Who are the Heroes?
Movie heroes are brave. They are strong, so strong that we must see their muscles bulge out of their too-tight shirts. Movie heroes always have the perfect plan against the bad guy. The perfect weapon that is the key to defeat them. Movie heroes are strong, they can get through a halestorm of threats, insecurities and fake friends. They don’t really need hep, they just need to find the inner strength they had all along.
Somehow the threat only leaves once it’s been beaten up. The bad guy is simply bad. All bad. Feelingless and weak. He tries to hide his weakness of character with his bad guy facade, but the movie hero realizes what hides deep inside him. That it is in fact fear and nothing else what makes a bad guy bad. And the hero fights the villain. Does a couple of martial-arts-like moves that become much more effective once he knows the bad guy is not really a super villain but simply he is a scared, weak, man (it’s usually a man).
Oh, how simple our lives would be if life was always like that. If the answer to everything was some carefully placed punch. If all bad people were symply weak people and the heroes were perpetually strong, brave and self-assured.
But the beauty of life is that it’s not simple. “Bad guys” are not necessarily bad. Or weak. They are people who feel wronged. People who feel they are being the heroes. People who truly believe that violence is the answer to their problems. Who feel brave, and sometimes reckless. Life is not divided by good guys and bad guys. The narrative is diverse and complex, and only once you understand the motivations that someone might have, once you make the effort to understand their situation, then perhaps you’ll see that they are also people fighting for their own narrative, and trying to be as close to a hero as they can, just like you.
Comments