The Death of Aspiration
Wed, Aug 14, 2024 | By John Schroeder
Recent decades have seen the rise of the anti-hero. Beginning in the 1980’s, Batman was retooled from the semi-comic, brightly colored depictions epitomized by Adam West to the very dark, very brooding, very violent Batman depicted by Robert Pattinson in the most recent film. Wolverine took over the X-Men comics – a character with serious temper issues, now coupled with utter cynicism about the very nature of heroism generally in Deadpool & Wolverine currently in release. The most recent Disney Plus miniseries Loki saw the original Avengers villain save the multiverse. Our heroes now look very villainous and our villains have become our heroes.
Disney is now cementing the rise of the villain and the demise of the hero:
Josh D’Amaro, the chairman of Disney Experiences, revealed at the company’s annual D23 event that Disney World’s Imagineers are working to bring a long-awaited “Villains Land” to the Magic Kingdom in Florida.
“We love our Disney villains, right? Their evil ambition gives us endless possibilities to tell brand new stories, which is why I’m so excited to announce we’re building a Villains Land at the Magic Kingdom,” D’Amaro told cheering fans at Saturday’s event in Anaheim, California.
We now celebrate our villains, and I cannot help but wonder about the greater cultural impacts of that fact. This certainly reduces the moral impact of the fables we have told for centuries. They are reduced to mere stories where the need for a good villain is as important as the presence of the mighty hero to move the story along. But there are real world villains and real world heroes. I wonder if in making it about the narrative instead of the good-and-evil we make it that much harder to generate the energy and resolve necessary to fight real villains when they arise.
This also raises serious issues about the aspirations it generates in our youth. If both hero and villain are just pieces of the story and one desires to simply be in the story, might one not aspire to be a villain as easily as a hero? I have heard one too many actors talk about their aspiration to play some dastardly villain; how rich the role would be. Will not our youth carry similar aspirations, sometimes confusing real life with their stories?
We read the great epics of history, from Homer to Virgil and forward as a summary of the values and aspirations of the cultures that birthed them. I do not wish to be remembered by history as the culture that celebrated villainy – where the likes of Loki and The Joker have heroic tales told about them just as Thor and Superman. We should aspire to better.
ADDENDUM (About an hour later) – Why this matters so much.
Just came across this Axios story from yesterday:
TheHarris campaignhas been editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads that make it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News and other major publishers are on her side, Axios has found.
OK, here’s what is going on, for those of us that are not fluent in internetspeak. When you do a search on Google, you may have noticed that the first link you come upon are generally ads, but it is hard to tell the difference unless you look closely – the link will have a little “sponsored by…” above it. The Harris campaign is using this ad feature on Google to place favored news stories where you will most readily find them if you are googling for information on Harris/Walz, but as they do so they are also altering the headline from the originating source to suit their interests. This is within Google’s advertising rules, but is most certainly designed to mislead, “sponsored by…” labelling notwithstanding.
So, the Harris campaign, a campaign built on lies, continues to operate on such a shaky foundation.
But that is what you expect in a world where our villains are honored alongside our heroes. When our epic tales are set up to require a villain to lie his or her way through an issue because the hero is just too bothered with concerns of “truth, justice and the American way,” you are going to get people that will mislead people and consider it good.
