Silver screen magic
One
of the most educational experiences of my life was going to see a
made-for-TV Babylon 5 movie in the lecture room of the university where
I studied in, when that show was the hot thing. A horde of nerds filled
the seats, although Comic Book Guy didn't show up. In the movie, the
manly hero Garibaldi put down and humiliated a squeaky scientist nerd
who had tried to explain why something isn't possible. (I have
forgotten the exact details, but they are less important than the
overall tone.) The audience seemed happy about this turn of events,
which left me completely baffled.
Didn't these people understand that the humiliated character was a caricature of them as other people see them, and that the whole scene actually pretty faithfully recreated the scene that happens to every teenage nerd when they still erroneously believe that facts and rational arguments are a good way to explain to others why something is wrong. Perhaps if the manly alpha male had repeated the nerd's words back to him in a whiny nasal voice, and a bunch of followers had started to laugh hyena-style, the scene might have been a bit more familiar for them.
Of course, most movies are just entertainment and too incoherent for anyone to derive any ideology from the words and actions of the hero. Usually the hero is, of course, wish-fulfillment for the audience who lives in a world where fortunate events and positive reactions of other people just don't seem to fall in place as conveniently for violent self-centered wisecracking loners as they tend to do for the movie heroes.
In practically every movie, every member of the audience understands perfectly well which one is the hero and which one is the villain. You have to really admire the skill of Hollywood for consistently reaching such uniformity of opinion in the world where people tend to divide to factions that bitterly oppose each other. There are, of course, well-known conventions for establishing that somebody is evil, for example, when the hero really needs a car and has to steal one from somebody who is just stepping into his. Of course villains are written to do villainous things, and the hero will do heroic things. But ever since I started to read the ideas of David Brin (which I heartily recommend), I have been wondering how much the ideologies that the heroes and villain have correspond to ideologies that are "good" or "bad". Does there even have to be any such correspondence?
Thought experiment. Would it be possible, by skillfully using the standard conventions of movie storytelling, make a movie in which the hero clearly follows an ideology that the audience finds repugnant in the real world, and the villain clearly follows an ideology that the audience considers positive in the real world, so that the audience would still suspend its reason and come out of the theater happy for what they saw?
To find the answer, we could recall a recent popular movie trilogy in which a band of medieval primitivists, led by an old bearded man, managed to strike a fatal blow against the ugly forces of industrial revolution and that way got to keep their serfdom society that was hostile towards any kind of idea of enlightenment and progress. (There are not that many ways that a primitive culture could construct a massive fortress.) Or perhaps another popular animated movie about superheroes, in which the main crime of the villain seemed to be that he wanted to engineer consumer products that could let anyone purchase super powers, instead of leaving them to the aristocratic few whose only merit seemed to be the luck of being born to the right bloodline.
Didn't these people understand that the humiliated character was a caricature of them as other people see them, and that the whole scene actually pretty faithfully recreated the scene that happens to every teenage nerd when they still erroneously believe that facts and rational arguments are a good way to explain to others why something is wrong. Perhaps if the manly alpha male had repeated the nerd's words back to him in a whiny nasal voice, and a bunch of followers had started to laugh hyena-style, the scene might have been a bit more familiar for them.
Of course, most movies are just entertainment and too incoherent for anyone to derive any ideology from the words and actions of the hero. Usually the hero is, of course, wish-fulfillment for the audience who lives in a world where fortunate events and positive reactions of other people just don't seem to fall in place as conveniently for violent self-centered wisecracking loners as they tend to do for the movie heroes.
In practically every movie, every member of the audience understands perfectly well which one is the hero and which one is the villain. You have to really admire the skill of Hollywood for consistently reaching such uniformity of opinion in the world where people tend to divide to factions that bitterly oppose each other. There are, of course, well-known conventions for establishing that somebody is evil, for example, when the hero really needs a car and has to steal one from somebody who is just stepping into his. Of course villains are written to do villainous things, and the hero will do heroic things. But ever since I started to read the ideas of David Brin (which I heartily recommend), I have been wondering how much the ideologies that the heroes and villain have correspond to ideologies that are "good" or "bad". Does there even have to be any such correspondence?
Thought experiment. Would it be possible, by skillfully using the standard conventions of movie storytelling, make a movie in which the hero clearly follows an ideology that the audience finds repugnant in the real world, and the villain clearly follows an ideology that the audience considers positive in the real world, so that the audience would still suspend its reason and come out of the theater happy for what they saw?
