My father, for reasons I’ve never fully understood, fell in love with Irish folk music before I was born. I had the strange experience of growing up talking to my grandparents about life undor the tsars and then listening at home to LPs of songs about the 1798 rebellion.* I’d read comics books where the heroes always won in the end, and listen to songs where the heroes almost always lost. Hell, in The Minstrel Boy, the protagonist is dead in the second line of lyrics. The one that got to me was Boolavogue.** It’s got a beautiful slow melody, and the description of the rebellion builds step by step towards inevitable disaster. The image of that disaster – men fighting while standing back to back because they were being overwhelmed by superior numbers – showed up in the comic books, but somehow it didn’t end the same way.
The word “hero” has been abused to the edge of meaninglessness. For me, heroism has to include two aspects of behavior: the act has to require courage and it has to help someone other than the person performing it. The first means that actions on a sports field are excluded, since I don’t believe that being called a bad name on the back page of the New York Post is a fate that requires courage to avoid. The second excludes daredevils. These exclusions don’t mean that examples are hard to find: parents who work themselves to death to make life better for their children all qualify, in my opinion. If that’s too pedestrian for tastes that prefer war, Irish farmers armed with pikes going up against soldiers armed with muskets might do. It irks a lot of people in the U.S. today, but Goliath is never a hero, while David sometimes is. Of course, it also helps if your cause is just, but whether or not that is so is always open to debate.
It’s some 40 years since I first picked up a comic book and I still read them now and again. Some of the recent movies have been worth watching, with Nolan’s Batman movies near the top of my ranking. Traditional comic book protagonists almost by definition meet my two criteria for heroic action…except when they don’t. There is reason to believe that two of the main characters in The Avengers*** – Thor and the Hulk – cannot be killed by the enemy they fight. That seems to me to remove the courage aspect of it. The other superhuman characters – Captain America and Iron Man – are definitely killable, but not easily so. That leaves the two spy/assassins, Hawkeye and Black Widow. They may be well armed and well trained, but they are fully human. There’s a lot of build up that Hawkeye is fighting, at least in part, for revenge, while it is made quite clear that Black Widow is fighting because she believes it’s the right thing to do. Of six “heroes” only one fully meets my criteria and, Joss Whedon being Joss Whedon, it’s the only woman. Amusingly enough, one scene in the movie, which was used for a promo poster, has the six of them standing in circle facing outwards – i.e., standing back to back. And sure enough, they end up fighting an enemy immensely superior in number. Black Widow is the only one who seems to understand a personal fear of death.
A trailer for the last of Nolan’s Batman trilogy showed before the movie. In it, Catwoman says to Batman something like “You don’t owe these people any more. You’ve already given them everything.” His response: “Not yet.” I assume this is an intentional paraphrase of the Gettysburg Address, where Lincoln says that the dead soldiers had given the last full measure of devotion. It’s something that no sane person sets out to do, but quite a few sane people have ended up doing. I wish more fiction portrayed it well.
*Note that every war has heroes on its side. I’m not speaking to the issues that stem from English colonialism in Ireland, but rather how those issues are perceived.
**Given that Mini__B is the only person in the world who wants to hear me sing, I’ve been trying to find songs he likes. To date, he prefers me to go with Irish folksongs and Gilbert & Sullivan rather than rock or pop.
*** Good flick. Enjoyable and amusing.
