ARE HEROES IN OR OUT?

Shout out to the reader who posted the following in our comments section, after my article “Die, Mr Bond!”

“There are definitely more interesting stories to tell, but I'm interested to know why you think "Heroes are out." The worldwide box office (and our evolutionary psychology) strongly suggests otherwise!”

Today’s short snark is an extended reply. Have another martini— there’s always more to rant about why James Bond is undead!

Are heroes out?

Not entirely. It’s not possible to tell a story without one, or at least a form of one, as we cannot escape the archetypes of character. From hero to jester, we share the same archetypes with every culture on earth; they come out of the human subconscious whenever a story is created. So our movies still have heroes.

But a big cause of James Bond going from alive to dead is our culture’s loss of the “true heart” archetypal hero— who pursues his (I’m picking a random pronoun for pithy’s sake) goal with unwavering focus and by his effort brings light back to his people, who’ve fallen under a darkness. In modern films, heroes are burdened with emotional problems, mixed motives, and unclear goals. These traits are subpersonalities that would be better off separated from the hero into other characters in the story.

Or, from the 1950’s James Dean movie Rebel without a Cause to the recent Joker movies, the hero is outright replaced with an anti-hero. I can see a Bond movie where the supervillain is the “hero,” haha, why not? The diminished hero and the anti-hero are neither good nor bad; they’re products of the ever evolving state of our culture. I think the diminished hero and the anti-hero have hit their high water marks and the zeitgeist is primed for a return to capital H heros, but I may be wrong!

And I mean the above in a general sense, the general drift of our culture. Certainly there are classic hero movies being made, and in Bond’s next outing this would be an easy fix for Denis Villenueve to make.

But a bigger problem to exhuming Bond from his grave yet again is cultural dissonance. To wit: mixing modern tropes and concerns with heroes from a culture that no longer exists, i.e. our past, creates unsatisfying films.

Example: the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong. Kong was invented in 1933, out of that culture’s concern about civilization overgrowing the wild, as there still was a wild. Remaking the film made no sense (which is not to say it was a bad movie). There’s no genuine “wild” left on Earth (wild in the sense that we have no idea what’s in it). Neither the forest that Gilgamesh battled nor undiscovered islands with giant apes on them make sense to the modern psyche.

Danger has shifted from the wild to our own creations. Mary Shelly nailed her culture’s turn to the future. We need visionary filmmakers to nail the next turn, and data mining heroes that fought our grandparents’ wars is not the answer.

I think the recent focus on trying to kill James Bond in his movies is as much from this cultural pressure as it is from changing out actors. The filmmakers know in their hearts that we can’t move on if we keep wallowing in the past. But of course they can’t turn down the money either. It’s a massive franchise. At some point this tension between irrelevance and commercial success has to crack.

Finally— I just put this song on the jukebox. It’s a good drinking song for this Irish funeral, for the late great undead James Bond. And thank you for chatting over drinks with me here in our favorite virtual bar! Cheers!

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