To find the answer, we could recall a recent popular movie trilogy in which a band of medieval primitivists, led by an old bearded man, managed to strike a fatal blow against the ugly forces of industrial revolution and that way got to keep their serfdom society that was hostile towards any kind of idea of enlightenment and progress. (There are not that many ways that a primitive culture could construct a massive fortress.) Or perhaps another popular animated movie about superheroes, in which the main crime of the villain seemed to be that he wanted to engineer consumer products that could let anyone purchase super powers, instead of leaving them to the aristocratic few whose only merit seemed to be the luck of being born to the right bloodline.
Or perhaps another popular animated movie about superheroes, in which the main crime of the villain seemed to be that he wanted to engineer consumer products that could let anyone purchase super powers, instead of leaving them to the aristocratic few whose only merit seemed to be the luck of being born to the right bloodline.
That bit bothered me too. But to be fair, the movie spent much more time on exploring the crappiness of amazing people forced to try to be normal by a confining society. That bit about the antagonist's goals was just in one brief monologue, IIRC. And the protagonists didn't fight him because of that goal, but because he was using his tech without caring about killing people.
So "the main crime of the villain" is quite an exaggeration, and not supported by the source material. "The main goal of the villain, and when combined with a disregard for human life, what caused him to enact evil plots" was more like it.
If you want really crappy ideology, try watching "Hero". Although perhaps to the Chinese, its a positive one.
Posted by Anonymous | 4:55 PM
that was hostile towards any kind of idea of enlightenment and progress
Can you cite some evidence for this thesis? I mean, yeah, LOTR is obviously pro-farmer and anti-industry, but your broad statement does not jive with my memory of the text.
In general, I guess I don't see why this is notable. Even in real life, lots of bad people have good ideologies, and vice-versa. Stories and films often portray people doing bad things for what start as good reasons - like using the ends to justify the means.
(both comments by Patri Friedman)
Posted by Anonymous | 5:01 PM
That bit about the antagonist's goals was just in one brief monologue, IIRC.
True, but it was the villain's grand master goal for which all the other stuff was done. Of course the villain had to made a villain in these other ways, so that the audience wouldn't stop to question such an enormous whopper in a supposedly "libertarian" movie.
Which is exactly what I was talking about in the original post: the ideology itself does not make a hero or a villain, but the actions and their consequences can be scripted to make basically anybody a hero or a villain, and the audience happily accepts this. It's funny when I think about it.
Can you cite some evidence for this thesis?
The evidence is in what we know about how real medieval feudal societies work, of which Tolkien and the movie creatively avoid mentioning any nasty details. And the fact that Sauron and his minions are such obvious distorted caricatures of the industrial revolution. Probably not much unlike how Osama sees the U.S, or how Ned Ludd saw the industrialization.
Of course we can explain some of this away with magic, if we really want to imagine the good people of LOTR to be some kind of Jeffersonian democrats from the pre-enlightenment era.
But let me try to explain my annoyance towards LOTR another way. Suppose that the heroes and their societies in LOTR had been socialist (socialism was pretty big around the time LOTR was conceived, so simply imagine an alternative history where Tolkien became a socialist instead of an antimodernist), but so that everything works and there is plenty of freedom and food and goodies. Then when you question why exactly these people are supposed to be "good" and somehow role models for us with their noxious ideology, you'd be told that there is no evidence of long queues or any dissidents thrown to gulags.
Posted by Ilkka | 7:39 PM
There's a video game from a few years ago, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, in which everyone gets sucked into a fantasy world where all their dreams come true and the hero's goal is to destory this world and send his friends back to their crappy real lives. You are expected to believe that this is a good thing.
And don't forget The Constant Gardener, where the hero's goal is to prevent the evil drug company from saving the lives of millions all because their drug happens to kill a few Africans who were going to die of AIDS anyway. Sheer brilliance.
Posted by Sean | 9:57 PM
anonymous 1: "Hero" can be interpreted in several ways, one of them being "stab while you still can". As for the Chinese, I've always wondered what they think about the movie. The sacrifice for the sake of an eternal unified empire can be seen in a totally different light if you know that the actual empire built by Qin Shihuang has lasted for 11 years and fell apart immediately after his death.
Ilkka: there is a fairly good Lithuanian movie, "Nobody Wanted to Die", made in 1967. It takes place immediately after WWII, and of course the heroes in it are pro-Soviet and the villains are for independence. Lately I heard from one Lithuanian that nowadays the movie is still popular, but people watching it like to pretend that the heroes are pro-independence and villains pro-Soviet (that is, the same characters are heroes and villains as before, but their allegiances are disregarded or "reinvented").
Posted by Vera | 5:14 AM