“Nurture your minds with great thoughts,” Benjamin Disraeli once said.”To believe in the heroic makes heroes.”
Aspiration was once a value like accuracy, before we could imagine a future in which we managed the comfortable demise of the human race instead is taking risks to save it – as in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, a rare movie looking back positively on how we once were.
It has become harder in the past few decades to find heroes truly worth emulating in film and television. Irony and darkness are our lazy attempts at art and accuracy as we cynically accept the “realism” of our flaws rather than aspire to goodness. To Socrates, it might appear that we continue to create cave shadows instead of lead the way to light – from our ironically morally-ambiguous television characters, which I mentioned in Part 1, to our dark movie anti-heroes.
Where is Will Kane, willing to do the job that no one else will do, even when no one would blame him for running? Where is Atticus Finch, standing up for justice, teaching that we must climb inside the skin of others and walk around in it? He too stood up for what was right even though few around him would stand with him.
Atticus is perhaps the greatest of all movie heroes. (The American Film Institute agrees.) It is said in Harper Lee’s novel that he “is the same in his house as he is on the public streets.” Where does the lone man standing for good, also present in 12 Angry Men, find his fortitude? From within? Yes, but not because he is its source, but because, as Jonah Goldberg wrote, he “clung to” (and internalized) “a definition of ‘good’ that was outside himself, and therefore something he had to reach for.”
Trying to find a man in a modern movie who aspires to good in all areas of life the way Atticus does in To Kill a Mockingbirdis, I can say from experience, a difficult exercise. The closest hero is a superhero: Captain America. In Marvel’s movies, he is gentlemanly, eager to fight for good, willing to sacrifice and unbending in his defense of liberty. No other Avenger can claim that, though Thor has grown into that description to some degree. These virtues are recognized as old-fashioned in the movie, though, happily, in this example, old-fashioned is appreciated, not scorned.
Superman was long intended as a symbol of aspiration to truth, justice and the American Way, always holding out hope that humanity could become as good as he. Times change. In Man of Steel, the latest film iteration of Superman kills – granted, with remorse – something that the character had always stridently avoided and that even Nolan’s darker Batman didn’t do.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy’s Aragorn is the only other pure hero in recent memory – courageous, sacrificial and incorruptible.
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Fortunately, two films this year might well spell an end to the trend, if they can be appreciated as such. The first is David Ayer’s Fury, the story of a Sherman tank crew headed by their larger-than-life commander Don Collier (Brad Pitt). Young Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), expecting a much less dangerous job, is assigned to the crew as a replacement for a fallen member.
Ranking it among the top five movies of 2014, I wrote:
The beauty of the film is how understated it is. All of the performances and technical aspects are well-done, but none of them steal from the whole. There is no message that the movies tries to hit you in the face with. It just is; what happens happens. For that reason, it is effective at conveying the camaraderie, the sacrifice and the bravery of those who fight for America. And it conveys the difficulty of remaining sane and human in the inhuman madness of war.
In a world where so-called realism is the most valuable currency in the economy of artistic appreciation, Fury places ordinary and imperfect people in extraordinary situations in a way that is genuine, unassuming and inspiring.
When Norman finds himself out of his depth as a newly-assigned tank gunner, he does not wallow in self-pity or reflect on the darkness in humanity that leads to war; he learns and does his job. The crew holds on to their faith not out of desperation or in a cheesy, preachy and simple manner, but out of a genuine sense that it is a rock they can stand on when everything around is chaos. Faith and friendship hold them together and allows to stand up against terrible odds.
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The second movie is Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, the surprisingly true story of Olympic runner and World War II veteran Louis Zamperini. I don’t find surprising the coincidence that Brad and Angelina are at the center of each of these movies. They are more traditional and even conservative in their outlook than most Hollywood stars.
Zamperini has been recognized as a role model since Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling biography, also titled Unbroken. The website Art of Manliness (which I highly recommend) used Zamperini’s life story as a lesson in the virtues of perseverance, foresight and integrity.
The movie is reportedly very accurate to Zamperini’s life. As a teenager, he was a trouble-maker, until his brother found him an outlet –running – and told him if he persevered he could make it through anything and do great things. He pushed himself far enough to become an Olympic runner.
His athletic career was interrupted by World War II, in which he became a member of a bomber crew. The plan crashed, leaving him and a couple of others adrift in the Pacific for weeks. They were picked up by the Japanese and Zamperini spent the duration of the war in multiple prison camps. In the prison camps, he met Corporal Watanabe, also known as “the Bird.”
Watanabe, who seems to sense a strength in his American prisoner that he wishes he himself had, tries to break Zamperini. But Zamperini endures, mentally and physically, to the end of the war, eventually learning to forgive and love his enemies, something Watanabe refuses to do. Zamperini therefore proves himself to be the bigger person, despite having less reason to be.
Neither film is perfect; Fury’s tank warfare is said by many to be unrealistic, while Unbroken is too long and not focused enough, short-changing the role of faith in Zamperini’s life a bit. Both, however, represent above average filmmaking and both have been popular with general audiences. Along with Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, they could begin a shift in the type of movie Hollywood studios make in response to viewers’ preferences.
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Is American culture too far gone or might we still want good men as our heroes? Can the demands on the media market arrest this slide and return the kinds of heroes we should aspire after to film and television? If not, it will be an uphill battle to change the minds of Americans confronted with cinematic examples pushing in the other direction. Even so, we chose to go to the moon not because it was easy, but because it was hard.