In
dramatic fiction, a key element is to design the right hero and the right
villain.
Designing
a character is always a complicated process, mapping out his or her back-story,
envisioning the hurts and losses and triumphs that shaped him or her.
But, in a larger-than-life sense, the hero is key in what he represents.
He's what the audience needs or aspires to be. He's what society
needs to save it from darkness. Ditto for the villain, for he embodies
that darkness. But, what faces the hero and villain wear depend entirely
on your point of view.
Writers
may try to aim for the needs of their target audience in selecting their heroes
and villains. And, the public selects its own heroes and villains from
real life. Whom we choose as hero or villain is a reflection of what
defines us, individually and collectively. How we respond to each defines
us, too. So, who are our real-life heroes and villains?
George
Zimmerman. Hero or Villain? To the African American community, he's
the villain of the piece. If he was a comic book villain, he'd probably
be called "The Profiler" (oh wait...that's taken.) Maybe,
"The Wraith." That's what he did. He hovered like a
wraith, waiting (maybe hoping) to see someone sufficiently different from
himself invading the confines of his sacred space so he could spring into
action. What drove him? Fear? Hate? Or, just a
desperate need to feel relevant. And, heroic. Yeah, he's the
villain to everyone who's ever been stopped, frisked, interrogated or otherwise
harassed because he "didn't fit." (A euphemism for being one of
that "other" group we don't want in our neighborhood.) But, one
gets the impression that Zimmerman is someone who desperately (and
pathetically) wanted or needed to be a hero. Society casts the young black
male in baggy pants and hoody as today's villain; equivalent to the
mustache-twirling top-hat wearing villain of another era. See a villain,
confront a villain. That was Zimmerman's view. And, he had on his
side the "stand your ground" law which is basically a license for
hero wannabes to create situations in which they then have an excuse to shoot
somebody. A law that tries to turn life into an action movie, casting our
own selected heroes and villains. The law seems designed (guess by whom)
to allow a George Zimmerman to stand his ground, but not a Trayvon Martin.
Like Rodney King, Bernhard Goetz, and other cases that starkly outlined
our society's racial divisions, forcing people to identify their heroes and
villains, this grim drama has once again sparked national debate and revealed,
as always, that attitudes have not progressed as far as we'd like to think.
Edward
Snowden. Hero or Villain? Here, society wallows in ambiguity.
On the one hand, we live in an age of fear, of "trust no one"
and "always keep your guard up." In this paranoid age of
looking for terrorists in our closets, we have come to vindicate, even idolize
as our heroes government agents who invade our privacy, even kidnap, secretly
imprison and torture their victims, telling ourselves their atrocities are
necessary to keep us all safe. And so, we have no use for whistle-blowers, for
wimpy, whiny, idealistic, goody-goody government clerks who tattle on our spy
agencies. To people who think along those lines, Edward Snowden is the
villain. On the other hand, we also live in an age of "don't trust
the government." Given that attitude of seeing Big Brother at every
turn, an Edward Snowden, who punches a hole in the veil of government secrecy,
revealing the fact that sneaky-peeky Washington agencies are monitoring our
phone calls and emails, may be seen by many as the hero of the story. I
have to admit, he reminds me a bit of Winston Smith, the hero of George
Orwell's immortal distopian novel 1984; a clerk who worked in an all-powerful
government registry that watched everyone. Smith secretly despised the
despotic superstate and was just waiting for his chance to sabotage it from
within. Snowden's on-going story also contains elements of the kind of
James Bond-esque international intrigue that makes for a good drama.
Whatever his ultimate fate and whether he lingers in our collective
memory as hero or villain, there's no doubt that Edward Snowden has sparked
another badly needed national debate on the proper reach and potential abuse of
governmental information gathering and the invisible power of intelligence
agencies. (Of course, we all know our perceptions of Snowden are bordered
by the fact he's as white as they come. If he were black, we'd have the
Tea Party hanging him in effigy, screaming for his blood and calling him an
"Arab out to destroy America.")
Ronald
Reagan. Hero or Villain? In the closing years of the cold war, he
was the chosen hero of white America. A Hollywood cowboy actor who made
us feel good about ourselves again with a simple-minded comic book hero
mentality of "stopping the evil empire." For progressives, he
was definitely the villain. I still vividly remember him apologizing and
making excuses for the brutalities of the white-supremacist regime that ruled
South Africa then. And, when the question arose of whether Dr. Martin
Luther King should be officially remembered as a national hero, Reagan was one
of the thinly disguised voices of opposition, holding out the possibility that
Dr. King may in fact have been a communist agitator.
In
short, heroism and villainy are pretty much defined in your head by who you are
and which window you're looking out of. Whether we admit it or not, race
will always go to the heart of it. Every society needs heroes, and villains
for them to fight, but when a society is divided, it’s hard to choose them.
No comments:
Post a Comment