Action Heroes and Unlikely Heroes

Mannion’s doing an interesting multi-part critique on Hollywood’s Right Wing Agenda, which starts here and continues here. (I really encourage you to go read it all, because I'm commenting on such a small part of it, and it deserves to be read in whole.)

Star Wars is almost unique among the blockbuster action-adventure movies of the last generation in insisting that there is a code that the Good Guys have to follow and they can't break that code without becoming villains themselves…

But although Star Wars begat countless action-adventure movies, it begat no more Lukes.

Instead for the next twenty years we had Rambo, the Terminator, Steven Sagal, the Die Hard movies, and Indiana Jones.

In all these incarnations, the hero isn't bound by any code. He isn't even defined by his virtues. He is good because he is the hero and the bad guys want him dead. (Yes, I remember that in the first Terminator movie, the Terminator was a bad guy. I'm really talking about Schwartzenegger in most of his movies, of course.) Evil is very clearly defined as the work of monsters, but Good is defined only by its hatred of Evil and the violence it uses to stomp it out...

For a generation Hollywood has been selling us the idea that Heroes are angry, brutal, violent, and Right. Good is what they say and what they do. This is an extremely Right Wing notion, that law and order are what the authoritarian strong man says they are and that not only are we to accept this, we are to applaud it and fall in line to cheer the strong man on.

I think Mannion’s spot on, although I see some evidence of more complex heroes beginning to emerge. (It also might just be that Christopher Nolan, Sam Raimi, and Bryan Singer have been given jobs that traditionally have gone to the Michael Bays of Hollywood—but then again, such decisions may themselves be indicative of a shift in the wind.) I commented at his place:

“One of the notable exceptions to this … are the recent reimaginings of comic heroes, most notably Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man (‘With great power comes great responsibility’) and Christian Bale's Batman (‘It's not who I am underneath, but what I do, that defines me’), both of whom wrestled with their identities specifically within respective code of ethics modeled for them by men they felt the need to live up to. They each face an option between virtue and apathy—which is, in some way, even more interesting (in its realism) than good vs. evil.

A similar example is the world of the X-Men, which is also not a straight good vs. evil (or an us vs. them) scenario. It could easily have been mutants pitted against non-mutants, but instead, it's mutants (aligned in some cases with sympathetic non-mutants) against other mutants—and each has a clearly defined agenda. And, yet, on some occasions, the opposing mutant groups (X's and Magneto's) have allied themselves together to work against a non-mutant threat to all mutants. It's a complicated and interesting world that relies on ethics and politics—and, as an aside, happens to be one of the rare examples of a network of characters that also features multiple good and bad female characters.”

What strikes me when I consider the difference between The Action Hero—Rambo et al—and The Unlikely Hero—Luke, Maguire’s Spider-Man, Professor X—is that the former are meant to be superhuman, though mortal, and the latter are thoroughly human, in spite of their midi-chlorians or wacked-out DNA. And it’s impossible not to draw the parallels between a fortunate son who evades responsibility but plays the hero, and those who rise to the challenge and care about the less fortunate, though they’ve every opportunity to avoid both.

When I reviewed Batman Begins, I noted (finding, as did Mannion, the last great Unlikely Hero among the ranks of the Rebel Alliance):

For those who prefer their superheroes on a pedestal, to be admired and regarded as having broken the bounds of mere mortaldom, the opportunity is left intact, but as those of us who were raised on the flawed and fallible, inimitably human, heroes populating a galaxy far, far away are coming into their own as filmmakers, we are given the chance to relate to our heroes as well. Far from taking anything away from our heroes, instead behind this door left ajar for those who want to venture inside, we find that seeing ourselves in our heroes elevates us all, and encourages us to be our best selves, too.

There is a time for perfect heroes who are handed powers of someone else’s design and never doubt their destinies, but this is not it. This is a time of self-made heroes who take on more than they might have been meant, and who do the right thing not because it is easy, or because there is glory to be had, but because we are defined by what we do, and so doing nothing is not an option.

Maybe we’re getting tired of watching perfect heroes with presaged destinies who come out of battles unscathed. That might be too much to hope, but a girl can dream, can’t she?