that whether or not he actually enjoys living. Later, he is given the chance to abandon his revenge quest and flee Iceland to some quiet corner of the world with a woman he loves (who is also pregnant with his child)... but turns his back on her to return to Fjolnir and kill him instead, where he dies in battle. Made worse if you take the interpretation that the supernatural stuff is all just dreams, visions and the delusions of Amleth's addled mind, in which case there is no glorious Valhalla waiting for him and he ultimately achieved nothing in his brutal quest.
• The Good Son: Henry can be viewed as a deconstruction of Macaulay Culkin's most famous role, Kevin McCallister- A Wise Beyond Their Years kid that can outsmart and manipulate grown adults, creates homemade contraptions, and derives enjoyment from hurting people. With Kevin it's played for comedy and his victims are criminals, but with Henry it's played without the comedy and to its logical conclusion: Such a kid would realistically be a sociopath, it wouldn't take much for that kid to graduate to murder, and he would target anyone for any reason (perceived slights, jealousy, for fun, etc.).
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood spends much of its third act deconstructing the mythos of the Manson family murders. In the third act, all signs point to the film leading to the exact same events occurring as in real life, with Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring and the party guests being attacked and brutally killed by the Manson acolytes, even setting it up as such by initially focusing on the partygoers' activities as night falls. The film then decides to follow an Alternate History by having the acolytes, who have been distracted by Rick Dalton cursing at them when they nearly run him down, opt to attack his house instead of Tate's. When they do so, they are met by an occupant who can not only defend himself, but exposes the acolytes (and Manson, by extension) as a pack of idiots by mocking their most well-known statements on the night of the murder, and quickly disabling the majority of the attackers in the first minute of the fight.
• Savageland is a deconstruction of the horror genre in general, exploring what the aftermath of your typical gorefest would be like — in this case, what happens when a small-scale Zombie Apocalypse wipes out an entire town. There's confusion and debate over what happened, an innocent man gets convicted for the crime because nobody believes that monsters did it, people hijack the incident for their political views, and massive controversy ensues when evidence of unnatural events become public.

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