In the interests of etymological peace, translation of the title is left as an exercise for the reader in this edition.
"Yes, it's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and
true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or
black hats, and, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever
dies, and everybody lives happily ever after." --
Giles, "Lie to Me"
There is an old saying that it is possible to see all of Rome in a
day, some of it in a week, and none of it in a month. Writing about
heroes feels that way. You can sum them up in a few words quite easily:
"The good guys," but people have spent entire careers composing
treatises on the nuances of the hero. We'll try to find a sweet spot a
bit shorter than a book, but a bit more introspective than three words.
That may be an elaborate cop-out avoiding comprehensiveness, and may or
not be a round-about preemptive fuck off to accusations of leaving out
important elements. But it's midnight in Indiana, my body thinks it's
eight pm, I've been running on fumes since I got up at four am my time,
and my shuttle leaves for the airport in four hours. So let's talk
about heroes.
Our society is free and loose with the term heroes, using it as a
superlative for anyone who does the slightest positive thing. Reporters
sniff out heroic human interest stories the way a randy dog hunts down
a cheesy crotch. The mailman who stops delivering junk mail? Hero. The
angry centenarian who chases armed robbers out of 7/11 with naught but
her umbrella and her fury? Total hero. That kid with AIDs who faced
down adversity and discrimination to make a real difference? See, I
totally made you think the third one was going to be something
ludicrous like a monkey who could suck his own balls, and you almost
caught yourself before laughing automatically, but not quite, so you
were laughing at a kid with AIDs. Asshole.
"The real heroes are the guys who didn't make it back." It's
repeated often enough in one form or another, but it hints at our
awareness of a deeper understanding of heroism. Heroes are more than
just the good guys, more than protagonists, more than common people who
manage something extraordinary like rescuing babies from burning
buildings or storming nightmarish beaches of steel and smoke. Heroes
are the ones who stare into the abyss so that the rest of us don't have
to.
Joseph Campbell- - no one seriously thought we'd make it through
this without dropping some serious Hero's Journey references did they?
-- identified the common metaphor that we use for heroes. We talked
about the metaphor of monsters, this is the metaphor of their counter.
He identified the symbolic journey that our conception of the hero
follows. The hero suffers, succeeds, and ultimately is so changed that
he can never truly return home. In saving the village, he destroys his
own place in it. At the end of stories, heroes must disappear, they
cannot linger. It's true in our real life interpretation of heroes as
well. Alexander dies of malaria a thousand miles from Macedonia, Gandhi
and Martin Luther King never see the futures for which they fought.
When it's not true, we deny it, we ignore the rest of the hero's life.
Napoleon dies without a whimper in his final exile, McArthur fades
away. We cling to our metaphors even when they don't precisely reflect
the reality.
"Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
It's not just a cute turn of phrase. The martyrs are to some degree the
lucky heroes, because they don't live long enough to take on the taint
of the monsters that they fight. Die young, stay pure. Fight monsters
long enough and you become a monster. The metaphor of the monster is
wrapped around the metaphor of the hero. One does not exist without the
other. But that works both ways. The monster causes the world to create
heroes, but the hero causes the world to create monsters.
"All progress depends on the unreasonable man. The reasonable man
adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to
adapt the world to himself."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Senior year of high school, I took a literature elective on Science
Fiction. The centerpiece of the class was the final two weeks of the
semester when an elaborate trial took place, students playing jury,
attorneys, and characters from the novel. We put Paul Atreides on trial
for being harmful to society. Frank Herbert has said that he wrote Dune in part as a cautionary tale against the role of heroes, that they are not an absolute good.
In well written stories, every character thinks that he is the
protagonist. That's what real life is: everyone, including Hitler,
thinks that he is the protagonist of his own story. They think that
they are the good guys. But that's also what makes heroes problematic;
they cast things into black and white, into fundamentalism. You can't
have heroes without villains, and in the real world where everyone
thinks they are the hero of their own piece, that means that the
villains are the opposite side of the same coin. Villains are just the
other guy's hero.
In shitty stories this isn't the case, the hero is distinct from the
villain. Reality (and good stories) just doesn't work that way. This
doesn't mean that there aren't good and evil, that everything is just a
gray moral relativism where nothing is wrong and nothing is right. It's
more to say that heroes and villains are the same fundamental force
acting on society, differentiated only by whether we agree with the
direction it pushes.
Without heroes, we don't progress. We don't build better things
without breaking down the old. Heroes are the societal equivalent of
DNA mutation. The right mutation, the right little misinterpretation of
a few base pairs can create a wonder. Ninety times out of a hundred it
does nothing meaningful, all sound and fury. Nine times out of a
hundred it causes some variety of cancer that rips apart the entire
body politic unless excised. But that one time out of a hundred it can
create something beautiful, something that shatters societal inertia
and drives evolution. We can't have one without the other. We can't
have a society that produces heroes without the wreckage of failed
attempts.
Heroes aren't all saints, they have elements of horror bred into
their bones, else they couldn't fight monsters in the first place. It
is so tempting to insist that this doesn't have to be so, that we could
conceive of a hero without the flaws, that flaws are just literary
devices not inherent qualities. But the flaws don't just make a hero
more interesting, or more human, they are intrinsic to heroism itself.
You can't take away Ender's sympathy for those who abused him without
destroying the empathy that made him a leader and commander. You can't
take away Batman's capacity for brutal violence without eliminating the
will to stalk the streets in the first place. The qualities that make
them heroes are the exact same qualities that make them monsters.
Morality isn't a zero sum game. The good you do never offsets the
evil you do or vice versa. Good and evil don't cancel each other out on
a balance sheet so that you can beat Ma'at's feather. It was one of
Angel's epiphanies. You don't get a free pass on doing something evil
just because you're still ahead in the bigger score, and no amount of
good deeds can ever make up for an act of evil. The duality of man and
heroes is that that they are both simultaneously good and evil.
The banality of evil derives from this duality. It shouldn't be a
wonder that a man exterminates Jews by day and goes home to read his
son stories before bed. Only in bad stories is evil ever anything but
banal. There is always something human and redeemable about every
villain, because there are no villains.
"Answer me this - just one question, that's all. If the Doctor
had never visited us, if he'd never chosen this place... on a whim... would
anybody here have died?"
-- Joan Redfern
This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.
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