America is Creating a Culture Without Heroes

What happened to heroes?

There are a few notable TV and movie critics who’ve built up a following on YouTube and one of the best is “The Critical Drinker.” Not only are his reviews good, he has a gift for analyzing the wider trends not just in movies, but in culture. This video from him and some other critics brought up an intriguing point:

The video starts with a discussion about the Star Wars series, where the Critical Drinker complains about what happened to the former heroes of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo:

We're all at different age ranges I suppose, but we all looked up to characters like Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and we've seen them get turned into either bitter old men or had their memories tarnished by saying like well they were never that heroic in the first place.  

From here, he notes that the sort of heroes that have replaced them in the Star Wars series are much more morally questionable:

"If we take this to its logical conclusion, what do you see happening here in terms of like the next generation of viewers or audience growing up with movies where there aren't any Heroes anymore and we have these morally ambiguous characters like we get in The Acolyte, where nobody's really a hero or a villain, it's all just like shades of meh."

Later on, they also note how this messaging about heroes is negatively impacting society:

The gist of so many stories used to be the hero of the story would start in a place way down here, like weak, maybe a little bit overconfident in themselves. They start to climb up a little bit they hit some setback, like they match themselves up against someone who's way stronger than them, they hit adversity and they fall down they have to find some kind of strength within themselves. They have to learn some kind of lesson and that's when they rise up and eventually overcome their adversity. That's a simple formula, but it works so well this idea that you are not necessarily born prepared to take on all the challenges that life is going to throw at you but you are going to have to learn to become a stronger person as a result of that and eventually you will overcome and you will then reach a better place as a person.

Now, I think like you said, the message is more, "You're already awesome, you know everything you need to know already, and it's the rest of the world who just has to adapt to you and deal with you. That is a horrible lesson to teach people because that's not going to equip them to deal with life.

This seemed profound to me because I realized they were right about this – and it was something I hadn’t fully comprehended. In fact, most of us haven’t because “anti-heroes” have been around for a long time in one form or another.

At one point in my life, I obsessively read Conan novels. I loved them – and who is Conan? Well, Conan the Barbarian was created back in 1932. He certainly had his own code of ethics, but he was also a mercenary for sale to the highest bidder, a thief, and a pirate. So, you couldn’t really say he was a “good guy” in a meaningful sense even though he usually ended up fighting even worse people in the books. However, Conan was not the norm when I was a kid. The norm was the Lone Ranger, who shot guns out of the hands of bad guys, Superman, who was habitually described as a, “big Boy Scout” and the very relatable Spider-Man, who had money troubles, girl troubles, loved his old aunt and was determined to do the right thing even though he usually got nothing but grief for it from the police and the Daily Bugle, where he worked.

Sure, Superman, Spider-Man, Captain America, and a few of the other heroes of that sort are still around catering to the fan base they’ve built up over time, but they were created a long time ago. Spider-Man is the newest one from 1962. Superman was from the thirties and Captain America was from 1941. The more conventional reimagining of superheroes is something like, “The Watchmen,” which was created in 1986, or “The Boys,” from 2006. Those shows feature deeply flawed, ethically ambiguous “superheroes” who are dangerous to society. If there’s a message to people about superheroes in them, it’s not, “with great power comes great responsibility” or “truth, justice and the American way,” it’s, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

If you think about it, the “heroes” in those shows are now actually the rule, not the exception these days. For example, my two favorite TV series of the last twenty years were “Breaking Bad” and “Game of Thrones.” The “hero” of Breaking Bad was a brilliant former teacher who starts cooking meth to support his family after he gets cancer and ends up killing a lot of people – and not just with his meth. The closest thing to a genuine hero in Game of Thrones was Brienne of Tarth, who was a relatively minor character and generally portrayed as unattractive, dorky, and awkward while the more popular “heroes” would cut someone’s throat for a sandwich or alternately, a chicken:

What about our other “heroes?” The Fast and the Furious franchise is about a bunch of criminals who care about “family.” John Wick is a literal hitman who likes dogs. “Dexter” is a psychopathic serial killer, but he works for the police and kills “bad people.” Mostly. The “hero” of Avatar betrays his own species. James Bond is all about drinking, sex, and prolifically using his license to kill. One of “The Avengers,” The Scarlet Witch became a multiversal threat. Another couple were former assassins, and we can’t forget the out-of-control rage monster. We also saw half the group decide to help put their friends who had saved the world multiple times in prison for not taking orders from the government. We could go on, but you get the general idea. We had the same shift society-wide that we had in the pro-wrestling world when they moved on from Hulk Hogan (“Say your prayers and eat your vitamins,”) to “the Attitude Era” with Steve Austin (“Don’t trust anybody.”)

Our society has mostly moved on from embracing heroes who are genuinely good people with rock-solid moral codes to violent, “cool” men of action who may not be good people, but who have a few good traits and are on the side of the angels in whatever particular story we may be watching at the moment.

So, what does this reveal about us? What does this transformation of what it means to be a hero tell us about Americans?

Quite a lot actually.

You see, the heroes we want to see up on the big screen have changed because WE’VE CHANGED.

Our culture used to be homogenous. Now it’s fractured. We used to put a high value on morality. We no longer do. We used to have a strong sense of right and wrong that was generally shared across our society. Now, a large part of the population has cobbled together their own personal moral code that usually seems to justify whatever they do. We used to believe that it was important that what went up on the Silver Screen should help make people better. Even the sci-fi shows like the Twilight Zone used to have moral messages or subtle lessons about life woven into them:

Today, morality and making people better seldom enter the picture. The only standard is entertainment, wish fulfillment or in the case of some of the more militant members of the Left, heavy-handed liberal propaganda.

Our heroes matter.

They’re reflections of our ideals and who we want to be. If our heroes now mostly range from wildly over-emotional influencers to hitmen and criminals, what does it say about who we are as a people today? A lot, none of it good.

---