The Dirtbag Is Back
This summer, the “dirtbags” have taken over screens. You know them when you see them. A paragon of the form is Eddie Munson from Stranger Things: Repeating his senior year of high school, Eddie sells weed, leads the Dungeons and Dragons club, and strikes most of the townsfolk as a plausible Satanist. He is alternately goofy and intimidating, with a love of heavy metal and a mullet one imagines smells of stale beer. In FX/Hulu’s new series The Bear, the protagonist, Carmy, represents another version of the grubby archetype—a tattooed, greasily rakish kind of man who seems unstable yet wields a certain allure.
refers not just to an appearance and a lifestyle, but also to a certain worldview. The term has roots in the culture of mountain sports: It’s proudly claimed by those who forsake
