Not so long ago, a movie called Battle: Los Angeles hit the big screens. On the surface, it’s a simple enough story. Aliens invade Earth, because they want our liquid water. The plot follows a unit of Marines sent in to evacuate some survivors that are trapped behind enemy lines in Santa Monica, before the Air Force pounds the entire area with enough ordinance to wipe it completely off the map. The men being sent in aren’t heroes. They’re Marines, they’ve been given their orders, and they’ve got a job to do, so they go. Simple, right?
Well, maybe not. The movie really kinda got me thinking about the nature of a hero, in a sort of back of my head kind of way. What really is a hero? When we’re kids, we’re all taught that the heroes are easy to find. They were the police, the firemen (and women!) that are out there to keep us safe. They shouldn’t have to be out there. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need police, we wouldn’t need firefighters. Their families shouldn’t have to be afraid that one day, instead of their loved ones coming home, it’ll be a knock on the door from a sober-faced partner or colleague to tell them that they’ve gone home for the last time. Yet, there they are, every day, because that’s what they’ve chosen to do.
In Backdraft, Kurt Russell had a great line.
It used to be real clear. When I was a kid, what meant most to me about this job was… no “ifs”. Somebody called the fire department, we came. We just showed up.
Think about what that really means for a moment, what the underlying statement is. These people are out there for us, to risk their lives for us, and it doesn’t matter who you are. If you call the fire department, they come. If you call the police, they come. They just show up. It was so easy, to be a kid. You knew who the heroes were. You knew that all you had to do to get them was dial three numbers on your phone, and they’d come. That’s why every little child wants to be a policeman, or a firefighter when they grow up, because they want to be heroes too.
But they’re not all heroes, are they? No, you learned that when you got older. In fact, the older you got, the more you started to realize that they were human, just like you. If a cop can be a bad guy, if a firefighter can be an arsonist, if they’re both really just human, then they can’t really be heroes, right? Who could you look to as a hero then? It used to be real clear, but not anymore.
Some of us found new heroes as we got a bit older. We found characters that represented the ideals that the police and firefighters were supposed to be, but weren’t always. Characters were better, right? Characters from comics and cartoons and video games and storybooks. Optimus Prime, Duke, Voltron, Link, Batman, Superman. They’re real heroes. They stand up and fight against the bad guys, they inspire those around them. They never, ever quit, no matter how bad the situation looked, because as long as they didn’t give up they’d always win in the end. They were heroes, bright, shining, and infallible, ideals that couldn’t be tarnished…
…Only they could be. Optimus Prime, that virtuous, honorable red knight… died. He didn’t just die, he was killed by Megatron, his arch nemesis, the worst bad guy of that universe. That couldn’t be right. The bad guys never beat the heroes, right? Only it happened again to Duke. Serpentor put a snake through his heart. Batman walks a razor-thin line between good and evil… and he’s stumbled more than once. Superman can be tricked, and brainwashed into fighting for the enemy. Once again, we got older, and our heroes were blemished, lost some of their shining example, only this time it was even worse, because these were characters that weren’t supposed to have those human fallibilities.
But maybe because we were older… maybe because we’d seen it before, or maybe because we’d started to learn that the world is one made of colors, not just black and white, they didn’t fall. Not completely. Batman had darkness in him, about him… but he still never gave up, and while he’d stumbled, he’d never quite crossed the line. Optimus was dead – at least until the toy companies realized what a mistake they’d made – but his example survived him. The ideal was still alive, still there to draw from.
It was an important lesson to learn. I learned it through the example of fictional characters, but that doesn’t make the lesson any less valid. Heroes aren’t always spotless, untarnished, pure. Sometimes, they’re just as grimy as the rest of us. All too often, they’re not really thought of as heroes until they’re dead. But it still wasn’t the full answer, just part of it. Just a glimpse into the nature of a hero.
More years passed, and we matured. We learned what a hero was supposed to be according to literature courses in school and television shows at home. They were crime-solving super-sleuths, country lawyers who always defended the innocent, mystery writers with a knack for piecing together clues. They were space station captains willing to take a stand against a corrupt government in order to safeguard the lives of the civilians on their stations, and starship captains willing to boldly go. They were suave secret agents fast with their guns and faster with the women, and cowboys that’d stare down the barrel of a Colt 45 and smile, then ride off into the sunset after winning the day. They’re surgeons serving mere miles from the frontline, struggling to hold onto their sanity while sewing young men back together to save their lives – and not always succeeding in either goal.
There’s a unifying theme to all these examples, though, and it’s one that’s taken me thirty years to really acknowledge. It wasn’t until the end of Battle: Los Angeles that it finally, truly crystalized in my mind. It’s still not a complete answer as to the nature of a hero, but I think it’s closer than I’ve ever come. You see, at the end of Battle: Los Angeles, the surviving members of the unit manage to make it out of the city alive. They’ve done the impossible, and given the military a fighting chance at turning the tides, and the commanding officer of the base tells them to get some rest, and get some hot foot and hot showers. All the Marines at the base know who they are, and they look at the members of the unit with the sort of awe that you only get from a hero’s inspiration.
Instead of eating, though, instead of standing down and taking a well earned rest… they rearm. They’ve been fighting for almost 24 hours straight, they’ve lost friends, they’re battered, bloody, and exhausted… but slowly, they refill their clips, pass around grenades, gather fresh supplies. They didn’t talk about it, didn’t agree that they had to go back out there, there was no moving speech… they just got rearmed, then headed right back into the fight.
It wasn’t heroics, not an application of Big Damn Heroes or any other trope save a Crowning Moment of Awesome. The realization stunned me. The survivors of the rescue operation weren’t trying to be heroes. They’d done the job that they’d been assigned to, and then they’d gone above and beyond the call of duty by risking their lives to turn the tide of the fight. Not a single person in that camp, in the world, would have blamed them if they’d stood down like they’d been ordered to, because they’d already done their job.
They went back out there because it was the only thing they could do, not because it was what they had to do. They’re heroes because they couldn’t stand aside and let somebody else do it for them. They’re heroes because they didn’t have to go, and they went anyway. The nature of a hero isn’t just doing what you have to do, it’s doing what you can do. That’s why police and firefighters are still heroes even though they’re fallible, that’s why Batman can stumble but still carry on the fight, that’s why Hawkeye Pierce could go back to the operating table to save the life of a little girl after a careless word resulted in the death of a baby.
That’s a little magical, in this high-tech, no-time, hateful world we live in, the idea that doing not just what you have to do, but what you can do could be enough to be “heroic”. What really is a hero? There’s just no complete answer to that question, because what makes somebody or something a hero can’t be defined until the moment it happens. The real question is what can we learn from the ones we have – be they real, the police and the firefighters and the service men and women out there fighting so we don’t have to, or imagined, the courageous knights in shining armor standing against the threatening dragon despite their fear.
Do what you can do. Not just what you have to do. It might not make you a hero… but it just might help get us a little farther along, and that is heroic.
Recent Comments