Every culture ends up with a hero that
defines it. From the trickster Odysseus of Homeric Greece to the chivalrous
Lancelot of Arthurian romance to the lone lawman of Hollywood westerns, heroes
reflect the values and ideals of their time and place. But who is the heroic
icon of 21st century America? Who defines us?
Warner Bros. announced recently that Clint Eastwood’s next movie will be a biopic of Chesley
“Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot whose US Airways flight collided with a flock
of geese during takeoff in 2009 and he famously had to ditch it in the Hudson
River. All 155 passengers survived. True to a selfless hero’s commitment to his
duty, Sullenberger was the last to leave the plane, which he did only after
personally inspecting it twice for any stragglers.
Sully was instantly hailed an American hero. “I
don’t think there is any other pilot in the world that could have done what
this guy did,” said one grateful passenger. “He’s the reason my wife has a husband and my
daughter has a father,” said another. “I’m 56 now, thanks to Captain
Sullenberger,” said a third.
But even Sully had his critics. Writer and
pilot William Langewiesche, for example, carped that Sullenberger exhibited not heroism but merely calm skill: “His
performance was a work of extraordinary concentration, which the public misread
as coolness under fire,” he wrote, although I can’t fathom how extraordinary
concentration, with your life and 155 others hanging in the balance, differs
from coolness under fire.
Sully’s film will be Eastwood’s first after his
Oscar-winning blockbuster American Sniper
about another true-life hero, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. Sniper raked in $543.4 million and became the top domestic release
of 2014 – not because of spectacular special effects or fast and furious cars,
but because after long years of anti-war box office duds, Hollywood finally
served up an Iraq war film that celebrated an American hero.
But Kyle had his detractors as well. The most
lethal sniper in American military history, he was glorified by many but
vilified by others who saw him as a warmongering murderer.
And most recently, ESPN’s wildly controversial
choice to honor Caitlin Jenner with its Arthur Ashe Courage Award for her
gender transformation showed that, as a culture, we no longer even agree on the
very definition of heroism. Is it sacrifice in service to others, as it has
usually been understood, or is it now about a liberating celebration of the
self?
Conflicted as we are as a culture about
real-life heroes, pop culture seems to be the one arena where we can all
consume heroic narratives, fictional though most may be, in something
approximating cultural unity.
And by pop culture, I mean more specifically
the movies. Television, even a big-screen TV, is too small to accommodate epic
heroics. Indeed, the most memorable protagonists of TV dramas in recent years are
anti-heroes: Tony Soprano, Don
Draper, Walter White, Vic Mackey, Dexter, the entire casts of Game of Thrones, Vikings, and Sons of Anarchy,
to name several of many that come to mind.
Anti-heroes may be guilty pleasures that keep
us coming back week after week (or straight through the weekend, in the case of
binge-viewers), but deep down, audiences don’t find them as compelling or satisfying
as traditional heroes. The former don’t speak to our better nature like the
latter. They don’t feed our age-old yearning for role models to elevate and
inspire us.
For that we have to look to the big screen,
which is the more suitable canvas for the heroic exploits of such larger-than-life
icons as James Bond, Luke Skywalker, Frodo, a whole galaxy of superheroes like Captain
America and Batman, even Sherlock Holmes. But all of those are classics from other
eras, and it’s too soon to know if more contemporary hero(in)es like Katniss
Everdeen and Harry Potter will have cultural staying power.
In any case, like the epic poetry of the
distant past, the movies of today are where we commemorate the heroes who
represent us, whether true-life or fictional. Let’s just hope we don’t end up being
defined by our anti-heroes.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 6/12/15)
