Who are the best whiners in cinema history?
Not whiners like Luke Skywalker, who was going through a standard space farmboy phase, but full-on crybabies, where whining isn’t a phase or a state of being but a state of becoming. Where characters with the veneer of cool, confidence, professionalism, or menace disintegrate, quickly, often without warning, into blubbering near-embryos.
James Karen in The Return of the Living Dead sets the standard pretty high. His complete decomposition as people start returning from the dead is awe-inspiring. His performance is all the more laudable because he drives the plot forward at several key points between his girlish cries of “Oh God!” and “Oh Jesus!”
Karen was a nice prototype for Bill Paxton in Aliens, who is the ultimate archetype for cinematic whiners. He strikes the right balance between obnoxious fatalism and self-serving contrariety. And he is eternally quotable.
“Maybe you haven’t been paying attention to current events, but we just got our asses kicked, pal!”
Both these guys redeem themselves in the end. Karen never allows himself to become a flesh-eating zombie. It is a pretty ballsy move to put yourself in an incinerator. And Bill Paxton snaps back into badass mode in his final confrontation with the bugs.
But the third on the list is a special case. Stuntman Mike, Kurt Russell in Death Proof, is beyond redemption, which makes his devolution that much more satisfying. He crumples at the first sign of resistance, when his intended victims break from his script, and he carries that whiny riff all the way to his demise. So while Karen and Paxton show us there is some sliver of redemptive nobility in their whiners, Russell shows the eternal crybaby lurking one bullet wound below the surface of a Hollywood serial killer.
